An analysis of sexism in English and its causes【Abstract】There are discriminations based on gender in English. There are different forms of expressions and they have its own origin in culture. This thesis is aim to analysis the sexism phenomenon and its causes.【Key words】sexism phenomenon; English; causesWe all know language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. It is a big wealth created by human. Language is a carrier of culture, and a tool of thinking and communicating for human. It just likes a mirror of society, which reflects social culture, customs and folkways, humanism, and cultural consciousness and so on. In the long history, there was a big difference between male and female in social position. It reflects in many different sides included language. As the background that the word is dominated by male, the language users in using language, especially in vocabulary, create many words which belittle, despise and insult female. That is called sexist language. This thesis will try to analysis the sexism phenomenon and its causes.At first, we must know what sexism is. According to Webster Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, the definition of sexism is that prejudice or discrimination based on sex: especially, discrimination against women. One explanation of sexism in American traditional dictionary is that the bias of a sort of gender members to other gender members. In language habit, sexism usually refers to the discrimination against women. Well then, how does English language discriminate female?English is a more masculine language, so there are many words against female. I will analysis it in vocabulary and syntax as following.①At the view of vocabulary, it is mainly in word-building and vocabulary meaning.⑴In the aspect of word-building, there are many words based on “man”. Such as: the meaning of the whole people is”mankind”; the meaning of ancestor is“forefather”; and some professional or title, policeman; postman; businessman; chairman and so on. Showing the nationalities, like Englishman; Dutchman; Frenchman etc. So we can say, female implicated is the accessory of male.⑵In semantics, there are many words specialized in referring male or female. The former have commendatory trend, but the latter usually have derogatory sense and deteriorative trend. Some words referring to female, firstly are commendatory words, but afterward slowly have derogatory senses. Such as gentleman and lady originally are a group of homologous words, but in modern English, the connotation of lady has become the counterpart of man. In Britain, we call female salespeople saleslady but we don’t call male salesman sales gentleman. Thus it can be seen lady and gentlemen have no opposite relationship of language in use. When gentleman has also kept dignity and sanctity, lady has become common woman. Boy and girl are not homologous words anymore, boy can not be used on chap beyond 20 years old, but girl can be used on woman beyond 20 years old. That is to say, people are inclined to call female by childish voice. According to textual research of language, in ancient indo-language, moon originally is masculine, while sun is negative. Later for the emergence of patriarchal clan, the genders of them were overturned. This is obviously related to the transference of right. Because people often associate sun, daylight with strength and luminosity, while moon and night are easy to make people think of the flabbiness and darkness. Like”bachelor”, which means the single man enjoys his single life, but like “spinster”, which means those old and virgin without charming. “Sir” and “madam” are both a respectful form of address, but “madam” can also be referred to a woman running a brothel. “Sir”doesn’t. The compound word “callboy” and “call girl” also are classified into this type. The former refers to the waiter in hotel or the person who calls the player ready to stage in theatre; the latter means the prostitute summoned by phone. These words have manifested the discrimination of language towards female from the angle of word matching.Besides “loose”refers to a man who is carefree and content, but to woman, it means the woman is dissolute. To man, “easy”means the man is amiable and get along with well, but it can also be indentified as a fickle and lascivious woman.“Cold” means the man is steady and calm, but to woman, it means the woman has a frigid disposition. And some other pairs of words also can reflect it, for example: “governor”——the chief leader; “governess”——house maid; “mister”——sir, “mistress”——the woman who seduces a married man. “King”——the chief leader of the country. “Queen”——a gay.The sexism in English vocabulary is not only shows this aspect, but also shows some food and animal name referred to woman. Actually, those words are not derogatory terms originally, but those words have the meaning of woman as the man’s pet or accessory to delight in. For example, “dumpling”——short and fat woman; “bunny”——sexy woman; “vixen”——fierce woman; “bitch”——shrew and so on. Woman as exception also shows the concept of male criterion. People usually in their minds regard reputable person as male, once a reputable woman will be treated as an exception, which will be wantonly aired by mass media. Whenever and wherever once refer to a famous woman, people are used to add female, and woman and other words before their names to show their sexes. But this situation doe sn’t exist in male.For example: western people are costumed to think “professor”“doctor”“lawyer”“surgeon”are all male words. If you want to express female doctor or female lawyer, you should add the prefix “lady” or “woman”.It is a long time that man always indentified woman’s female feature and social role, position with theirs appearance and social relationship, not with their ability and quality. It shows in language that people are used to use those words, like “beautiful; slender; plump” and