Linguistic Sexism: A Case of Gikuyu Language Discourse in Kenya

Sexist language is considered to be any language that is supposed to include all people, but, unintentionally or intentionally excludes gender which is either males or females. By looking at linguistic sexism, this paper aims at finding out the relationship between language and gender. Many people who speak Gikuyu language run into the difficulty of making the choices between certain words in their everyday discourses. They wonder which to choose the chaimani (chairman) has arrived for the meeting or mutungoria (the chairperson) has arrived for the occasion when referring to a woman. This is the stuff the Gikuyu language is made of. It is ridden with linguistic sexism that excludes women and trivializes what women do. This paper examines elements of sexism in the Gikuyu language which abound in the morphology, syntax and semantics of the language.