WOMEN AND/IN LANGUAGE

This paper goes into fundamental levels of discourse to analyze some of the ways in which women have been discriminated in society. The methodology used here is to give everyday examples of what women undergo and discuss why this is so. The points given here are made within a framework of practice and everyday experience rather than theory, as the idea is to unravel to any citizen why some of the hierarchies and stereotypes put in place in society with regard to women are hardly questioned or challenged. Culture, media, literature, and language itself, in this case Sinhala, are shown to contribute towards the construction of female identity which works against them most of the time, often driving women themselves to use indirect language to express what they want. In conclusion, it can be said that these hierarchies are put in place to serve those in power, be it in the basic economic sense or in the symbolic sense. It is recommended that we learn about the power and the dynamics of language not only to understand how naturalized some stereotypes have become, but to realize that language is social, and not an objective, scientific phenomena, and thereby can undermine the self-identity of some groups in very fundamental ways.