The Sexist Language in Tempo’s Columns

ABSTRACT

Language as a means of communication becomes a very important thing for human beings to maintain the relationship among others and to interact with others. Today, language is not only used in the direct communication between two or more people but also is widely used in almost every part of human life. Furthermore, in this modern society in which human beings rely much on the media, language is considered as the most appropriate means or tool to help the media to carry out its functions.

As a matter of fact, the media today exposes too much the domination of men to women one of which is reflected in the language. The sexism in the language which differentiates men and women and in turn discriminates women in term of the language usage gives negative stereotyped of women in the society, such as the appropriate place for women is in the house responsible for the domestic duties, women do not need to get high education and a job career outside the house, and so on. These negative stereotypes create and affirm the social definition of women in the society.

This research uses a descriptive qualitative research because the researcher wants to get a brief description of the words, the utterances, or the expressions of the language which distinguish men and women or which trivialize women. After classifying the sexist languages found, they were presented and analyzed by explaining deeply in terms of the morphological process, the reason of using it, and the alternative words which are gender neutral to substitute the sexist languages. The description of the sexist words is correlated with the social realities.

The sexist languages found in Tempo’s columns can be classified into sexism in words and sexism in proverbs. Sexisms in words are morphologically identified by the use of man as generic noun that is noun referring to men and women, the use of he/him/his as generic pronouns that are pronouns referring to both men and women, the use of suffixes –man, –ette and -ess in occupational nouns and job titles, the use of pairs of words showing non parallel term between men and women. The sexist languages are used in Tempo's columns by several ways: by generalizing the context where the subjects are referred to both men and women through the use of man as generic noun, by judging that the unidentified sex subjects are referred to men, and therefore uses masculine pronouns as the generic pronouns, by differentiating the terms in occupational nouns and job titles for men and women through the use of the suffix –man, –ette and –ess, by excluding the women from text.