The Linguistics of Putting Women in Their Place

In Part 1, we traced how two morphologically identical vocatives in Malayalam diverged into warmth and weaponry. In Part 2, we watched the same corrosive machinery operating across English, French, Hindi, and Telugu, systematically converting neutral female words into slurs while male words climbed or held steady.

Now the question becomes: if language is an instrument of patriarchal oppression, can it also function as an instrument of liberation?

The answer, as it turns out, is yes. And the most interesting experiments are happening right now, in a state of 35 million people on the southwestern coast of India.

The invisible syntax of power

Before we get to the solutions, there is one more dimension of bias to understand. One that goes deeper than individual words and proverbs. It lives in the structure of sentences themselves.

Who acts and who is acted upon

A comprehensive 2025 psychological study analyzed 6,600 episodes (approximately 2.7 million sentences and 16 million words) of children's television programming in the United States, spanning content produced from 1960 to 2018. The researchers focused on the fundamental psychological dimensions of agency (action, power, competence) and communion (nurturing, passive, supportive roles).

The findings were striking and consistent:

• Words referring to men or boys overwhelmingly appeared in the agent role (the subject performing the action)
• Words referring to women or girls were disproportionately placed in the patient role (the object being acted upon)
• At the semantic level, male identifiers co-occurred significantly more often with words denoting agency, while female identifiers were tethered to communion

Because media content critically shapes the early social concepts and identity formations of children, encoding the male as the active agent and the female as the passive recipient ensures that gender stereotypes are literally built into the syntactic core of a child's understanding of the world. These are not lessons taught through dialogue. They are lessons taught through sentence structure itself, absorbed unconsciously and reinforced thousands of times before a child can articulate what "gender" means.

When machines inherit the bias

As human interaction increasingly relies on artificial intelligence, patriarchal linguistic models are being inherited by machines. Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on vast historical text corpora inevitably reflect and amplify the gender biases present in their training data.

Research into low-resource Indic languages, such as Malayalam, exposes severe occupational gender biases within NLP models. Using the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) alongside prompt-based analysis involving gendered sentence completions, researchers found that models routinely associate highly technical, authoritative, or prestigious professions with male pronouns, while relegating nurturing, domestic, or subordinate roles to female pronouns.

Strategies for linguistic recovery

If the problem is structural, the solutions must be structural too. Across Kerala, a series of institutional, legislative, educational, and literary interventions have been launched to dismantle gender bias at its linguistic roots. Taken together, they represent one of the most comprehensive attempts anywhere in the world to re-engineer the relationship between language and power.

The "Teacher" directive

In January 2023, the Kerala State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (KSCPCR) issued a groundbreaking directive to all educational institutions in the state, ordering schools to abolish the highly gendered honorifics "Sir" and "Madam" in favor of the gender-neutral term "Teacher."

The directive was born from a public petition seeking to eliminate gender-based discrimination in address forms. The Commission argued that replacing the binary "Sir/Madam" with "Teacher" promotes intrinsic equality among children, removes hierarchical barriers, and fosters deeper emotional attachment by emphasizing the dignity of the profession over the gender of the individual.

This was conceptually similar to a 2021 initiative by the Mathur village panchayat in Kerala, which banned the salutations "Sir" and "Madam" in its civic offices to eliminate authoritarian, colonial-era barriers between state officials and the common public.

Legislative inversion: the Kerala Public Health Bill

A highly effective method of feminist linguistic disruption is the deliberate inversion of the generic masculine in legal frameworks. In 2023, the Kerala legislative assembly passed the comprehensive Kerala Public Health Bill, unifying older colonial-era health acts (the Madras Public Health Act of 1939 and the Travancore-Cochin Public Health Act of 1955).

In a landmark departure from conventional legal drafting in India, the text of the new law was written entirely using feminine pronouns as the default generic identifier. For example, when referring to a general "owner," the bill utilized the feminine Malayalam term udamastha rather than the historically default masculine.

While the bill stopped short of incorporating modern non-binary pronouns, this intervention is significant precisely because it operates at the level of law. Laws are not suggestions. They are the formal language of the state. When the state speaks in the feminine by default, it rewrites the cognitive script of every lawyer, judge, bureaucrat, and citizen who reads it.