so on. It seems like woman’s value only in their appearance. For example: a poster about picnic in one of American university says “Good Food! Delicious Women”In western country, once a girl married, she has to change her last name into her husband. It almost like the girl is belonged to someone. The serious and holly wedding ceremony in church, the clergyman claimed “I now pronounce you man and wife.” No matter man married or unmarried, they still are called man, but to woman, when they are unmarried, they are called woman, when they are married, they arecalled wife, a man’s spouse, leaded by their husband, giving birth to and raising. When the marriage is broken up, they have different names. The man is bachelor, but the woman is so-called a divorcee. The two words have totally different meanings. One is positive, another is negative. A divorcee just cannot bear to think of the past.In the past, women’s social status is so low that their languages are often confined. The most obvious exemplification is th at if women use some scrannel “expletives”, such as “damn it, shit etc” would be considered as terrible inelegant. People hope that they use some more elegant words as “oh dear or fudge.” The difference is that the men can use all kinds of words to express their strong feelings arbitrarily without blame, while the women have no this privilege. “Mr.” once has made many men feel pride. When people call “Mr. ---” the martial status of him is unknowable. But when it is turns to women, people usually clarify the women’s martial status: the female unmarried is called “Miss. ---”, otherwise called “Mrs. --- (husband’s name)”. In British and American, women in soiree often are asked by others with a question “what does your Husband do?” but there is never one who as ks a man what does his wife do. If there is some one really who asks such question, the man asked would be surprised to say: “she’s my wife, that’s what she does”. G. Lakoff talked about the similar situation in his book “Language and Woman’s Place”. When the New York Times reported the female candidate of the Supreme Court, it described her appearance, her husband’s job, called candid ate of mayor of San Francisco as Mrs. Feinstein. But to male rival, it didn't describe his appearance and what did his wife do, and directly called the male candidate Alioto, not Mr. Alioto( Chen Song Cen，1985：128).There is a vivid example. The first lady, Hillary in the U.S.A. still suffered the sexism, because of surname. Her family name is “”. And she don’t accept the change of surname, so in 1979 his husband Clinton elected the mayor of ( ), it brings a lot of troubles. Because the conservative people in ( ), they can’t stand a new people who doesn’t adhere to the traditional. For his husband’s political prospect, there is no choice but to change her surname. When a woman use her husband’s family name as hers, it shows that she give up her independent cultural symbol. Actually, it alsoshows that female lost their independence in a part of cultural.②from the aspect of syntax, the sexism in English language mainly reflects the use of general personal pronoun, and some phrases or the order of fixed words.Firstly, the third person’s singular in English, if the gender is different, they always use “he”, “him”, “his”. Of course, when repeating a noun, they still use “he”, “him”“his”. They get rid of female.For example: Everyone should do what he thinks well.If a person breaks the law, he will be punished.Somebody has lost his key.Secondly, when there are two words, one is female, another is male. They must put the male word firstly, not the female wordFor example: Men and women, husband and wife, boys and girls, father and mother, brother and sister etc. The phrase like “ladies and gentlemen” is really seldom seen. English language’s discriminations towards women also lie in some proverbs and idioms. Women always are described as loving chatting and stirring up trouble. For example: A woman’s tongue wags like a lamb’s tail. (England)Foxes are all tail and women are all tongue.The North Sea will sooner be found wanting in water than a woman at a loss for a word.A fickle thing and changeful is woman always.2 We have talked about so many phenomena, so we have to discuss the reasons about the sexism. In nature, sexism in language reflects sexism in society. The two are closely related. Social connotations of sexism in English tell the relationship between phenomena of sexism in language and essence of sexism in society.In western countries, the Christianity is very important to them. It is inevitable that the Christianity do has a big effect to people. In the Bible, man create the world, the woman is just a rib of man. This provides the founding theory. So in western countries, the main stream of cultural always adheres to the thoughts that man is superior, and woman is inferior. Women have a low situation in society. Man considers themselves as shelter. And woman just lives in their wings. Man includes all human beings, andhe stands for the male and the female. History is made up of man’s achievement and heroic story. Thanks to that, the words relating to woman mostly are discrimination, ridicule and deprecation. The American vice president Spiro Agrew ever said that something to the effect that it is difficult to tame “oceans, fools, and women”in August 26th 1970, which is the American women liberation day.In English, the mostly reflection woman’s low situation are the dirty words. Because many people think that woman is equal to disaster, even someone thinks that the fall of man and expulsion from the Garden of Eden involves in woman. Because woman eats the forbidden fruit by the snake’s enticement, the god is furious. They scold woman, like cow, mare and so on.Stereotype is a cognitive manner and cognitive strategy of human beings, which is shows analogy procedure from specific to general. Tough it can