Contrasts of gender, case and tense in English and Serbo-Croatian (ePub)

Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1 (A), University of Duisburg-Essen (Anglistics), course: Hauptseminar Language, Sex & Gender, language: English, abstract:
"Sociolinguistics is a term including the aspects of linguistics applied toward the connections between language and society, and the way we use it in different social situations. It ranges from the study of the wide variety of dialects across a given region down to the analysis between the way men and women speak to on another. Sociolinguistics often shows us the humorous realities of human speech and how a dialect of a given language can often describe the age, sex, and social class of the speaker; it codes the social function of a language."0

One can assume that in southern countries where women are thought to be more under pressure by men, this might be also expressed in the native language.
Indeed, not only in southern countries but also in numerous European languages three basic facts which express the patriarchal status in most countries are apparent:

- It is obvious that the female gender is semantically of lower range than the male form. In English, "master" indicates a positive connotation while the female form "mistress" indicates something negative. In Italian, "filosofo" means "philosopher" and the female form "filosofessa" stands for "imaginary wife".
- Male forms often are seen as revaluating while female forms are perceived as degrading: "She is man enough to ...", or in German, "Im Beruf steht Birgit ihren Mann." And contrary: "Tom behaves girlish.".
- Male forms that are syntactically or morphologically marked refer not only to a group of men but also to a mixed group of female and male persons. For example, when there are 99 women and one man in a lecture-hall, the male form must be taken as the conventional one. In Germany, for instance, it is not common to say "Liebe Studentinnen".