Gender Asymmetries in Seychelles Creole Human Nouns

Lexical representation of women and men constitutes one of the important areas of multidimensional linguistic research of gender and is explored cross-linguistically. Grammatical descriptions of Seychelles Creole (SC) acknowledge the availability of gender specific human nouns; however, there is no evidence of how sizable the group of such nouns is and what their semantic specifics are. This paper addresses the above empirical gap and sets out to investigate SC human nouns which refer to either women or men. The study presents semantic groupings of 372 nominations of men and women available in the current dictionaries of SC; identifies asymmetries in representation of women and men by SC gender nouns, including gaps, quantitative and qualitative imbalances; and outlines socio-cultural implications of the observed status quo in lexical representation of women and men in SC. Analysis of gender-specific human nouns in SC provides material for further cross-linguistic explorations of gender-related issues in language.