English Language & Usage Asked on May 16, 2021
When you look at word frequency data in English such as the Corpus Of Contemporary American English (COCA) he appears on 16th place with 6500 occurrences per mil and she at 35th place with 3210 per mil.
This is a factor of 2 in usage.
Compared to many languages, in English, he and she are only used for animate subjects, with it serving serving as the inanimate subject. And as far as I’m aware in an ambiguous or neutral context he or she or they would be used.
Therefore the null hypothesis would predict that he and she would have the same frequency, being used as pronouns by almost exactly half of the population each.
Is there something I’m missing? Or does this simply point to some deeply rooted sexism and gender imbalance?
If older works were included I could easily imagine this phenomenon being as strong as it is, because all the writers were men, but in the current language Corpus?
At the link above you can download a spreadsheet with a further subdivision of frequencies in different context and this relationship holds in most of them:
rank | lemma | PoS | freq | perMil | range | disp | blog | web | TVM | spok | fic | mag | news | acad | blogPM | webPM | TVMPM | spokPM | ficPM | magPM | newsPM | acadPM |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
16 | he | p | 6467470 | 6512.91 | 331648 | 0.97 | 519986 | 638982 | 912036 | 974382 | 1671940 | 652027 | 871369 | 227209 | 4184.87 | 4968.24 | 7121.13 | 7724.88 | 14130.41 | 5171.08 | 7157.51 | 1896.72 |
35 | she | p | 3188078 | 3210.48 | 206627 | 0.93 | 181410 | 217759 | 483074 | 354703 | 1283180 | 285458 | 295580 | 87513 | 1460.00 | 1693.13 | 3771.82 | 2812.08 | 10844.81 | 2263.90 | 2427.92 | 730.55 |
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