Genders and Language

Acknowledgement of Country

Marrnetj
 This session

• Credible sources
• Reading #2 answers
• How we do sociolinguistic research
• How language varies in relation to gender – some research
• How gender is changing

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How do we know if sources
are credible?
 Reading #2

• a) Name a distinctive phonological feature of the Quang Nam dialect.

• b) What is a heterodox dialect?
• c) Give an example of an orthodox dialect of English.
• d) What is dialect contact and what can it explain?
• e) Name a distinctive phonological feature of the dialect of Vietnamese or English you
speak. You may need to answer this question individually.
• f) What is the sociolinguistic term which refers to the boundary line around distinct dialects?
 What methods can we use to carry out
sociolinguistic research?

Do men speak differently from women? If so,

how?

How do languages constrain word choices for

speakers of different genders?
Social attributes/sociolinguistic variables

I didn’t do anything I didn’t do nothing

• Lower Working class (LWC)
• Middle Working Class (MWC)
• Upper Working Class (UWC)
• Lower Middle Class (LWC)
• Middle Class (MC)
• Upper Middle Class (UMC)

social class, social networks, sex and gender, ethnicity, age

Sex is not
gender
Key ideas: Genders and Language
• The linguistic forms used by women and men contrast – to
different degrees – in all speech communities.

• Women are more linguistically polite than men.

• Women are more likely to use standard language.

• Women and men do not speak in exactly the same way as each
other in any community.

• Men are more likely to use vernacular forms.

Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff (2008)

How to do ethnographic
research
Ethnographic Framework
What do you think?

• "men never listen to women“

• “women gossip, men don’t”

• “women speak more correctly”

• “women interrupt more than men”

• “women are more talkative than men”

How can we find something out?
Do women talk differently from men?

•Absolutely, and in lots of ways.

•Phonology
•Some languages have sounds that are only used by men
•Pirahã: Men use /s/, women use /h/ instead.
•Morphology
•Russian
•Male: Я прочитал книгу I read the book.
•Female: Я прочитала книгу I read the book.

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Do women talk differently from men?

•Lexical
•English
•Which kinship terms are marked for gender?
•Which aren’t?
•cf Māori
•teina means ‘a younger sibling of the same sex as the speaker’.
•Gender difference is written into the structure of these languages.
•These features are known as a direct index of gender.

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•Other features of language are known as
indirect indexes of gender
•They’re potentially available to both women
and men, but only one sex uses them with
any regularity. Do women talk differently
from men?

•Japanese
•Male: boku, ore ‘I’
•Female: atashi ‘I’

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Gender-specific linguistic structures

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Gender-exclusive examples
• There are pronunciation differences in the Gros Ventre American
Indian tribe.
• The women say [kjajtsa] for ‘bread’ the men say [dfajtsa].
• In this community, if a person uses the ‘wrong’ form for their gender,
the older members of the community may consider them bisexual.
• In Bengali, a language of India, the women use an initial [l] where the
men use an initial [n] in some words.
• Can you think of some examples of this in Vietnamese? What about
in English?
Gender-preferential features

• Can you think of some examples in your language?

What about in English?
Gender-preferential features
• In English speaking urban communities where
women’s and men’s social roles overlap, the speech
forms they use also overlap.
• Women and men do not use completely different
forms.
• But they use different quantities or frequencies of the
same forms.
• For instance, women use more -ing pronunciations
and fewer - in’ [in] pronunciations than men in words
like swimming and typing .
 • In Sydney, some women and men pronounce the
initial sound in thing as [f], but the men use this
pronunciation more than the women.
• Both the social and the linguistic patterns are
Gender- gender-preferential (rather than gender-
exclusive).
preferential • Though both women and men use particular
features forms, one gender shows a greater preference
for them than the other.
• What would you predict for [h]-dropping
patterns? Is it more likely that women or men
drop most [h]s?
H-dropping
Language, gender and sexisms

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Sexisms in the English language
Gender
inclusive
language
Why use gender-inclusive language?
• Language reflects patterns of social inequality that may
no longer be accurate
•From Time Magazine, 1943
•A doctor should always let his office know where to
find him. His office girl should not be snippy. In talking
to patients, he should not use technical language nor
discuss his personal and financial affairs. At the end of
every consultation he should make sure that all his
patient’s questions are answered.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,802915,00.html
Why use gender-inclusive language?
• One could argue that sexist usage perpetuates
social inequality
• Sexist language reinforces gender inequality.
• Language constrains the kinds of thoughts we
can have
 Studies of
gender and
language
Peter and Stephen Trudgill
(1974)
Language and woman’s place

• Lakoff identified some characteristics of women’s speech:

