ПРОФЕСОР ИЛИ ПРОФЕСОРКА? РОДЪТ НА ИМЕНАТА, ОЗНАЧАВАЩИ ПРОФЕСИИ В УКРАИНСКИЯ И БЪЛГАРСКИЯ ЕЗИК
PROFESSOR (ПРОФЕСОР) OR PROFESSORKA(ПРОФЕСОРКА)? THE GENDER OF THE NOUNS DENOTING PROFESSIONS IN UKRAINIAN AND BULGARIAN LANGUAGE

Summary/Abstract: Job titles for women are a central issue in debates about language and gender. This study concentrates on the class of professional nouns in Ukrainian and in Bulgarian. After having presented the use of generic nouns and the neutralization of referential gender in the two languages, the work analyzes two corpora of occupational nouns excerpted from Ukrainian and Bulgarian newspapers which specialize in job offers posting. The data reveal that the use of masculine generics prevails in Ukrainian. This is true both for new professions (брокер‘broker’, бармен ‘barman’) as well as more traditional ones (лiкар ‘medical doctor’, iнженер ‘engineer’), and both for low-status occupations (перукар ‘hairdresser’, касир ‘cashier’) and professions of higher prestige (директор ‘director’). Bulgarian, on the other hand, seems to take full advantage of the morphological possibilities of the language, with newly coined female equivalents of recent loan nouns such as брокерка ‘female broker’, барманка ‘barwoman’, диспечерка ‘female dispatcher’.

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