A Sociolinguistic Study on Vocabulary Reflecting Gender Bias on Elizabeth “The Golden Age”

ABSTRACT

English vocabulary reveals gender discrimination, which is often applied
to society. Intentionally or not, women are often discriminated and often exploited in many fields such as laws, jobs, religions, and especially in languages. Language simply reflects this gender bias, especially English because English is made up of sex exclusive vocabulary. This fact happens because men have power in society, the right to coin words.

Studying about gender and language has been traditionally divided into
two separate, but related, strands of research. First, the study of language use; how men and women use language differently. For example, women tend to use words implying feeling, emotion, and motivation such as empty adjectives, hedges, and question tags. Second, the study of sexist language namely how sexist manifests itself linguistically.

This research uses a descriptive qualitative research because the researcher does efforts in discussing, analyzing and finding the social phenomena which are running naturally; it is not a controlled or based on laboratory research. In this case, the researcher attempts to arrive at a rich description of the people, objects, events or conversations of the language usage that differentiate men and women or which insult women. After classifying the vocabulary lists based on two groups, the data are presented and analyzed by explaining the meaning and the functional usage of those words briefly, 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 directly linked and is described with the social realities.

Vocabulary which reflects gender bias on Elizabeth: The Golden Age are categorized into two classifications the language use and the language function. Language use between male and female is different in some extent such as color words empty adjective, hedges and tag question the use of taboo words. Many English words give different function, especially when refer to women, many terms are degraded. On the other hand, masculine terms have wide functions. Masculine pronoun or masculine terms are often considered as generic term, even often referred for unidentified sex. These differences make bias in language, as what society do about gender discrimination.

In this study, the researcher analyzes English which reflects gender bias in the area of vocabulary. Therefore, for enriching the discussion about gender bias in language especially English, the researcher suggests for the next researchers to analyze sexist language in the area of phonology. Since, another previous researchers analyzed in the area of morphology or grammar. For example, men and women have different style when pronouncing –ing.