Abstract: 

Language is a mirror of society and language can really reflect the social customs and values. As the essence of languages, cultural connotation are concentrated in the proverbs. Being used until now, the proverbs record not only from literature to folklore but also from religious belief to natural phenomenon. All the fresh experience and wisdom of different times and different classes are concentrated in the proverbs then. Thus, it is more typical and convincing to study sexism in the proverbs. The paper uses contrastive technique to state the specific expressions in English and Chinese proverbs in terms of social status, marriage, verbal behaviors, and morality. What’s more, the paper discusses the reasons of sexism from two angles which are the social division of labor and cultural factors. The paper is aimed to reveal the sexism in languages through the analysis of proverbs ,strengthen people’s correct awareness of sexism, and help people reduce even eliminate the sexism phenomenon in our daily communication.

Keywords: proverbs；language；sexism；gender language

摘  要：

语言是现实社会的一面镜子，能够真实地反映这种社会习俗及价值观念，而作为语言中的精华——谚语，更是浓缩了文化的内涵。谚语被沿用至今，记录了从文学作品到民间传说，从宗教信仰到自然现象，不同时代不同阶级人民的新的，经验和智慧都浓缩在当时的谚语中。因而从谚语中探索性别歧视更具有代表性和说服力。本文将运用对比手法从社会地位，婚姻方面，言语行为，品行道德四个方面来阐述性别歧视在英汉谚语中的具体表现，并从社会分工、文化因素两个不同角度分析性别歧视形成的原因。目的是通过对谚语的分析来揭示出语言中的性别歧视，提高人们对于性别歧视的意识，帮助人们减少或是消除日常生活中以及交流中的性别歧视现象。

关键词：谚语；语言；性别歧视；性别语言

1 Introduction
Language is a common tool for people’s communication and thinking in social life. So it is closely connected with our life. The language often reflects the thoughts, attitudes, and culture. We use language to communicate ideas and thoughts. Also we can express our feelings through language such as happiness, anger, suffering and so on. Language is regarded as the existing form of thinking, even as the identity card of thinking. Human beings, whichever language they happen to speak or wherever they happen to live, share a great deal in common both biologically and culturally. These common biological and cultural elements can be referred to as biological and cultural universals. And the universals may lead to linguistic universals. But through different developments and influenced by the differences of living habits, thinking patterns, behavior norms, moral values, political concepts and cultural traditions, they will also lead to linguistic differences.