Gender Bias in Manggarai Languages East Nusa Tenggara: A Sociolinguistic Study

Language is a cultural product. People have created language to describe the existence and position of a person within society, including to a woman. Within a patriarchal community where a man's position is higher than a woman's, people tend to have gender-biased language. This study analyzed the aspects of gender-biased within the Manggarai language. The language belongs to the people of Manggarai at East Nusa Tenggara, Eastern Indonesia. The community is a patriarchal one. This study explored the symptoms of language diversity used for women who are gender-biased. This research employed a qualitative descriptive study with an ethnographic as its primary method. It used observation and interviews as data collection methods. This study found that there has been various gender-biased languages using to position a woman lower and more marginalized than a man. People might use and find those languages in daily communication, in satire language, terms, in figurative language in the form of go'ét-go'et, or even within the ritual-religious form. The biased-gender language has become one of reasons of gender inequality in the community.