Language and gender
How is gender reflected in
language?
January 2011
Language and gender
How is gender reflected in
language?
January 2011
‘In the eighteenth century, when logic
and science were the fashion, women
tried to talk like men. The twentieth
century has reversed the process.’
Aldous Huxley, Two or Three
Graces
(In)equality, difference,
domination
Physiological differences: men’s vocal cords
vibrate at a lower frequency than women’s
‘The vocal tract is like a trumpet. You cannot make
it sound like a double bass or a piano, but there
are still many different ways of playing it’
(Coulmas 2005: 36).
Speaking is part of cultural tradition and therefore
variable.
Korean: deliberate high pitch.
Japanese: 1950s-1980s, the average pitch of
female voices rose significantly (ibid.)
Pitch
• Ohara (1997) recorded natural conversations
and reading of sentences in Japanese and
English by the same speakers.
• She found that women speak with a higher pitch
in Japanese than in English, whereas men’s
pitch remained the same.
• How deep a male voice is and how high a
female voice is depends on some extent to
variation and choice.
• Social and other cultural factors affect other
features.
Linguistic forms used by women and men differ
in all speech communities that have been
studied
Difference
Should sex-specific behaviour be
understood in terms of difference or
domination? (Cameron 1992)
NYC – women use fewer non-standard
forms than men
WHY?
( ) (Labov
1990) (Norwich: Trudgill 1984)
(Amsterdam: Brouwer & van Hout 1992).
principal caregivers, status-
conscious
Dominance
The dominance approach focuses on power
and inequality. Sex-specific variation in
language behaviour is seen as expressing
and reinforcing power differentials (e.g.
patronymic surnames Gibbon 1999: 61).
Linguistic determinism and relativism
(‘Sapir/Whorf hypothesis’): ‘It is language
which determines the limits of our world,
which constructs our reality’ Spender
(1985: 139) [Man Made Language].
Gender and phonetic
variation
1
2
3
4
5
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Women
Men
Distribution of –in pronunciation across social groups and broken
down for sex of speaker (Trudgill 1984)
Middle range: women orientate their speech
behaviour towards the prestige norm in order
to improve their social position.
Fasold (1990): women try to sound less local
and thus have a voice more suitable for
rejecting social expectations that place
women in an inferior position to men.
A woman aims ‘to modify her speech in order to
indicate her respectability’ (Gordon 1997: 61).
Women ‘make choices in the context of
particular social networks rather than as some
generalized response to the universal
conditions of women’ (Nichols 1983: 54).
Gender across cultures
Context-orientated research has led to the
view that gender and language use is
mediated more by social practice.
Differing gender identities and accompanying
speech styles are a component of the
different practices women and men engage
in (Cameron 1992).
Gender-specific speech forms are more
pronounced in some cultures than in others.
Difference/dominance
approach
• Difference
Humanity has produced a multiplicity of
cultural systems just as it has produced a
multiplicity of languages
Dominance
Quasi-social Darwinist ideas: degrees of
equality is a measure of progress
Traditional societies practised exogamy
Western societies have levelled linguistic
differences
• Problems associated with the
dominance model:
• Associating social developments with
cognitive and linguistic ones
• Hard to reduce sex to gender, i.e.
The sociocultural construction of
maleness and femaleness is
everything and the biological
constitution of men and women
nothing.
Preferences based on
gender
Swan 1992
Swedish speeches and interviews:
higher proportion of unique words
Women’s sentences were longer than
men’s
Kakavá 1997
Men express disagreement more
directly in Greek
Politeness
A higher level of politeness is generally expected of women than of men
Some East Asian languages (Javanese, Korean, Japanese) encode levels of
politeness in the grammatical system rather than in lexical and phonetic
choices, e.g. Sentence-final particles in Japanese:
Kaa Wane
Yona Noyone
Yonaa Kashira
Ze Nanone
Monna Wayo
Monnaa
Tara
100% Male 100% Female
But boku (‘I’) being used by female high-school students (Backhaus 2002)
Marked and unmarked
forms
The male form is considered unmarked:
prince princess
authorauthoress
count countess
actor actress
hosthostess
poet poetess
heir heiress
hero heroine
Paul Pauline
Many of the marked female forms have been replaced by the male
forms.
Semantic differences in gender
pairs
Governor
Governess
Master
Mistress
Major
Majorette
Unmarried mothers
Career women
Househusband
Bachelor Spinster
Generic ‘he’
• E, hesh, po, tey, co, jhe, ve, xe, he’er,
than, na
(Pinker, The Language Instinct)
Thomas Jefferson: ‘all men are created
equal’
‘governments are instituted among
men deriving their just power from
the consent of the governed’
Lord Chesterfield (1759) ‘If a person is
born of a gloomy temper ... they
cannot help it.’
• 1850: British parliament act
sanctioned the generic use of ‘he’
• This was ignored: Massachussetts
Medical Society (1879) barred
women doctors based on the bylaws
of the organization which referred to
‘he’
Changes
Mankind People
ManpowerPersonnel
Mothering Nuturing
To man To operate
Chairman Chairperson / chair / moderator
Mailman Postal worker
Fireman Firefighter
Policeman Public safety officer
If the English language had been
properly organised ... Then there would
be a word which meant both ‘he’ and
‘she’, and I could write, ‘If John or Mary
comes, heesh will want to play tennis.’
which would save a lot of trouble.
AA Milne, The Christopher Robin
Birthday Book
he
(s)
Discussion: Stereotypes
VIDEO CLIP
Do women talk faster than men? Do
they talk more than men?
Do men swear more than women?
Do men use less standard language
than women?