User:Anjugeorge050

Language and gender The study of relationship between language and gender has an important place in socio linguistics’. From time immemorial women have been considered as secondary to man and there for women has always occupied marginal place in society. So women are far behind in the availability of the opportunities in terms of education, job, health care and social status. This discrimination is reflected in the language of the society. The issue based on the relationship between gender and language can be studied from two perspective namely, 1.Language used to refer to women, 2. Language used by women. Language used to refer to women shows bias against women. It has been established by many scholars that in language gender demarcation comes in three forms •	Language ignores women •	It defines women as less significant •	It deprecates women This is especially true on English. English language ignores women by allowing masculine terms to be used .specially to refer human beings in general .One of the best example for this demarcation is the use of the generic muscular pronoun ‘he’ and its variants in the sentence .Eg:-Every good citizen must love his country more than himself; he should be ready to die for it if the need arises. Although the word ‘citizen include both men and women the following reference is by using masculine pronoun and its variants. English language also defines female as less important than man. This attitude is reflected in the pairs of word, prince-princes, doctor-lady doctor, poet –poetess. So the attachment of suffix ‘ess’ to form feminine words indicate the significant of female as only an appendage to male.