Lexikalische Feminisierungstendenz als sprachkulturelles Phänomen in Europa
Lexical feminization bias as cultural phenomenon in Europe spoke

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines one of the most relevant aspects of feminist linguistics, e.g. the feminine use of language concerning the female names of persons and titles. From this aproach, feminist language criticism starts out from the basic objective that women should be made visible in their fields of occupation as well as through the social positions they hold. Linguistic data of several languages in the European context show that a tendency of feminization is characteristic of quite a lot of European languages. Linguistic feminization, however, should be interpreted in different ways as far as the self- and foreign-positioning of the female individual is concerned. On one hand, a distincition is to be made between self-reflexion and foreign-reflexion in the sociolinguistic sense, on the other hand, the interdependence of the perception of foreign portrayal and the language production mechanisms of self-portrayal in the psycholinguistic sense should not be underestimated. As to the questions of linguistic feminization, the main issue ist the image „that women present of themselves and that they have of themselves” (Burr, 1998).

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