EXPRESSING GENDER IN ENGLISH AND SOME SLAVIC LANGUAGES
EXPRESSING GENDER IN ENGLISH AND SOME SLAVIC LANGUAGES

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with gender as a grammatical category, on the one hand, and as a social construct, on the other, with a particular focus on the interrelation between them. The starting point is the description of the common grammatical means of expressing gender in English compared to Bulgarian, Czech, Russian and Polish aiming at outlining the typological features uniting Slavic languages and contrasting them to English. The description involves examples from both the grammatical and lexical levels of the languages. The discussion moves further onto the socially accepted use of specifically marked gender forms in Modern Slavic languages thus tackling the issues of political correctness and language use. It is pointed out that the relation between gender marking and political correctness was first brought to the fore within the Anglo-Saxon sociolinguistic tradition that resulted in massive changes in English in the past 40 years. In the conclusion the basic differences in language planning with regard to the relation between gender and political correctness in English and Slavic environments is outlined.

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