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

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
Published online: 09 October 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.211.12hoa
References

References

Arnold, Jennifer E., Lesongco, Anthony, Wasow, Thomas, & Ginstrom, Ryan
2000 Heaviness vs. newness: The effects of structural complexity and discourse status on constituent ordering. Language 76(1): 28–55. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cao, Xuân Hạo
2003 Tiếng Việt, Văn Việt, Người Việt (Vietnamese Language, Literature, and People). Ho Chi Minh City: Nhà xuất bản Trẻ.Google Scholar
Cooper, William E. & Ross, John Robert
1975 World order. In Papers from the Parasession on Functionalism, Robert E. Grossman, L. James San & Timothy J. Vance (eds), 63–111. Chicago IL: Chicago Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
Corbett, Greville G.
1991 Gender [Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics]. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Deumert, Ana
2006 The relationship between linguistic and social change. In Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J. Mattheier & Peter Trudgill (eds), 2138–2146. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Đỗ, Thị Kim Liên
2008 Đặc điểm văn hóa – giới tính qua tục ngữ Việt (Cultural and gender characteristics through Vietnamese proverbs). In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Vietnamese Studies, 143–153. Hà Nội: Vietnam National University, Hanoi & Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences.Google Scholar
Doleschal, Ursula
2015 Gender marking. In Word-formation: An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe, Peter O. Müller, Ingeborg Ohnheiser, Susan Olsen & Franz Rainer (eds), 1159–1171. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Ettner, Charles
2002 In Chinese, men and women are equal–or–women and men are equal? In Gender across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men, Vol. 2 [Impact: Studies in Language and Society 10] Marlis Hellinger & Hadumod Bußmann (eds), 29–55. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fenk-Oczlon, Gertraud
1989 Word frequency and word order in freezes. Linguistics 27: 517–556. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Goddard, Cliff
2015 Words as carriers of cultural meaning. In The Oxford Handbook of the Word, John R. Taylor (ed.), 380–398. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Joseph H.
2005 Language Universals: With Special Reference to Feature Hierarchies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hellinger, Marlis
1997 Language and gender. In The German Language and the Real World: Sociolinguistics, Cultural, and Pragmatic Perspectives on Contemporary German, Patrick Stevenson (ed.), 281–316. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Hoàng, Phê
(ed.) 2006 Từ điển tiếng Việt (Vietnamese Dictionary). Hà Nội: Danang Lexicography Center and Danang Publishing House.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman
1957 Shifters, Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb. Cambridge MA: Harvard University: Russian Language Project.Google Scholar
Kim, Minju
2008 On the semantic derogation of terms for women in Korean, with parallel developments in Chinese and Japanese. Korean Studies 32: 148–176. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kramarae, Cheris & Treichler, Paula A.
1985 A Feminist Dictionary. Boston MA: Pandora.Google Scholar
Lyons, John
1977 Semantics, Vol. 1. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Nguyễn, Lực
2002 Thành ngữ tiếng Việt (Vietnamese Idioms). Hà Nội: Thanh Niên Publishing House.Google Scholar
Nguyễn, Văn Khang
2004 Xã hội học ngôn ngữ về giới: kỳ thị và kế hoạch hóa ngôn ngữ chống kỳ thị đối với nữ giới trong sử dụng ngôn ngữ (Sociology in language on gender: Linguistic sexism and language planning to counter sexism against women in language use). Xã hội học (Sociology) 2(86): 25–38.Google Scholar
Pham, Hoa
2002 Gender in addressing and self-reference in Vietnamese: Variation and change. In Gender across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men, Vol. 2 [Impact: Studies in Language and Society 10], Marlis Hellinger & Hadumod Bußmann (eds), 281–312. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sapir, Edward
1921 Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York NY: Harcourt, Brace & Company.Google Scholar
Trần, Xuân Điệp
2002 Sự kỳ thị giới tính trong ngôn ngữ qua cứ liệu tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt (Linguistic sexism in English and Vietnamese). Hanoi University of Social Sciences & Humanities.Google Scholar
Vũ, Tiến Dũng
2003 Lịch sự trong tiếng Việt và giới tính (qua một số hành động nói) (Politeness in Vietnamese and gender (through some speech acts)). Hanoi University of Education.Google Scholar
Waugh, Linda
1982 Marked and unmarked: A choice of unequals in semiotic structure. Semiotica 38(3/4): 299–318.Google Scholar