Micromachism in the modern Spanish language and culture

Abstract

The article is devoted to one of the most acute problems of modern society — gender inequality. The author analyzes the state of the Spanish and Latin American society through the prism of the lexeme micromachism and its function in speech. The interest in the linguistic and lexical-semantic analysis of the word micromachism is triggered by the wide use of the word in the periodical press in Spanish, as well as the direct interconnection of the lexeme and the problem of violence against women in the modern Spanish-speaking society. The meaning of the word micromachism and its correct use in speech were firstly described in the recommendations of the Spanish Foundation BBVA — an organization dedicated to the popularization of the Spanish language, and also seeking to improve the Spanish language of the mass media. Later, the word among 11 other nominees was nominated for the title of “word of the year”. Despite the fact that it did not become a winner, it attracted the attention of linguists, sociologists, and journalists to the problem of the functioning of micromachism in modern Spanish speech. The main research materials are the corpus of the Spanish language, explanatory dictionaries, dictionaries of neologisms and banks of lexical data. An analysis of texts from periodicals to identify the frequency of use of the lexeme micromachism carried out by the author confirms the official statistics of abuse of women in some countries of Latin America and Spain. As for the Russian language, the author in his study addresses only the National Corpus of the Russian language and explanatory dictionaries to reveal how often the lexical unit is used in the Russian language and whether it is recoded in dictionaries. The author does not aim to study the situation of gender inequality in Russia and its reflection in the language. In addition to the widespread illumination of the problem in the periodical press in Spanish, the phenomenon of micromachism is actively studied in the scientific field, which once again confirms the severity of the problem in modern society.