За женския род в граматиката и (във) феминистката лингвистика
On the Feminine Gender in Grammar and (in) Feminist Linguistics

Summary/Abstract: In this text the author proceeds from the presumption of the autonomous value of language as the strongest foundation of national culture and memory and supports the following theses: 1) The increasingly widespread use of feminatives and neo-feminatives in public speech is an unacceptable approach from the arsenal of the feminist criticism of language adopted by today’s liberal- progressive ideology. This approach does not achieve the intended social equality between men and women and is counterproductive due to its manipulativeness and socio-political inadequacy; 2) The feminist criticism of language is not based on scientific evidence from the area of linguistics. 3) The language “neofeminization” of masculine gender word forms cripples the Bulgarian language by forcibly depriving it of the internal logic of self-development, its inherent morphological specificities and stylistic harmony. This questions its own value as a traditional and most reliable proponent of national culture. The author finds the main arguments for her theses in three points of radical linguistic feminism, which she criticizes: 1) attributing a direct ideological function to language at the level of the word/concept (rather than the sentence/statement); 2) the ideologeme of language as “producing” social relations; 3) the use of language exclusively as an operational, technical tool in the ideological game.

• Details
• Contents