These slides are about language and gender.

1. LANGUAGE AND GENDER
DWI FIRLI ASHARI
MUSTIKA HATI
VIVI NUR AKMALIA

2. OUTLINE
1. LANGUAGE AND GENDER AROUND THE WORLD
•Gender and genre
•Gender and multingualism
•Gender and politeness
•Gender and ESL contexts
2. GENDER DIVERSITY ACROSS CULTURES IN US

3. GENDER AND GENRE
• Men and women have their own distinct social
spheres.
• Schieffelin (1987) points out that in everyday
conversation there are no marked male or female
registers.

4. GENDER AND MULTILINGUALISM
• Gal's work (1978) on the use of Hungarian and German in Austria
focuses on the effects of urbanization and industrialization on the
speech patterns of women and men.
• Hill (1987) investigates gender differences in the use of a former
colonial language and an indigenous language in Mexican.

5. GENDER AND POLITENESS
• Brown and Levinson (1983)
- Politeness is normatively values as skill.
• Keenan’s Study of Malagasy Village in 1974
“Me n are m o re po lite than wo m e n”
“There no straightforward way to operationalize and quantify politeness –
Brown & Levinson (1983)

6. GENDER AND ESL
• Understanding speakers 'language and social background is
important.
• Goldstein’s Study of Portuguese Speakers Women in Canada in 1992
“Aro und the ne e d to le arn Eng lish to carry o ut wo rk tasks and assum e
g re ate r re spo nsibility at wo rk”

7. GENDER DIVERSITY ACROSS
CULTURES IN US

8. RESEARCH ABOUT AMOUNT OF
LANGUAGES THAT WOMEN SPEAK IN
UNITED STATES
Medicine (1987, p. 159) points out that there are at least 206 distinct
languages spoken by Native Americans - which suggests the enormity of
the task to be undertaken.
She notes that American Indian women perform three distinctive social
roles with respect to language in their communities

9. DIFFICULTIES OF AMERICAN INDIAN
WOMEN IN USING LANGUAGES IN THEIR
SOCIETY
• they must make decisions about whether to bring up their children as
bilingual or monolingual (in English or the native language) and are
often held responsible for the lack of knowledge of a native language
by the younger members of the community.
• they also often serve as mediators between their own communities
and white society, as represented by Bureau of Indian Affairs
bureaucrats, county welfare workers, police officers, judges, and so
on.

10. AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS, CULTURE AND
LANGUAGE THAT THEY USE IN SOCIETY
• As with Native Americans, the language of many of these different
groups remains unstudied, let alone the social variations within these
communities along the lines of gender, age, class, and so on.
• Zentella (1987, p. 158) provides a picture of some of the linguistic issues
that Puerto Rican women face. She points out that lower working-class
Puerto Rican speakers, in addition to having the problems that all lower-
working-class people do, are faced with a number of identity conflicts
triggered by the colonial status of Puerto Rico, racism, and feelings of
linguistic inferiority.

11. AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS, CULTURE AND
LANGUAGE THAT THEY USE IN SOCIETY
(CONT.)
Zentella found that children used three criteria in how they decided what
to speak and to whom, there are:
•Girls have more exposure to and opportunities to use Spanish than
boys because of their greater restriction to the house with mother
(1987, p. 173).
•Girls use different amounts of English and Spanish at different life
stages. (p.173).

12. AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS, CULTURE AND
LANGUAGE THAT THEY USE IN SOCIETY
(CONT.)
• Female speakers are more likely to believe in the importance of
speaking Spanish in marking and maintaining Puerto Rican identity
and the Puerto Rican nation, although this in no way precludes their
Appreciation of the importance of bilingualism and their significant
community advocacy for bilingual education (pp. 175-177).

13. AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS, CULTURE AND
LANGUAGE THAT THEY USE IN SOCIETY
(CONT.)
• Gonzales Velasquez (1992) summarizes studies demonstrating that in
northern New Mexico communities, women are using English more
than vernacular Spanish, and men are using vernacular Spanish more
than English.
• In describing the discourse of African-American women, Morgan
(1991), like Medicine, emphasizes the importance of understanding
the communication styles of women because of their responsibility for
language socialization in children, and thus language maintenance in
the community (p. 4221.

14. Although, as was noted earlier, many early studies of language and
gender in the United States focused on white speakers, the
inattentiveness to the ways in which gender was articulated with
ethnicity means that researchers must return to white, as well as to
ethnically mixed, communities to look at the construction of class,
race, sexuality, and age alongside gender.
LANGUAGE AND GENDER IN US