To browse Academia. The field of gender and language has gradually abandoned studies of gender-fair language, perhaps considering that there is little left to say on the subject. However, the debate over gender-fair language rages on in the media. Language bodies spend a significant amount of time and money on producing guidelines, yet there have been woefully few studies on what speakers think of these reforms, and the few studies that have been carried out have tended to focus on small groups.
There is also a dearth of comparative studies in gender and language, which would allow conceptions of language in general, as well as feminist linguistic reforms, to be framed in their cultural and historical perspectives. This thesis aims at filling this gap in the field of gender and language by examining discourses on feminist linguistic reform in the media from a cross-linguistic perspective.
A corpus of articles approx. Apart from the obvious fact that the media have an enormous influence on public opinion, this is where the debate on sexist language has traditionally been carried out, and thus the media play a special role in the debate.
On-line newspaper texts were therefore chosen in an effort to find discourses that readers are exposed to on a regular basis, and that could be classed as widespread and familiar to the general public. A corpus-based analysis was employed as a starting point to identify traces of discourses that are used to frame arguments in the gender-fair language debate.
Frequency lists, keyword lists, and word sketches were carried out in order to indicate possible directions for analysis. Hypotheses based on the literature review were also followed up with searches for particular semantically related terms relating to discourses found in other studies. Finally, a CDA analysis was carried out on relevant concordance lines. Twelve main discourses were identified in the two corpora, based on six principle ideologies of language. Findings indicated that the overwhelming majority of these discourses and language ideologies are found in both the English and the French corpus, and across the political spectrum of newspaper groups.
