Language and gender

Abstract

The study explores two sources of linguistic material that are traditionally referred to as examples of misogyny and gendered asymmetry: proverbs and dictionaries. With an analysis of a corpus of seventeenth-century proverbs, I shall try to demonstrate that the issue of gender is not predominant, and that references to women and men are often complementary. Also, Historical linguistics can illuminate the development of gender and sex-related concepts by studying the process of their materialization, that is the new words and expressions related to them that became idioms and are now perceived as part of the language. Understanding how these processes of materialization were constructed through language in earlier times allows us to question the nature of modern identity labels.