help make things category, it often has the abuse of overgeneralization. When stereotype is related to moral belief, value system, and language culture, it is easy to make some subjective judge standard representing some hackneyed concept and discrimination manner (Pullman 1983; Berryman 1980). Social linguists is considered to this question what must be paid attention is that because of affection of patriarchies of thousands years, society has formed a bias to women’s ability, value and behavior, and finally formed a thought stereotype and cultural stereotype and entered into the value system of social members. There are so many examples to prove it. To the relationship between cultural stereotype and language behavior, firstly we find that sexism in language has existed in many cultures, which reflects a popular language rule. And secondly we find that in mostly cases, this cultural stereotype incarnates the phenomena of social inequalities caused by ascendancy culture. Thus, sexism in language is not only a question of language in use, but reflection of rooted social stereotype, and the results of the patriarchal view or male chauvinism, and also the direct embodiments of women’s long suffering the unfair treatment in politics, society, education, economy, and culture etc. Language of course has a traditional part, but the use of language in specific social context inevitably has the different ideological trend and value judgment. It is same to talk about the questions of sexism in language. Condition isjust same as the saying of famous sociolinguist Sally McConnell ( Ginet 1983: 388) “The sexual politics of di scourse affects WHO can mean WHAT ,and WHOSE meanings get established as community currency”.The research of discourse analysis tells us that sometimes different communities can reflect a certain influence of stereotype to other communities’ discourse beh aviors. In Anglo-American culture, affected by the thought stereotype and the cultural stereotype people often thinks women’s discourse behaviors as trivial, gossipy, empty and meaningless. Sociolinguists investigate and find that in real language communication, male have more chance to turn talking, interrupt, and floor the others comparing with female. As social member we know the individual’s language behavior is restricted by many factors such as spatial, temporal, cultural, informative, and idiosyncratic one. To more important, there is a research that testifies that in Britain and American society, the stereotypes of male chauvinism mainly have come into being in growing period of young ones through the progress of socialization (Shelley Phillips 1983). Through the research of two thousands, Australian pupils’ views to opposite sex, we find that even in the procedure of metal developing of teens, conventional idea of sexism has formed. Female young ones’ descriptions to their male buddies almost have no derogative colors; but almost 50 percents of male young ones see female’s characteristics as undesirable. According to sociology “labeling theory”, the contents of cultural stereotype are usually some negative views of society to puny community as minority and females (Bainbridge 1994: 4025). Briefly speaking, male chauvinism and patriarchy make sexism in society, and they are reflected in the English language.As we all know, man and woman have their own characteristics. But as a group, there are mainly group: man and woman. When they were born, they have been given different social roles and social situations. The society indentifies man as their ability, achievement, career, title and talent. People hope man can be independent, but to woman, they should be soft, gentle and agreeable. Because that, when female leave school and begin to find their own means of livelihood, the common customs’ attitude towards them is that “men have careers, women have jobs.” Actually, the unspokenwords are only man can realize their ambition and have an infinitely bright future. Comparing with man, woman just can find a simple job to feed on herself. That is one of reasons that man is more than woman in important and political careers all over the world.To make a long story short, the sexism in language is a very important new question for discussion, which has been attached importance by a lot of countries in the world. With the high-speed development of society and scientific technology, our research on sexism in the English language will come to a new stage. The sexism in English language on the whole is a social problem, which is the thought of human beings in their minds discriminating female and reflecting it in language. As we all know language is relatively steady, if we want to eliminate the sexism in the English language, firstly we must eradicate the concept of sexism existing in society to make people realize the point and make the real equality of male and female and give the female the equal recognition and respect. Though the changes in social concept to make the changes in language naturally, finally realize that whether in society or language, sexism is just a history of past. In this paper I greatly agrees with a passage of saying of Rosalie Mag gio: “It is also necessary to acknowledge that there can be no solutions to the problems of sexism in society on the level of language alone .Reference documents:1 Bonvllain. N. women and men: Cultural Construction of Gender [M].New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Lnc. 1998.2 Christie C. Gender and language [M]. Edinburgh University Press. 20003 Journal of Jiangnan University(Education Sciences) vol.28 No.1 Mar.2008 江南大学学报（教育科学版）第28卷第一期2008年3月4 Science & Technology Information vol.29 2009 科技信息报2009年第29期5 Berryman, Cynthian L. Attitudes toward male and female sex-appropriate andsex-inappropriate language. In Cynthia L. Berryman ＆Virginia A. Eman (Ed), Communication, language and sex, 195-216. Rowslay, Mass: Newbury House, 1980.。