A Study on Sexist Language in the Malaysian English Newspapers

Tay, Emily Wan-Ling (2022) A Study on Sexist Language in the Malaysian English Newspapers. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University of Management and Technology.

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Abstract

In a wider research corpus, studies on sexist language used in the Malaysian English newspapers are not much explored compared to other media in the country. This paper aims at identifying sexist language used in the writings of four popular local English newspapers, Malay Mail, New Straits Times, The Star Newspaper and The Sun Daily. In this mixed-approach study, the researcher applied Mills’ sexist language (2008) (i.e. overt sexism and indirect sexism) as the theoretical framework to analyse features of linguistic sexism in the selected news articles from all four newspaper companies. Five types of sexist features from overt sexism were identified and the findings revealed how some elements appear more than the others. It was also found through a questionnaire that females had better ability to differentiate sexism in newspaper headlines than males. The collected data provided a deeper insight, thus invoking a sense of awareness towards sexist language in Malaysian society and newspaper writings.