Gender and dictionaries: perspectives from an African language

Abstract

This article investigates gender bias and stereotyping in African language lexicography, with specific reference to two Northern Sotho dictionaries. Drawing on the framework of critical lexicography, dictionaries are approached as cultural artefacts and potential carriers of ideology. The study focuses primarily on the Groot Noord-Sotho Woordeboek (GNSW), a pre-corpus, introspection-based trilingual dictionary, and compares selected findings with the more recent Oxford Bilingual School Dictionary: Northern Sotho and English (OBSD), which is corpus-based. The analysis centres on usage examples, which, alongside definitions, constitute a key site for the encoding of cultural and ideological meaning. Two datasets are examined: (i) example sentences containing the lemma mosadi ‘woman’, and (ii) the use of gendered pronouns in English translations. The findings reveal a persistent pattern of gender bias and stereotyping, including the domesticisation of women, asymmetrical gender representation, and a strong preference for masculine default forms. The study further demonstrates that a corpus-based approach does not automatically eliminate such biases. It is argued that lexicographers must actively mediate between descriptive practice and normative responsibility in order to avoid perpetuating gender inequality.