Squaw Daffiness (sociolinguistics)

[Scott DeLancey]

The reason why "squaw" is offensive has nothing to do with its origins.
And it's not just a matter of who thinks or doesn't think that it's
offensive, either.  In English, we have separate words for the male
and female of barnyard animals, but not for ethnic groups of people.
We have 'mare' and 'hen', but no 'Frenchette' or 'Russianess'.  And
because of that, English uses a separate word, like "squaw", as a
way of diminishing the humanity of the people being referred to.

Not that long ago, the English language had two other words of the same
kind--"Negress" and "Jewess".  It's no coincidence that it is exactly those
two groups that the language made up special female forms for--people
said "Jewess" but not "Germaness" because they thought of Germans as
just people who spoke a different language, but of Jews as something
different--not quite the same as real people.

Nowadays no one would use either of these words, and anyone hearing
them would immediately recognize them as racist.  This isn't because
of their origin or etymology.  There's nothing racist about "Jew" or
"Negro" (even if that one is kind of out of fashion), but to use a
special, distinct word for the women of a group is automatically racist,
because it's treating that group like animals instead of people.

Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
1290 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1290, USA

delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html