New Names Based on Gender Attribution

Abstract

    The article addresses new gender-denoting coinages present in the Database of Lithuanian Neologisms from the formational point of view. It furthermore offers a brief overview of the feminist linguistic activism and the feminist language reform (also known as the gender-based language reform, non-sexist language reform, etc.), as well as the Gender-sensitive Guidelines of Vilnius University, advancing a hypothesis that this could have played a role in the appearance of new gender-denoting coinages in the Lithuanian language. The article identifies the most productive methods and tools of the formation of such coinages; describes the quantity of new names based on gender attribution that are made with the traditional and novel (or unconventional as far as this category of formation is concerned) tools of formation, as well as the nature of the new words (that can be stylistically charged or neutral); and concludes with the statistics on the dissemination of gender-denoting new Lithuanian coinages on the Internet.