Family Names and Addresses
Family names and addresses show that male-female differences are encoded in language.
D. Spender (1980) writes that traditional adoption by women the husband’s family name may signify “that women’s family names do not count and there is one more device for making women invisible”. Women have to use titles which indicate their marital status: Mrs /Miss, but both married and unmarried men are using Mr. This indicates that women are defined according to their relationship to men, but men are more autonomous.
Other address forms indicate that men typically are more respected and treated with more formality than women.
e.g. Men are more likely to be addressed with formal “sir” than women as “ma’am”.
Women are more frequently addressed informally as “dear”, “honey”, “sweetie” in social contexts where men would not be addressed in this way.
Relationships of Association
Certain language forms suggest relationships in which women are defined in terms of the men with whom they are associated, but the other way round does not take place.
e.g. man and wife vs woman and husband
(officially) Walt’s wife vs Margaret’s husband
This is indicative of relationship between the owner and the owned (Eakins, 1978)
The conventional placement of male before female in coordinate constructions husband and wife vs. wife and husband, host and hostess vs. hostess and host indicates a pattern of male precedence.
The prescriptive grammarians in the middle of 1600s indicated that the male gender should be always placed first because it is the worthier (Spender, 1980)
Labeling
Many examples of differential labeling, which are the evidence of unequal male-female power relations, are encoded in the English language.
The age span covered by such items as “boy-girl”/”man-woman” illustrates that semantic range of analogous lexical items is not always comparable for males and females. Older women are much more likely to be referred to as “girls” than older men as “boys”.
e.g. One would hardly say “I met this nice boy” to refer to 30-year-old-male.
e.g. TV announcers still refer to the NCAA “girls’ basketball tournament” but never “boys’ basketball tournament”.
In paired masculine-feminine lexical items the feminine member of pair often undergoes semantic derogation. The feminine member of the pair often acquires connotation of subservience or diminished importance.
e.g. mister – mistress
governor – governess
bachelor – spinster
In some cases the feminine item may acquire connotation of improper sexual behavior (e.g. mistress).
1.6.3. How to Avoid Sexist Language
The linguistic manifestations of inequality and stereotyping based on sex are hardly disputable. The question that remains is whether changing the language will alter the unequal position of men and women in society or whether achieving increased social equality must precede increased linguistic equality. One answer might be that language simply mirrors sociocultural patterns: If a society treats women as unequal, then language will simply provide the symbolic mechanism for displaying society's underlying discriminatory base. Changing to alternate, more neutral forms will not really stop underlying sex stereotyping, as items characteristically undergo semantic derogation when associated with a feminine referent. After all, at one point, words like mistress and governess were neutral counterparts of their male equivalents mister and governor. So changing language-use patterns may simply be a linguistic cosmetic for an underlying problem of social inequality. From this vantage point, language dutifully follows a symbolic course set for it by the established social system; language can hardly be blamed for the more fundamental social inequity to be confronted.
However, it must be noted that just as language mirrors the prevailing social order, the use of language may reinforce and perpetuate the acceptance of these social conditions. Thus, whereas it may seem pointless to begin using he or she in place of generic he or to change one's title from Mrs or Miss to Ms, there is a sense in which if we do not make these changes, we continue to endorse the notion that women don't "count" as much as men and that women can only be defined in relation to the men who surround them. There is an obvious interdependence between language as a reflection of social differences and language as a socializing instrument. Changing language-use patterns may thus go hand-in-hand with changing social conditions. In other words, language reform may actually serve as an impetus for social change.
While there remains some discussion among linguists and other scholars of language concerning what constitutes "realistic" language reform with respect to sex reference in English, there seems to be a consensus on a number of proposed reforms. In fact, the Linguistic Society of America, the most influential organization for language scholars in the United States, has adopted a clear policy statement regarding non-sexist language usage, which includes the following strategies for avoiding sexist language:
1. Whenever possible, use plurals (people, they) and other appropriate alternatives, rather than only masculine pronouns and "pseudo-generics" such as man, unless referring specifically to males.
2. Avoid generic statements which inaccurately refer only to one sex (e.g., "Speakers use language for many purposes — to argue with their wives ..." or "Americans use lots of obscenities but not around women").
3. Whenever possible, use terms that avoid sexual stereotyping. Such terms as server, professor, and nurse can be effectively used as gender neutral; marked terms like waitress, lady professor, and male nurse cannot.
(from the Linguistic Society of America Guidelines for Nonsexist Usage, approved by the LSA Executive Committee, May 1995)
1.7. BRITISH AND AMERICAN ENGLISH: