Gender, Language and New Literacy presents cross-cultural research on gender as it is lexically and socially categorized in electronic media. For the purposes of the study, the authors have compiled a corpus of gender terms from online thesauruses to show how new technologies interact with gender categorizations in different languages, and how these are related to their respective culture and society. Each language is examined within the same theoretical framework, functional semantics, focusing on lexicon. This common empirical ground facilitates cross-language comparison. The contributors examine languages from around the world, including the Indo-European, Semitic, Uralic and Austro-Asiatic families. This is a cutting-edge research book that will be of interest to academics working in the fields of corpus linguistics, and gender studies.

Author Biography

Eva-Maria Thune is Professor of German Linguistics at the University of Bologna, Italy. Simona Leonardi is Associate Professor of Germanic Philology at the University Federico II, Naples, Italy. Carla Bazzanella is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Torino, Italy.