THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN PROVERBS – A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF MODERN GREEK AND SERBIAN LANGUAGE

Abstract

The way language is used can tell us a lot about a culture and the mentality of the people speaking it. Thus, it is very interesting to see which values are rooted in common proverbs in different languages. Having in mind that beliefs and values can be recognized in all forms of linguistic communication (DOMINGUEZ BARAJAS 2010: 50), and that proverbs are based on oral tradition, with a very specific way in which they are being transferred from generation to generation (RASUL 2015: 55), they can tell us a lot about the way a society is influenced by the language it uses and vice versa. Considering the fact that the Greek and the Serbian society are, broadly speaking, built on similar, traditional and patriarchal foundations, a comparative analysis of linguistic features can be very insightful. The present study presents the findings of a corpus analysis of Greek and Serbian proverbs found in different online bases and dictionaries. We investigate the representation of women from the perspective of negative vs. positive representation, as well as the most common associations which accompany them. The results of our study show a greater number of negative connotations, a mostly passive role of a woman and a high similarity between the stereotypes we can identify in the proverbs in both languages.