To use “he/she” or “they”: That is the question

Abstract

This paper aims to underline the close connection between language and culture. Linguistic interaction is not only a series of sentences from a speaker to a hearer, but it also involves the cultural context which influences the interactants either to use political correctness or not. In recent years, native speakers as well as English teachers have been forced to deal with the abundance of terminology contrived so that people would not be offended by a ‘biased’ language which ignores/rejects their gender, ethnic origin, or sexual orientation. We try to show how sometimes an ‘unbiased’ language can have comic implications from a lexical-semantic point of view, but the goal of this discussion is to point out or even eliminate certain inequalities in society and to make the students understand these word-creations. The last part of this paper examines a questionnaire given to Romanian students which is meant to be a survey of their attitude towards the use of language with political correctness. The findings reveal the students’ opinions on gender, on societal restrictions and on (ab-)using language.