Language and identity: a linguistic study of women-centric Hindi proverbs

Language shapes social realities, and also reflects socially constrained identity of an individual so much so that the relationship between language and identity is intertwined. The paper explores how women are represented in the Hindi proverbs. The portrayal of women in these proverbs is mainly negative; they are represented as being devilish, senseless, morally degenerated, and powerless. The study highlights proverbs extracted from the corpus of thousand proverbs from literary and non-literary oral tradition. The paper focuses on the semanticity of proverbs, and finds out how negative representation degrades the identity of women. The linguistic analysis of these proverbs highlights that the women are represented in bad humor, and further pictures their negative image. The paper sums up stating how the meaning depicted by these proverbs reflects the sociolinguistic reality.