One of the most important political and social movements of the twentieth century has been the drive towards achieving complete equality for all people regardless of race, colour, class, gender identity, mental state or physical impairment. One area that has remained resistant to change is language. While it is has been widely accepted that some aspects of language are clearly sexist, for example the use of ‘he’ as a genderless pronoun (Cameron 1998, Wardaugh 1992, Pauwels 1998), there is still argument as to whether or not changing these forms of language is necessary. Some claim that the use of "politically correct" terms is not only unnecessary but disempowering (Jernigan 1994) because it forces a group of people to refer to themselves by a term that was invented by people who are not of their group. This essay will examine some of the different kinds of linguistic sexism in the English language, some of the reasons why these forms of language are harmful and finally some ideas of how these forms of language can be changed for the better.

As stated above the most obvious example of sexist language is the use of the male pronoun to describe groups of

In conclusion sexist language is real, widespread, subtle and damaging. Combating it is not a simple issue and change will be slow but there are many ways of fighting it and advances are being made. As long as awareness of the problem continues to grow and the issues become clearer progress will be made until eventually equality in both society and language will be reached.

The most important question that remains is how the language should be changed. Pauwels (1998) promotes several strategies for changing sexist language she calls these: "Causing linguistic disruption", "Creating a woman-centred language", "gender neutralization" and "feminisation". These four approaches are very interesting and definitely require investigation.

Some topics in this essay:
Psychology Linguistics, Kramarae Henley, Finegan Besnier, Andrew Verrijdt, Correct” Escalas’, Deborah Cameron, Marguerite Ritchie, Escala Valian, Maria Escalas, sexist language, pauwels 1998, thorne et al, et al, linguistic sexism, social constructionist, thorne et, according view, al 1983, martyna 1980, basic pronoun, et al 1983, approach language change, graham 1973 thorne, ‘he’ basic pronoun,