Chapter 7: LANGUAGE AND GENDERPresented by: Le Hoang Uyen My

Le Thi Thanh Tu

SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Language and Gender research formally began in the 1970s.

Contributions to the topic from other areas: anthropology, education, women’s studies, social psychology, etc.

Different types of studies have looked at gender: Variationist (quantifying gender differences), Interactional studies (context, same-gender, mixed-gender), Fluid models (unisex), Alternative contexts for communication.

7.1 Introduction

Caribs (men) Arawak (women)– 10% vocabulary not shared by both sexes

Native American languages◦ Different verb forms in Koasati

7.2 Women’s and Men’s Languages

7.2 Women’s and Men’s Languages

Japanese◦ Women- Formal pronouns in informal situations◦ Women- Absence of deprecatory pronouns

7.2 Women’s and Men’s Languages

Men’s speech Women’s speech

First person (I)Formal watakusi watakusi

watasi atakusiPlain boku watasi

atasiDeprecatory oreSecond person (You)Formal anata anataPlain kimi anata

anta antaDeprecatory omae

kisama

7.2 Women’s and Men’s Languages

7.2 Women’s and Men’s Languages

South African-Xhosa speakers◦ Hlonipha-women’s language of respect

Married women delete consonants, replace one consonant by another, a word by another that is semantically related, use a paraphrase or borrow a word from English or Afrikaans.

e.g: i-bhekile (a tin can)i-ekile (consonant deletion)i-wekile (consonant substituition)Ikonkxa (synonym)Isikhelelo (paraphrase)

7.2 Women’s and Men’s Languages

Direct relationships between gender & language Language & gender research concerned with:

Male and female differencesGender cultural difference verses power and dominance

Gendered language use interpreted as reflecting pre- existing & maintaining social distinctions– Past: Gender roles were more well defined– Present: Subgroups within those gender categories– Future: Lack of language-gender differentiation possible

7.2 Main Points of Gender and Language Use

Labov, Trudgill: “Women use more prestige features (status conscious) , men more vernacular features (overt prestige)”

Edwards: “Middle-class voices: higher, smoother, more feminine; working-class voices: lower, rougher, more masculine”

7.3 Variationist Studies: Gender and Social Stratification

Women’s and men’s lifestyles in different communities: whom they interact with, what motivate them to adopt certain varieties.

e.g: Young women in Hungarian and German tended to prefer to speak German.Peasant man had begun to find wives outside the village – usually monolingual German speakers. (Gal 1978-1979)

7.3 Gender and Lifestyle

Women and men use different linguistic variables to express their integration into the local community.

e.g: (a) hat, (th) mother(ay) fight

• Speakers select certain ways of speaking so as to be like groups with which they wish to identify, or unlike groups from which they wish to distance themselves. (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985)

7.3 Gender and Acts of Identity

Differing features of conversational style – Amount of talk (Coates)Mixed groups-men talk more especially in formal & public contexts

Same sex groups- amt. talk equal– Interruptions (Zimmerman & West)Men interrupt women more than vice versa– Conversational support (Fishman)Women gave more conversational support, encouragement than men by minimal responses: “mmh”, “yeah”

7.4 Gender Differences

7.4 Gender Differences

– Tentativeness (Lackoff, 1975, Holmes, 1995)Women use more hedges and tag questions: “I think maybe…”, “you know”, “It’s so hot, isn’t it?” that make their speech appear uncertain.– Compliments (Metshire, et. al., 2001)Women pay and receive more compliments.

7.4 Gender Differences

Lakoff (1975)• Deficit model of women’s language use

Women’s speaking style (uncertainty and hesitancy) denies them the opportunity to express themselves strongly and make what they are talking about appear trivial.• Women’s speaking style denies them access to power.

Zimmerman & West (1975)– Interruptions - more occurred in mixed-sex than in single-sex

conversations.Men are likely to lead the conversation in another direction, which is considered as an oppressive speaking behavior. Men are denying women’s equal status as conversational partners.

7.4 Gender Dominance

7.4

MALTZ & BORKER (1982)– Women and men constitute different ‘gender subculture’

Minimal responses indicate attention for women, but for men they signal agreement Women - “mmmhmm” = “I’m listening.”Men – “mmmhmmm” = “I agree.”

