Hair Colour Stereotypes in Croatian Language Corpora

Abstract

The paper shows how hair colour stereotypes are reflected in two Croatian language corpora: the Croatian Language Corpus hrWaC and the Croatian Language Repository. Both were searched with the Sketch Engine corpus tool, utilizing the word sketches function, which shows the information on the most common collocations in which a lemma occurs. Synonymous words denoting female and male persons with fair, brown, black, ginger, or red hair were explored. The following hypotheses were confirmed or partially confirmed: women are more often defined by hair colour than men; more synonyms denote a female person of a particular hair colour than a male person; some synonyms appear in contexts suggesting stereotypes more often than others; in the formation of words especially denoting female persons of particular hair colour, some word-formation models are used to form pejorative and depreciative words and (by onymisation) animal names; and the adjectives pravi (‘real’), jedan (‘one’), and običan (‘ordinary’) serve as focus markers and suggest expressions reflecting stereotypes. Based on the conducted collocation and word-formation analysis, it is concluded that the collocations and word-formation models associated with hair colour words suggest various extralinguistic data, including the social status of women.