ABSTRACT
Language plays a crucial role in signalling the way that we think about others and in displaying to others the way that we think about ourselves. Our relationships with others are largely managed through language, and we can thus signify to others how we see ourselves as gendered, classed and raced individuals through our choice of language items and styles of language. Since the 1970s, language has been of interest to feminist linguists because the use of certain types of language can signify particular attitudes towards women and men. Language seems to encode systematically a view of women as aberrant from a male norm. However, more recently feminist linguists have stressed the fact that, despite this embeddedness of certain stances towards women within the language, words do not ‘contain’ meaning in any simple way. Instead, meanings are worked out contextually and can be contested. Thus, while it is clear that sexist attitudes are still expressed, they no longer have such a normative feel to them and they take their meanings within the context of contesting discourses, such as feminism, which have suggested alternative forms of expression. Those who wish to express sexist attitudes may also be driven to be more indirect, to use irony or presuppositions rather than to be direct. First, let us consider the way that the language encodes women as a marked case and males as the norm.
