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Part of
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vietnamese Linguistics
Edited by Nigel Duffield, Trang Phan and Tue Trinh
[Studies in Language Companion Series 211] 2019
► pp. 253–274

Chapter 12
Gender in Vietnamese

| Ho Chi Minh city University of Education, Vietnam
| National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan

This study aims to identify strategies for the representation and encoding of gender in Vietnamese, as well as to show the various manifestations of a mainstream gender bias against women that are observed in this language. We achieve our goal mainly by categorizing the human-denoting lexicon into subgroups of different gender-marking properties, and by making relevant comparisons to look for both qualitative and quantitative contrasts in the ways in which men and women are linguistically represented. While arguing that this imbalance stems from a conventionalized hierarchy that prefers men over women, we also point to a reduction in such bias in the contemporary language, and advance an alternative view of the derogatory drift of neutral words and phrases in collocation with female-marked terms.

Keywords: semantic gender, gender-marking, gender bias, social hierarchy, socio-cultural encoding, pejoration, amelioration, semantic shift
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Clarifying the terminology
    • 1.2Previous research on gender in Vietnamese
  • 2.Gender in the human-denoting lexicon
    • 2.1A taxonomy of gender features
      • 1.2.1Group A: Gender-definite items
    • 2.2Group B: (Currently) gender-neutral terms
    • 2.3Groups C and D: Terms unspecified for gender
    • 2.4Attributive modification
    • 2.5Ordering in coordinated N-N pairs
      • 2.2.1Alternative explanations
  • 3.Asymmetries in gender-neutral lexical items
  • 4.Gender and semantic shift
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.211.12hoa
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