'Language And Society' tag archive

DEBATE ON SEXIST LANGUAGE Sexism and Semantics Deborah Cameron In RP34, two articles appeared dealing with the relation between language and sexism: Alison Assiter’s critique of Dale Spender’s Man Made Language and a dialogue between Mike Shortland and John Fauvel on the subject of sexism and linguistic reform. Although these articles were not explicitly connected […]

Did Man Make Language? Alison Assiter Males, as the dominant group, have produced language, thought and reality. This sentence appears on page 143 of Dale Spender’s book Man Made Language. Spender believes that ‘maleness’ pervades language ‘as a whole. Moreover, according to her, the reality most of us inhabit most of the time is a […]