Chapter 6

Gender representation in Chinese language

Different from Romanized languages with gender marker, the Chinese language does not have inflections in nouns, adjectives and verbs when the subject is a female. Instead, a semantic stem or the radical woman 女 (nü) is used to directly indicate femininity. This study takes a lexicographic and corpus approach to explore gender representation in Chinese and discusses its forms, meanings and usages. First, characters with the radical woman were classified into different semantic fields to see how they represent women and reflect social ideologies. Second, their representations in a modern Chinese dictionary were compared with a classic one to see the historical change. Third, the use of the words was explored in a mega-corpus of 287 million Chinese characters. It is interesting to see that more than 70% of the characters with the radical 女 (nü, woman) listed in classic Chinese dictionaries have vanished in modern society probably due to language evolution and social-cultural changes such as a shift in attitudes towards women. A few characters changed their female semantic element to a gender-neutral one. Gender representation in Chinese is also reflected in Chinese idioms, the word order and gendered third-person pronoun. Understanding these forms can provide insight into Chinese culture and raise awareness of shifting trends of their use in the language.