TANNEN (You just don't understand, 1990)• Women speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy• Men speak and hear a language of status and independence

Men want women to mount resistance when they lead the conversation in another direction and take center stage by telling a story, etc. Women are irritated by men who interrupt to change the conversational topic.

7.4 Gender as Cultural Difference

7.5 GENDER AND POLITENESS

Lakoff (1975): part of women’s social role was “arbiter of morality, judge of manners”→ Women more linguistically polite than men

RESEARCH FINDINGS

Japan: women’s language is polite, deferential, or "soft “

Africa: Hlonipha- system of avoidance speech.- associated with married women in respect to senior male relatives.→ Importance of context/culture in linguistic behaviour

TAG QUESTIONS

Women Men- Used more facilitative tags: inviting the addressee to contribute to the conversation

- Used more epistemic modal tags:uncertainty about information conveyed.

You’ve got a new job, Tom, haven’t you?That was amazing acting, wasn’t it?

Fay Weldon’s lecture is at eight, isn’t it?She was behind the 2-meter line, wasn’t she?”

RESEARCH FINDINGS

Facilitative tags show positive politeness → Women were positively polite than men (Holmes, 1995)

Holmes: English language use in New Zealand

7.6 CONTEXTUALISED APPROACHES: PERFORMANCE & PERFORMATIVITY

Conceptions of “Language” & “Gender”

Language functions are seen as not simply “in the language”, but as negotiated between speakers.

Gender is relatively fluid. + salient in some contexts but not others + embedded in other social categories (race, class, sexuality, etc) Recent research focus on “performativity” - the

act of speaking E.g: “I promise to pay you” - the act of promising.

Contextualised Approaches in Empirical Research

1. Holmes (2006) emphasises the complex nature of “gendered talk” in the workplace.

Example: a male doctor and a female nurse

References

• Metshire, Swainn, Deumert, & Leap (2000). Gender and Language Use. In Introducing Sociolinguistics. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. (216-247).

• Tannen, D. (1994). Interpreting interruption in conversation. In Gender & discourse. Oxford University Press (53-79).

Context: Doctor to nurse in the nurse’s station of a hospital ward.Doc: [softly]: there’s another um: + thing that I would like to ask

forNur: what’s thatDoc: somewhere in delivery suite or at Ward 11 er there are those

plastic er read containers for ++ for blood tests I need I need beside the the line there’s a plastic end for this..Doc: yeah so er we + could you just could we maybe have one

from er ward eleven oh this stuff er +Nur: well you go down to ward eleven and get it cos I don’t want

to have to(Holmes 2006: 163)Note: + = a pause of up to one second

Male Doc: - several hedges- hesitations- repetitions- indirect request→ Feminine styleFemale Nur: - direct - unmitigated

speech→ Masculine style

Contextualised Approaches in Empirical Research

1. Holmes (2006) emphasises the complex nature of “gendered talk” in the workplace.

Example: a male doctor and a female nurseRelevant : - professional status - parcticular context of utterance - the nurse’s age - seniority - medical experience

Contextualised Approaches in Empirical Research

2.Barrett (1999): how African American drag queen adopt stereotypical ‘white women’s language.

3. Hall (1995): many of the telephone sex workers used a stereotypical ‘women’s language’: + speak in breathy or whispery voices+ ask lots of questions+ use rising intonation & ‘feminine’ vocabulary.

Continuing challenges & Debates

Swann & Maybin (2008) face challenges in contextualised approaches: The focus on the local, contextualised playing out of

gender plays down & sometimes rejects To see the relevance of gender within an interaction,

researchers themselves must have some prior conception.

Untangle the maze of interconnections between the aspects of language and gender.

A focus on specific interactions => miss broader connections with other contexts.

7.7 CONCLUSION

Language and gender cover several different aspects of language.

Studies of gender and interaction have adopted both quantitative and qualitative methods (increasing contextualised approaches)

Gender is in the course of everyday language use.

Gendered language use raises issues of power and inequality between women and men.