| Abstract | This study focuses on ideologies regarding language, sex, gender and sexuality. The data was collected through semi-structured sociolinguistic interviews with two respondents who are bilingual speakers of Croatian and English and was analysed to further explain how various ideologies influence the speakers’ linguistic production, as well as their daily life experience as members of a marginalized, queer sexuality. The research discusses societal portrayals of femininity and masculinity from a critical discourse analysis perspective in hopes of deconstructing rigid and harmful views of human beings. Especially those who do not align with the traditional views of women and men. In addition, as gender can be seen as an ideological spectrum which ranges from the traditional to a more modern view of gender, the role of an individual’s agency was analysed in terms of how an individual wishes to be portrayed regarding gender ideologies. Furthermore, the research pays attention to the role of linguistic features, e.g. pitch, which serve as an index of one’s sexual identity and how the context of utterance influences language features as indexes of sexuality. Finally, language contact was an important focus point of this study since English possesses far more queer-related expressions than Croatian. Therefore, concrete communicative scenarios centred around bilingualism, overall code and style switching tendencies were discussed and analysed. The results of this study found that sex and gender co-exist in tension; their complex, dialectical relationship serves as an enabler for the gender/sex ideological spectrum where every individual has the power to insert agency in order to portray their true self, regardless of the traditional view of a masculine man and a feminine woman. In addition, the results of the study show that language is a (self-)regulating system which successfully manages to repair communicative scenarios, even those where a certain term does not exist in one’s native language. Finally, the results of the study emphasise that ideologies, both of sex and gender, as well as language ideologies, negatively impact individuals by successfully restricting their linguistic production and self-expression through fear and anxiety. |
