LANGUAGE AND GENDER
Sexism
Some of the most important linguistic changes affecting English since the 1960s have arisen from the ways society has come to look differently at the practices and consequences of sexism … There is now a widespread awareness, which was lacking a generation ago, of the ways in which language covertly displays social attitudes towards men and women. The criticisms have been mainly directed at the biases built into English vocabulary and grammar which reflect a traditionally male-orientated view of the world and which have been interpreted as reinforcing the low status of women in society. All the main European languages have been affected, but English more than most, because of the early impact of the feminist movement in the USA.
(Crystal 1995: 368)
Bringing sexism in language into consciousness, at least among the educated, has not been difficult. No doubt Crystal is correct in suggesting that the feminist movement has spearheaded this development. The effect has been to encourage change by individuals who are sensitive to the issue and by organizations which wish to promote an ethical stance (or unkindly avoid litigation for sexual harassment). Implementing change, however, has not been easy.
In vocabulary, words of masculine gender which are commonly used to refer to people, both male and female, have been targeted. Thus, ‘chairman’ becomes ‘chairperson’ or ‘chair’ and ‘policeman’ ‘police officer’. Marital status for men is not marked linguistically: ‘Mr’ being neutral as to whether married or not. The introduction of ‘Ms’ for women (with some success) attempts to equalize in terms of address. Special vocabulary for women in professions where there is no need for gender distinctions is now disfavored: thus ‘actor’ not ‘actress’, ‘waiter’ not ‘waitress’. It is frequently pointed out that sexism is implicit in the unmarked status of the male form whereby morphological processes take that form as the base and add affixes (‘-ess’, ‘-ette’, ‘-ine’) to signal female. What is not in question is that languages typically contain far more terms to describe women than men, usually derogatorily, and that even when they are not at first derogatory they tend over time to acquire negative connotations (e.g. harlot, tart).
In grammar the focus of change has been on the third-person singular pronoun in English, which is always marked for gender. Holmes points out that
[E]xperiments exploring people’s perceptions report that ‘man’ and ‘he’ are consistently interpreted as referring to males, despite generic contexts. The problem arises when a pronoun is needed in combination with a sex-neutral noun (such as ‘patient’) or an indefinite pronoun (such as ‘anybody’). Alternative solutions are to use a hybrid (e.g. ‘he/she’) or the plural (‘their’). Thus the following solutions are among those found: all have their critics:
1. If a patient needs attention urgently, he should ring his bell.
2. If a patient needs attention urgently, he/she should ring his/her bell.
3. If a patient needs attention urgently, he or she should ring his or her bell.
4. If a patient needs attention urgently, they should ring their bell.
5. If patients need attention urgently, they should ring their bell.
(Holmes 1991: 214)
The long history of attempts to establish an epicene pronoun in English is well documented by Baron (1981) and there is some suggestion that preferred usage now is for ‘they’ as an alternative generic pronoun.
Discourse patterns also have been subject to scrutiny, with attention given to such inequalities as order of mention (‘boys and girls’, ‘man and wife’, ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’, ‘Lords and Ladies’, though ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ is ignored as somehow slipping through the sexist net) and value of mention (e.g. ‘the bomb was responsible for the deaths of seven people including one man’). Changes to existing texts are less common and no one seriously attempts to rebowdlerize Shakespeare. But those texts that claim a universal appeal, such as the Bible, the Prayer Book, have been carefully edited so as to offer a more inclusive language of mention and address (Doody 1980). We might speculate that such changes are in the direct line of the increasing vernacularization of religious texts on the grounds that just as the early translations into German, English and so on were attempts to make congregations feel that they owned those texts in ways that they could not when they were only in Latin or Greek, so the further inclusivizing takes account of the reality of many congregations which are (in Christian churches) largely made up of women, who find themselves excluded by the traditional male-dominated language of the Bible.
Change, however incomplete, there certainly has been, and it has been remarkably quick. It has affected writing far more than speaking and in the written language it is likely to be permanent since publishing companies and other normative bodies now often insist on the avoidance of sexist language.
It may be that changes in English are easier than in languages (such as French) where there is greater morphological marking of grammatical gender. Even so, it is the case that in often very different ways all languages exhibit sexist language and the thrust of this language in gender movement has been to encourage first consciousness-raising and change where that is possible.
To what extent are applied linguists (rather than linguists) involved in these interventions? The answer is a great deal, first of all through participation in proposing and encouraging and explaining the changes (e.g. Cooper 1982; Holmes 1991; Cameron 1985), and second through offering a radical critique.
After all, what the applied linguist is able to do is to bring into consideration about language problems not only the linguistic view, or the feminist view but other views too, including what effect change may or may not have and to what extent change will be acceptable. The linguist’s single-minded interest in language change and the effect that has on the internal structure of language means that he/she is more likely to assume that deliberate change, especially when it appears so desirable, will be effective and will change the structure permanently. The applied linguist on the other hand is more likely to be skeptical and to acknowledge that deliberate change has never been easy to bring about and that in any case even if the language changes, that does not necessarily change the power inequalities, which is the main thrust of the movement to rid language of its linguistic sexism.
A helpful guide to recent development can be found in Susan Ehrlich (2004). She stresses the ‘importance of considering communicative settings and tasks as possible determinants of linguistic behavior that has more typically, and perhaps too simplistically, been treated as the effect of speaker’s gender’ (Ehrlich 2004: 307). She quotes Cameron: ‘Sociolinguistics says that how you act depends on who you are: critical theory says that who you are (and taken to be) depends on how you act’ (Cameron 1995: 15–16).
A more recent treatment by Cameron can be found in Cameron 2005. The interaction between action and identity takes us back to Joseph’s discussion of language and identity.
