Chapter author : Coraline Jortay

Publisher : Routledge

This chapter examines how gendered language became a site of linguistic and socio-political debate in modern Chinese history. In doing so, it discusses how different sites of linguistic gender marking in Mandarin (lexical, morphological, or syntactical) have been deemed problematic by a variety of actors (linguists, translators, feminist activists, etc.) from the eighteenth century up to the present day. Moving through late-Qing missionary linguistics, Republican-era attempts at building a national language, and various feminist critiques of sexism in language in the early PRC, this chapter sheds light on the importance of taking into account Chinese linguistic history for historicizing contemporary debates on gender-inclusive language in global perspectives, in a field where European languages still remain overwhelmingly the focus of inquiry

Updated on 01/01/2024