DURING the past several decades, a sometimes raucous but generally silent revolution has been taking place within the English language. This revolution — call it an induced evolution, if you may — is the much welcome shift of English toward nondiscriminatory grammar, structure and form. Fanned by the civil libertarian and feminist movements in the major English-speaking countries, this movement has substantially freed the inherently sexist, chauvinist language of Chaucer and Shakespeare from some of its most vexing linguistic biases. For the first time in its over 1,500-year history, and well in keeping with its role as today's global language, English is now consciously nondiscriminatory in its more formal forms. Informally, of course, it still has to find ways of cleaning up some more of the intractable semantic vestiges that prevent it from expressing total equality and respect for all individuals.

The language has of late been most successful in handling four problematic tendencies: discriminating against women in word formation, grammar, and sentence structure; universalizing human attributes in favor of men; treating people asymmetrically based on such aspects as gender, age, and ethnicity; and unfairly focusing on irrelevant, discriminatory characteristics of people when describing them in negative situations. We will examine these areas of success more closely, then look at the hard-core semantic structures for which English still has to find enduring nondiscriminatory alternatives.