Background

There is a crucial need to develop Ukrainian language along with various social reforms. Gender stereotypes cannot be overcome without proper gendered terminology. Ukrainian language has a masculine–feminine–neuter grammatical gender system. Thus, there is a specific set of rules how words of different gender are formed. The issue of using feminitives (feminine-gendered nouns) has been recurring since 1960s and using masculine-gendered nouns for defining female-related ones is against morphological and syntactic rules of Ukrainian language [1].

Objectives

  • Spread awareness about the feminitives (why, when and how they are used; why they are needed at all; what are the guidelines of their formation)
  • Develop a web application where anyone can look up existing feminitives, their forms, meaning and usage
  • Demonstrate real-life applications of feminitives in literature as well as in tech documentation. Provide a link from existing explanatory dictionary (1980’s)
  • Optimize each feminitive by filtering words with ambivalent associations and creating new forms or providing alternatives.
  • Establish a “feminitives-friendly” community where everyone could connect with like minded users, share experiences and get support
  • Involve people from various backgrounds and level of education to develop the dictionary. Encourage everybody to be part of the community
  • Collect statistics of usage and prove it to NAS for further review in order to demonstrate the actuality of feminitives
  • In the long run, it will break the ice and show that people are positive about feminitives; therefore such words should be implemented in the UA language at official level
  • Create a database of feminitives which will be an effective aid for the explanatory dictionary NAS is compiling right now

Scope

Our final result will be a popular and useful open-source online dictionary. Users could register and login to their portal, add new feminitives or notify moderators which words need to be added. From the portal they would also be able to access history of their recent activities, threads of pages’ comments they follow and list of their favorite words. In the long run, the website statistics will be used to prove NAS the need to include feminitives in the new explanatory dictionary edition.

Prototype

I already designed an MVP of the website, developed FE and currently we are working on a database of existing words.

Mockup