1. Chapter 7: LANGUAGE AND GENDER
Presented by: Le Hoang Uyen My
Le Thi Thanh Tu
SOCIOLINGUISTICS

2.  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

3.  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

4. 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

5. Men’s speech Women’s speech
First person (I)
Formal watakusi watakusi
watasi atakusi
Plain boku watasi
atasi
Deprecatory ore ∅
Second person (You)
Formal anata anata
Plain kimi anata
anta anta
Deprecatory omae ∅
kisama
7.2 Women’s and Men’s Languages

6. 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

7.  Direct relationships between gender & language
 Language & gender research concerned with:
Male and female differences
Gender 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

8.  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

9.  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

10.  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

11.  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

12. 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

13.  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

14. 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

15. 7.5 GENDER AND POLITENESS

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

17.  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

18. 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

19. 7.6 CONTEXTUALISED APPROACHES:
PERFORMANCE & PERFORMATIVITY

20. 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.

21. 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

22. 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).

23. 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
for
Nur: what’s that
Doc: 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 style
Female Nur:
- direct
- unmitigated
speech
→ Masculine style

24. 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
Relevant : - professional status
- parcticular context of utterance
- the nurse’s age
- seniority
- medical experience

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. 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.