Rewriting the textbooks

In response to a horrifying spate of dowry-related deaths and domestic abuse in Kerala in 2021, where data indicated a woman becomes a victim of a dowry-related death approximately every hour in India, the state government launched initiatives to address the ideological roots of gender-based violence through early education.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan ordered the comprehensive auditing of school textbooks to "sieve out" sexist portrayals, disparaging words, and patriarchal messaging.

By 2024, the state successfully introduced innovative, gender-neutral textbooks. In stark contrast to historical media that positioned males strictly as agents of action and females as patients of domesticity, the new textbooks featured visual and textual representations of fathers grating coconut and cooking snacks in the kitchen for their daughters.

1. 01
   Audit: Comprehensive review of all existing textbook content for sexist portrayals, disparaging language, and patriarchal messaging.
2. 02
   Remove: Elimination of gender-stereotyped role assignments, derogatory proverbs, and language that positions women as subordinate or passive.
3. 03
   Replace: Introduction of visual and textual representations showing men in domestic roles and women in professional, leadership, and technical roles.
4. 04
   Normalize: Repeated exposure across grade levels to establish egalitarian role assignments as the cognitive default for the next generation.

Literary reclamation: Pennezhuthu and Dalit feminism

Beyond institutional edicts and legislative drafting, language is recovered through raw literary expression and the intentional reclamation of slurs.

In Malayalam literature, the term Pennezhuthu (literally meaning "women's writing," echoing Helene Cixous's post-structuralist concept of ecriture feminine) was initially used as a derogatory label by male critics to condemn feminist authors like Sarah Joseph. The patriarchal literary establishment weaponized the term to dismiss the unique, fluid, and subversive nature of women's literature, attempting to maintain the dominance of phallogocentric logic.

But modern feminist authors actively reclaimed Pennezhuthu, transforming it from a term of abuse into a badge of revolutionary literary identity. This reclamation allows women to write outside the constraints of traditional masculine structures, prioritizing narratives that validate female physiological and psychological realities.

Similarly, campaigns by the Department of Woman and Child Development (WCD) in Kerala utilize digital media to directly attack derogatory phrases thrown at women, replacing lines like "Keep quiet di" or "Women are good for nothing" with progressive, pro-woman messaging that normalizes female bodily autonomy.

The Dalit feminist voice

This literary recovery is most potently observed in Dalit feminist literature. Writers such as Bama, Urmila Pawar, and Baby Kamble leverage language to reconstruct identities systematically crushed beneath the dual, intersectional oppression of caste and patriarchy.

These writers do not ask for permission to enter the literary canon. They build their own. And in doing so, they demonstrate that the most powerful form of linguistic recovery is not reform from above, but creation from below: new words, new structures, new stories that refuse to be contained by the vocabularies designed to silence them.

What recovery actually requires

The linguistics of patriarchal influence is a vast, self-sustaining architecture designed to centralize male power and marginalize the feminine. It manifests in the micro-aggressions of everyday address, where a Malayalam man is warmly hailed as da while a woman is aggressively minimized as di. It is fossilized in the etymological history of languages worldwide, transforming respected female professionals and community healers into spinsters, hussies, and gossips through the relentless machinery of semantic derogation. It is explicitly codified in regional proverbs that degrade the female intellect, implicitly mapped into the syntactic roles of children's media, and unwittingly propagated by artificial intelligence algorithms that bury human prejudice deep within their neural networks.

But because linguistic structures are engineered by human attitudes, they can be un-engineered through conscious, systemic intervention.

Recovering language requires a dual approach. First, the meticulous exposure of the patriarchal biases hidden within our syntax, semantics, and vocabularies. Second, the active, unapologetic generation of new linguistic norms that grant marginalized genders equal agency.

By stripping patriarchal vocabularies of their power and insisting on egalitarian discourse, societies can dismantle the cognitive frameworks that have historically licensed the subjugation of women. Language is transformed from a tool of oppression into the ultimate mechanism for liberation, ensuring that the lexicon of the future reflects a reality of genuine equality.