Sexist Languages on the Facebook Page Threads of Philippines' Most Followed Female Social Media Influencer

Abstract

This study was undertaken to uncover the sexist languages on the Facebook Page threads of the Philippines' most followed female social media influencer- Ivana Alawi, including their linguistic and non- linguistic features. The identification of sexist languages was framed on Mill (2008)'s sexist language typology, while the framework of Herring, et al (2017) and Schneebeli (2018) were adopted to determine the linguistic and the non-linguistic features of these sexist comments. The researchers considered 20 posts on Ivana Alawi's Facebook page in 2019, 2020 and 2021. A total of 1500 comments were collected but only 175 comments exhibited sexist languages. The study revealed five types of overt sexism namely, surnames and titles, jokes, naming, semantic derogation, insult terms, and proverbs. As to indirect sexism, only humor, and presupposition were observed. Meanwhile, prominent linguistic features included punctuation marks, and interjections, non-standard capitalization, reduplicated letters, and acronyms. On the other hand, emoji, photographic images and stickers were the identified non-linguistic features of sexist comments. The study concluded that the comment sections of Ivana Alawi's Facebook page contain sexist languages which exhibited certain linguistic and non-linguistic features. The study recommended that gender-fair language should be utilized in the social media sphere and on the classroom. Moreover, future researchers are encouraged to explore other social media platforms, speeches and other materials to compare results of this study.