The Gender Discrimination in Chinese Language

Abstract

Dejiang Hu, hudejiang1966@yahoo.com

Graduate of Teaching Chinese Language and Culture Program

Department of Asian Studies, Seton Hall University

Language functions as a unique systematic tool in human communication. Inevitably it reflects the reality of human society. The relationship between language and thought has been a sector in sociolinguistics that attracts the everlasting interest of linguists. Gender discrimination refers to the phenomenon in a language that engages devices to express ideological perceptions and conceptions, spatiotemporal sequences and cultural discrepancy in the spectrum of sex among its speakers. It is supposed that Chinese language, the communicative tool and vehicle of its cultural, has its gender discrimination in the sphere of character and word creation, word order and semantics. Studies on this topic have provided more than enough language materials but have not launched a theoretic exploration yet. The author of present paper tries to explore the relationship between the phenomenon of Gender discrimination in Chinese language and Chinese ideology by plowing its cause with the enlightenment of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

It is concluded that some of the characters have its marks showing the emphasis on the potential for feudalist thinking 'influenced' and reflected rather than unavoidably 'determined' by the characters. It is also true that this is a “two-way process”. Some of the characters with the radical of 女(nǚ)were also influenced by ‘the way’ Chinese people saw the world they lived in. These characters, mostly those rarely used in daily conversations or writing, came from the socialect of some higher hierarchical classes who played the words. They were the language used by members of a particular social group. The fact that some characters of this category did not have Gender discrimination in Han dynasty but picked up the color later accounts for that the emphasis should be given to social context of language use rather than to purely linguistic considerations. The author expects that the discrimination will exist for a considerable period of time. It can not be rid of even if when people show special respect for the female by saying “Lady first” which is actually an example of the factual existence of discrimination. The discrimination can not completely disappear unless the speakers do not sense of any difference between men and women in the spectrum of language consciously – their “way of looking at the world”. In addition, that some characters did not have shade of derogatory meaning at Xu Shen’s time, but do in Modern Chinese is supposed to be the corollary of diachronic evolution, which might be a significant topic for further study.