This research examines androcentrism and the stereotyped image of women in the French language. Considering that language is also a product of the past, we initially focus on history so that we can analyse language stereotypes and understand why they have emerged. In the following, we talk about semantic changes, more precisely, about their causes and conditions. The causes show us how changes occur and the conditions of these changes show us that each change has two stages (innovation and propagation) and that each linguistic change is a social construct, reproducing itself over time with the agreement of a majority of people. However, the language is also characterized by a certain rigidity, that comes from collective knowledge of a certain group of people, doxa, which implies an enormous presence of automatism in the linguistic expression. In the last part, we focus on examples that aim to confirm the existence of androcentrism and the pejorative image of the woman in the language. We thematize grammar and its androcentric rules and then we observe the lexicon, on the one hand through the word woman, its synonyms and its appearances in proverbs and on the other through insults and curses, professional titles and zoomorphisms.
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