Abstract:
The study examines the linguistic landscape of Afrikaans women as observed in the women’s magazine rooi rose from 1948 − 2020. Corpus linguistics was used as the methodology for the study, using the rooi rose corpus.
The rationale for undertaking the research is because there is still very little data on language sexism in Afrikaans. An attempt was made to fill this gap.
This is a sociolinguistic study, specifically focusing on the subsection of language and gender. This includes language sexism − especially language sexism that is portrayed in the media − like magazines.
The main goal is to identify language sexism in Afrikaans, in the womens’ magazine, rooi rose.
The main research question of the study is to examine the linguistic landscape of Afrikaans women as observed in the women’s magazine rooi rose from 1948 – 2020.
To get an answer to this question both quantitative and qualitative research methods were used. The quantitative research mainly involves the frequencies of the search words and indicates how these frequencies have changed over time. The qualitative research seeks to analyze the search words as they are used, by looking at concordance lines. The collocations of the keywords are also analyzed qualitatively.
The following aspects concerning language and gender in rooi rose were investigated:
Aspects that were researched include forms of address, the generical he and male and female nouns for personal names and profession.
The study concludes that there is a noticeable change in the use of some of the aspects examined. Afrikaans follows the world trend by moving away from some masculine and feminine nouns by replacing them with one neutral lexical item.
On the other hand, there are still signs of language sexism in rooi rose. This can be seen in the generic he and the fact that forms of address and titles still differ between men and women.
