Chapter 12. Gender in Vietnamese

This study aims to identify strategies for the representation and encoding of gender in Vietnamese, as well as to show the various manifestations of a mainstream gender bias against women that are observed in this language. We achieve our goal mainly by categorizing the human-denoting lexicon into subgroups of different gender-marking properties, and by making relevant comparisons to look for both qualitative and quantitative contrasts in the ways in which men and women are linguistically represented. While arguing that this imbalance stems from a conventionalized hierarchy that prefers men over women, we also point to a reduction in such bias in the contemporary language, and advance an alternative view of the derogatory drift of neutral words and phrases in collocation with female-marked terms.

• Affiliations: 1: Ho Chi Minh city University of Education, Vietnam; 2: National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan