Language and society - Research Paper Example

Cultural diversity has brought in different ways through which people interact and communicate to each other. In our informal and formal interactions, we use various titles to show honor to our colleagues, to identify gender and to recognize the marital status of an individual. Different cultures use titles differently due to difference in the languages that we use. Various titleshave been used for many years in Anglophone cultures to show gender and marital status. Other languages, e.g. French, also use equivalent formsof these titles to show gender.

The main concern is how the different languages use various titles to show gender and other aspects of the human life such as education, respect in the society, marital status and so on. This paper investigates this matter in a more elaborate way since it uses data from various cultures, does comparison of these data to find if there exists any differences in how the world uses titles. It therefore uses both practical and theoretical approach to this matter. The Anglophone cultures have widely used titles to indicate marital status and gender.

The general title for men is ‘Mr.’, while for women it is ‘Mrs.’ for those who are married and Miss for the unmarried. These terms have a long history since their use started in the olden days (Buxton, 2014). This shows how sexism is seriously emended in this culture and how it stresses on women’s marital status. The same case exists around the world in other cultures. Let us take for example the Portuguese language, which uses the following titles: The main question is whetheruse of these titles mark marital status.

In the history of the Portuguese culture, marital status did not bring in name changes, i.e. women did not adopt their husband’s names. This phenomenon has changed over the recent past since nowadays women do adopt the names of their husbands. At the same time, women