ABSTRACT
This project basically examine the language of gender discrimination in African literary works with special reference toPURPLE HIBISCUS and YELLOW-YELLOW. In the past few years, women folk have been rendered invisible or stereotyped by their male counterparts. As a result, women voices are not heard, they are relegated to the background.
Gender is a central organizing principle of societies and often governs the processes of production and reproduction, consumption, and distribution. Gender roles are the ‘social definition’ of women and men, and vary among different societies and cultures, classes and ages, and during different periods in history. They vary greatly across the Nile Basin and sub-Saharan Africa at large. Gender-specific roles and responsibilities are often conditioned by household structure, access to resources, political stability, and ecological conditions. Gender research in rural development is therefore essential in poverty reduction and sustainability of development interventions. With the feminist movement, there is a fight for female emancipation and as a result, the feminist rose up for equal gender in African society.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Language is a means of communication among human beings. There are further classifications of language into formal or informal verbal or non-verbal, written or unwritten. Chafe (1996) defines language as a system which mediates in a highly complex way between the universe of meanings and universe sounds. Chomsky and Halle (2000) see language as a system of rules which determines the relation of sound to meaning for infinity of sentence for that language.
Language is purely human and non-instructive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols. Language is considered by other linguists as a vehicle of culture. J. F. Weredu (1994) asserts that language is uniquely human and this appears to be the most important distinctions.