Gender in Chinese Language: A Study of Words containing Woman Radical in Chinese Characters

It has been opined by many scholars of linguistics that Chinese language has a strong patriarchal bias. In the 20th century China, the linguistic and cultural bias in its language somehow remained intact despite the turbulent changes that China experienced thorough the processes of Socialist and modernist transformations. The paper, through the perspective of theory of Sociolinguistics and Markedness, will examine a selection of Chinese characters that contains women radical “女”, such as forms of address for women, certain nouns, verbs etc with women radical marking. The paper will also try to make a general attempt in understanding how certain words and terms in their deployment in communicative context are linked to influencing a person’s thought cognitively and socially.