The Linguistic Portrayal of Women in Written Afrikaans from 1911 to 2010

Abstract

This corpus-based study investigated what written Afrikaans had historically been ‘telling’ its readers about gender, and specifically about women. The investigation examined the frequency, collocation and concordance lines of feminine, masculine and epicene nouns in the Historical Corpus of Standard Afrikaans (Kirsten 2016) spanning the time period 1911-2010. The study was conducted because there is limited research available that examines the portrayal of gender in Afrikaans across an extended time period.

Corpus linguistics was used as a methodology to extract and evaluate data. The extracted data were analysed using quantitative data analysis, specifically descriptive statistics methods that included normalised frequency and MI score. The data were interpreted using qualitative analysis methods to explain the findings observed in the corpus data analyses. The qualitative analysis method used was content analysis, this method considered context and sociocultural factors within the Afrikaans language community.

The findings of the study pointed to Afrikaans’ movement toward gender parity. Firstly, the frequency of the feminine nouns decreased across the time period, with masculine nouns increasingly used to refer to women. Secondly, the most statistically significant collocates emphasised gender marking and highlighted the overall precedence of masculine nouns over feminine nouns. Lastly, the concordance lines indicated the linguistic inequality in the patterns of use, as women were frequently described pejoratively with unfavourable adjectival collocates.