A Comparative Analysis of Gender Stereotypes in Children's Literature in Persian and English within the Framework of Cultural Linguistics

Gender stereotypes can be considered as one of the prominent concepts in the field of socio-linguistics. These stereotypes are found at all levels of language application, including children’s literature, and play an important role in the reproduction of sexist language and patriarchal discourse. Through a descriptive- analytic method, the present study aims to investigate the aforementioned stereotypes in forty children’s stories of age groups “A” and “B” and seeks to compare the amount and the types of common stereotypes within the cultural linguistics framework as proposed by Sharifian (2016). Then, a linguistic and cultural interpretation of the stereotypes will be provided. The results of this study indicate that although the amount of gender stereotypes in children’s stories has been diminished in the past decades, patriarchal discourse is still remarkably present on the deep structure level and encodes its values and criteria through the presentation of gendered frameworks and roles in language and affects the audiences.