The Process of Sexism in Contemporary Persian Novels

Investigating the effect of social factors, such as age, sex, education and social class on language variation is the consequence of changes followed by the arrival of ‘functionalism’ on the stage of linguistics,which resulted a considerable growth in sociolinguistics. In ‘sexist language’ differences between the lexical items whose references are the members of the two sex groups imply a kind of unfair judgement towards one group. Since literature reflects culture and worldview of a society, it can be taken as a suitable device to study subjects like the degree of sexism in Persian language.In so doing,sexist concepts were extracted out of 20 novels which were randomly selected based on the two variables of gender and date of publication (10 novels written by male authors and 10 novels written by female authors ;10 novels belonging to 1360s and 10 novels to 1380s). To analyse the data, the spss18 and k2 test were used. The results of this study showed the following ‘sexism’ in Persian novels is proved. Difference between sexist items in female and male authors were showed to be significantly increased(p=. /.1). Difference between sexist items in novels belonging to 1360s and 1380s were showed to be significantly increased (p=. /.1).