Tendencies in Using Feminitives in Modern French and Russian

Social changes taken place in the last century influenced the perception of women. As a consequence, women were granted various rights. In order to be treated equally with men, the fight against androcentrism in languages began. According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, language affects speakers’ worldview. So, to make women more visible in the society feminization of language needed. Nowadays, the usage of femitives still provokes numerous social discussions. The paper aims at studying the frequency of feminitives in French and Russian languages. This pair of languages are chosen as both of them have masculine and feminine grammatical genders. Furthermore, in both of them the masculine form trumps the feminine one historically. As a result, the question of the necessity of feminitives in speech is a matter of discussion for these languages. To figure out whether female forms are actively used in discourse the analysis of media sources will be examined. Findings will be compared in qualitative and comparative studies. Results may be essential for the further exploration of language feminization within a few years. In addition, it will assist in better understanding of the rate of change in situation with gender inequality in French and Russian.