Gender Stereotypes in the Paroemiology of Sorbian

Abstract

Gender Stereotypes in the Paroemiology of Sorbian

All the entries that address the gender roles or relations of natural sexes are selected from two collections of Upper and Lower Sorbian proverbs. These roles are regularly recorded stereotypically in paroemiological units. Due to the currently low usage of the docu­mented proverbs among speakers of Sorbian, only the historical state of the linguistically fixed gender stereotypes can be established here. Proverbs referring to women dominate over those referring to men. The taxonomic differentiation in the present proverb corpus is striking: although the majority of proverbs express negative gender stereotypes, a con­siderable number of proverbs show positively evaluated attributes, especially with refe­rence to women.