•hesitations (er…)
•hedges (sort of, like, you know)
•qualifiers (some, many)
•tag questions (isn’t it? haven’t you?)
•empty adjectives (divine, lovely, adorable)
• She claimed these characteristics had the function of
weakening the force of an utterance:
•Women use politeness markers that denote insecurity
•Women are more insecure
•Women, typically having lower status, need to be more
polite.
 Women Men
+power -power +power -power
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Modal tags 3 (5%) 9 (15%) 10 (18%) (29%)

Affective tags (fac.) 43 (70%) 0 25 (45%) 0

Affective tags (soft.) 6 (10%) 0 4 (7%) 0

Total 61 55

Male & female

discourse
Some findings
Do women talk more than men?
Do women talk more than men?
• Subjects wore recording devices around.
• The devices recorded at random times
and could not be turned off.
• Researchers counted the words spoken,
and found no difference between
women and men
• Estimated word count for men and
women: about 16,000 words a day.
Do women
talk more
than men?
Gender variation studies
Principles of gender and variation change from above

•William Labov (2001) proposed three principles about

language and gender:

1. For stable sociolinguistic variables, women show

a lower rate of stigmatised variants and a higher
rate of prestige variants than men
2. Above the level of awareness, women adopt
prestige forms more than men do
3. Below the level of awareness, women use higher
frequencies of innovative low-prestige forms than
men do

change from below

Labov’s principle 1

• For stable sociolinguistic variables, women

show a lower rate of stigmatised variants and
a higher rate of prestige variants than men
• Women use gerundial or participial [iŋ]
more often than men
• Men use [in] more
• e.g. workin’, thinkin’
• Replicated in many places
• Australia, New Zealand, Canada,
USA, UK
•Trudgill (1972,1974)

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 120

100 97
91
88 Working-class men
82 Working-class
women
80
Middle-class men

Percentage of [in] used

Middle-class
women

Labov’s 60
54

principle 1 38
40
34

24
20 16
10

2
0
0
Reading passage Formal speech Casual speech

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Labov’s principle 1

• Women use the more standard [ð] in words like ‘this’ and ‘these’
• Men tend to go to [d]
• Same for [θ] in words like ‘thin’
• Men tend to use [t]
• Negative concord
• Women: ‘I didn’t do anything.‘ Men: ‘I didn’t do nothing.”
• Edina Eisikovits studied adolescents in working-class Sydney in the 1970s
• Boys tend to increase their usage of non-standard forms in the presence of a female researcher
• Girls show highest incidence of non-standard forms in adolescence

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 • When there’s change from above (above the level of awareness),
women adopt prestige forms more than men do
• [ɹ] (the ‘American’ one) in New York
• This shift is led by upper-class speakers
• Within social classes, [ɹ] used more by women

Labov’s principle 2 • Glottal stop [ʔ] in England

• Gaining in popularity, but perceived as non-standard
• Interpretations
• Women, having less power, rely on high-prestige forms
• The low-prestige forms carry connotations of masculinity or
toughness

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 Labov’s principle 3

• When there’s change from below (below the level of awareness), women use higher
frequencies of innovative low-prestige forms than men do
• Laxing of [u] to [ʊ] or [i] to [ɪ] in Utah/Texas English
• so that still and steel sound the same
• Women are at the head of this change, despite its low prestige
• These sound changes are usually unconscious processes.
Interpretations

•Women are more sensitive to standard and non-standard forms.

•Men are evaluated on what they do, women on how they appear.

•Women claim status by using prestige forms; men by using forms

associated with masculinity.

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Conceptions of gender are changing
Singular they is becoming accepted
3 April 2017
Chicago accepts this use of singular they in
speech and informal writing….
A writer (or speaker) may also use they
to refer to a specific, known person who does
not identify with a gender-specific pronoun
such as he or she.
14 March 2017
They/them/their is acceptable in limited cases
as a singular and-or gender-neutral pronoun,
when alternative wording is overly awkward
or clumsy…. We do not use other gender-
neutral pronouns such as xe or ze…”
21 April 2017
The updated guidelines permit use of
“they” and “their” as singular pronouns
for individuals who do not identify as
male or female, or for when gender is
unknown.
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People want to choose how they are
addressed…
And we have new terms for this…
It’s less binary and more of a spectrum
Any
questions,
cats?
References

• Labov, W. (1966). The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics.
• Labov, William. “The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change.” Language Variation and Change 2
(1990), 205-254.

• Labov, William (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change, Vol. 2: Social Factors. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc. pp. 261–293. 
ISBN 063117916X.
• Holmes, Janet, and Miriam Meyerhoff, eds. The handbook of language and gender. Vol. 25. John Wiley & Sons, 2008.
• Trudgill, Peter. The social differentiation of English in Norwich. Vol. 13. CUP Archive, 1974.
• James, Deborah, and Janice Drakich. "Understanding gender differences in amount of talk: A critical review of research." (1993).
• Eisikovits, Edina. "Girl-talk/boy-talk: Sex differences in adolescent speech." Australian English: The language of a new society
(1989): 35-54.