Cover not available
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
References (24)
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. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fenk-Oczlon, Gertraud. 1989. Word frequency and word order in freezes. Linguistics 27: 517–556. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle 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