Women’s Rights Terminology on the Web: Investigating Official and Unofficial Sources

Abstract

In the last decades, women’s rights issues have gained increasing public attention, both in domestic and public spheres, leading to a renewed interest in the linguistic development of women-related terminology and gender-based language use. This interest has resulted in the setting up of projects, the collection of glossaries and the establishment of new bodies like the European Institution for Gender Equality (EIGE). This essay aims to investigate women-related terminology exploring its nature, development and its actual use in different contexts. To this end, a terminology analysis was conducted on women’s rights terminology found on official websites like the EIGE and the UN Women Organization, which include gender-related glossaries. The choice of exploring highly reliable sources like the EIGE glossary was made to identify trends, categories, and connections to other fields, and possibly define women's rights discourse as a full-fledged domain or sub-domain. In the first part of the paper highly reliable sources were compared to other official and non-governmental resources such as Amnesty International website. This comparative approach aimed to highlight the differences and similarities between various resources, examining them in terms of the standardization and popularization of terminology, while also considering women's terminology on social media.