Linguistic Sexism: An Overview of the English Language in Everyday Discourse

Abstract

By typical definition, sexist language is considered to be any language that is supposed to include all people, but, unintentionally (or not) excludes a gender—this can be either males or females. A look at linguistic sexism is finding out the relationship between language and gender. A lot of people run into the difficulty of making the choices between certain words in their everyday discourses. They wonder which to choose – the chairman has arrived for the meeting or the chairperson has arrived for the occasion when referring to a woman. This is the stuff the English language is made of. It is ridden with linguistic sexism that excludes women and trivializes what women do. This paper examines elements of sexism in the English language which abound in the morphology, syntax and semantics of the language. Some solutions were also proffered.