The General Trend of Sexist Language Reduced
Language is something that society creates and can also be seen as a mirror of society. In some western countries, though people advocate equal rights for everyone, there are still a lot of inequities, such as unequal rights between men and women. This phenomenon is called sexism in the English language.
Sexism, in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese dictionary, it means that disapproving action based on the ideas or belief that the members of one sex are less intelligent, able, and skillful, etc, than the members of the other sex, especially that women are less able than men and those particular jobs and actions are suitable for women and others are suitable for men.
Sexism in English is not formed in one day, but built up in the long period of the development of language. People can find universal phenomena of sexism in English language. But with the developing of women’s liberation movement and the improving of women’s status, the sexism in English language is weakening.
With the continuous improvement of the social status of women and years of feminist struggle, the society concerned about the degree of women is growing. And people’s attitudes towards sexist language are changing gradually. Elimination of sex discrimination in language has become an important component of the movement for womens rights in western countries. To eliminate the sexist language is applying standard language, and populating the neutral words and expressions, and avoid the masculine words in the communication.
Ways used to eliminate the sexist English have been taken out in the trend of language changing.
To spread the neutral words and expressions is the most important ways that people use to erase the sexism in English language. And the neutralization is to stop the production of the sexist words with “man” as their suffix and the usages of the sexist job titles. In stead, giving the usages of affix “person” to replace the words with “man”, such as “chairperson” replaces “chairman”, “mailperson” replaces “mailman”, “salesperson” replaces “salesman”, etc. Or other words like teacher, officer, dealer, coach, politician, leader, tutor, writer, and expert, etc. are trying to avoid the words ending with suffix “man”. On the other hand, people now would try to avoid using man/men or mankind to refer to people in the world and replace it with person, people, humanity, human, human being, the human race, and the human species. It’s a new trend to spread neutral words and use the gender-free words. And making the most use of gender-free words can help people reduce sexism in the daily life and in the language.
One of the most difficult problems when people say or write something is lacking of a singular personal pronoun with which to refer to one person whose sex is unknown or irrelevant. Traditionally “he” has been used, with “his”