Sexism in language: A critical discourse analysis perspective

Abstract

Language plays a crucial role in perpetuating sexism and gender inequality. The research draws on the Critical Discourse Analysis, an Interdisciplinary Approach to the study of discourse that views language as a social practice, to explore the existence and nature of sexist language in Kamba Popular Songs. Specifically, this study anchored itself on Grice’s Second Theory of Conversational Implicature (1991). The research had two objectives: to investigate sexist implicatures in Kamba Popular Songs and describe sexist inferences in the lyrics. The study used the descriptive research design and purposively sampled eight songs from the ten most popular Kamba bands with the youths. Besides, the research used content analysis to identify the possible sexist expressions classified into implicatures and inferences. Further, the researcher categorized the two linguistic items into negative and positive sexism, and the number of each type was counted up and described. The study concludes that popular Kamba songs project a sexist perception of women. This research recommends eliminating sexist language in both written and spoken discourse because it contains a lexicon and grammatical structure that trivializes and perpetrates biases against women.