I don’t think this is what you want to hear, but I think I actually do not want to follow you with the “Men Still Control Language” thesis. However, I am acquainted with a grammarian who I will see tomorrow and will quiz her about this topic, she may not have so many views about “practical application” but will definitely have some input about “Western” languages. As well, I think you really want some non-English speakers to post in this thread, even if you want only Western; French, Spanish, Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Arabic and so on might not shew the same results as in English.
My own rough view is that there are some oft pointed out facts about English that would imply phalocentricity in English language; these are worth mentioning although they are well known (Aristotle said we should begin by asking “what people say?”). ‘Mankind’ and 'man are used in general for all humans; ‘human’ contains -man-; a similar trend exists in many Western and Northern European languages; French, German, Dutch, Icelandic, Norwegian, Italian, Greek etymonline.com/index.php?term=man , very interestingly, it looks like ‘adam’ is man in Turkish; and also interesting to note there is a verb form of ‘man’, i.e. ‘to man’ ‘manning’ ‘manned’, ‘will have manned’ and so on. Man starts with an ‘M’ sound; but so does ‘mother’, ‘woman’ begins with a ‘W’ which is an up-side down ‘M’, but that is not true in French. There is no verb form of ‘woman’ in English: womanning, womanned… It is fair to say that this male bias extends through many parts of English vocabulary, ‘he’ is also neuter, though there is a trend these days to use a plural pronoun instead: ‘they’. Yet certain things such as ships use ‘she.’ But very interestingly, English is almost totally genderless unlike French, Russian or Arabic, with the exception of names: ‘Chris’ vs. ‘Christina’ or America or Australia; and ‘blond/blonde’. In case you are not aware, very roughly speaking, masculine words tend to be active and feminine passive: pen is masculine, table feminine in French; but this is very roughly speaking as paper is masculine and a gun is feminine; a sword has a masculine and a feminine form. I think it would be very hard to connect feminine gender to feminine grammatical gender. Or active and passive grammar tense to anything sexist: ‘I threw the ball/The ball was thrown by me;’ though it is perhaps interesting that English habitually uses the active tense and not the passive? There might be a little more argument with writing: Thoth who was male was the Egyptian patron of writing. Writing in the West is often though to have grown out of trade records and trade is a male activity. Cyrillic was invented by a man; there are few rounded shapes and more straight lines which is masculine in Western scripts; but those who claim that the shape of Arabic writing is derived from the flow of the desert are mistaken; the flow of Arabic results from the writing tool: the pen; this is also true of European languages which used the quill; and Oriental which used the brush; English letters are not easily written with a brush, Chinese characters are not easily written with a quill; European miniscule and cursive scripts would not have been possible before advancements in writing tools. Western language tends to use Subject-Verb-Object; some Eastern languages use Subject-Object-Verb. It would be a stretch to see any sexism in this; though perhaps the phalocentric relation between subject and object? Western language also tends to list from particular to general, Eastern (east of India and Indian Indo-China) names give generals first, but again is this a sexist feature of English language? Is capitalization in English or German sexist? No more so than cephalization is; but then ‘head’ also has a sexist meaning: as noun and verb. Western languages, excepting Indian scripts are linear, unlike Thai or Korean; but then is any script not Western? Thai is derived from Sanskrit (Indo) and Hangul is almost certainly heavily based on Indian writing systems via Buddhism (in my opinion) despite some Chinese forms. But what is sexist about linearality? Ask a feminist. Be that as it may; I’m very inclined at the moment to look at sexism in English language as confined to the more superficial parts of language; very basic parts of language such as noun and verb; definite/indefinite, articles, tense, English by in large being a non-tonal language, even writing and script do not at this moment seem to me to have any deeper sexist qualities.
‘A dog’/‘an apple’; other languages than English match up vowels and consonants (or anti-match) in pre- and post-positional articles; is there anything sexist about vowels and consonants? in many languages besides English, female names do not often end in vowels (Amanda, Stacey, Nikki…).
More after my chat with the grammarian tomorrow.
