Gender
Judith Baxter
Language and Gender (also known as ‘Gender and Language’ or ‘Feminist
Linguistics’) is a relatively new field within sociolinguistics, usually said to be marked by the
publication of Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place in 1975. The field has since aroused
huge interest among applied linguists both on ethnographic and ideological grounds.
Ethnographically, linguists were keen to gather authentic data to explore and explain folklinguistic beliefs that males and females speak and act differently (e.g. Fishman 1978;
Spender 1980). Ideologically, language and gender scholars aimed to show that language –
both in use and as a form of representation – was a primary means of constructing gender
differences, and at times hierarchies and inequalities between men and women.
‘Gender’ has now stabilised as a term to distinguish people in terms of their sociocultural behaviour, and to signify masculine and feminine behaviours. the term ‘sex’ in this
chapter to refer to categories distinguished by biological characteristics.

History of the area
 Variationist studies
Traditional variationist studies conceptualise ‘sex’ as a fixed and universal variable
determining people’s use of language alongside other equally key categories such as
class, age and ethnicity. Landmark studies in this field (e.g. Labov 1966; Trudgill
1974) found that men and women did use different forms, particularly phonologically,
and drew the conclusion that within every social class, women use more standard
forms than men. Trudgill (1974) found that many more women than men in Norwich
used the standard (iη) rather than the vernacular (in). Variationist research on gender
today can be more aptly described as ‘sociolinguistic’. It has tended to move away
from
large-scale,
quantitative,
correlational
methods
towards
more
local,
contextualised and ethnographic approaches.
 Interactional studies
The field of language and gender is most strongly associated today with a range of
‘interactional’ studies, which focus on the distinctively gendered ways in which
people interact in various social and professional contexts. Three early but still highly
influential theories (deficit, dominance, difference) all emphasised the notion of a
gender dichotomy.
 Deficit theory
Lakoff’s (1975) ‘deficit’ theory posited that from an early age, girls are taught how to
use a separate ‘woman’s language’: they are socialised to use language in a ‘ladylike’
way.
 Dominance theory
It has two distinct, parallel branches: language as social interaction and language as a
system. In language as social interaction, it considered how gender inequalities were
constructed through routine interactions between men and women. Besides language
as a system, Spender (1980) argued that language has evolved over the centuries to
serve male needs, to represent male interests, and to express male experiences: in
short, it is ‘man-made’. She noted three further ways in which the language sustains
this andro-centric perspective:

linguistic marking of terms to denote women (e.g. manageress, stewardess),

semantic derogation (the way terms for women like mistress have become
‘derogated’ or debased over time; also see Schulz 1990),

lexical gaps (the lack of a woman-centred lexis to describe certain female
experiences in positive ways, such as childlessness or remaining a single woman).
 Cultural difference theory
Maltz and Borker (1982) argued that women and men constitute different ‘subcultures’ learnt through friendly interactions as children in single-sex peer groups. So
boys learn how to compete with others for access to ‘the floor’, to use referential,
goal-orientated language, and to say things for impact and effect. Girls alternatively
learn how to build relationships of equality and trust, to co-operate with others to get
things done, and to express feelings and emotions (Maltz and Borker 1982: 207).
Main current issues
Since the 1990s, language and gender research has firmly distanced itself from gender
difference theories, and is, according to Holmes (2007) ‘engulfed in a wave of social
constructionism’ emphasising the diversity of gender rather than difference. This ‘postmodern turn’ can partly be explained by the impact of feminism in the West, which has
produced profound improvements in the cultural status of women.
 Social constructionism and the ‘post-modern turn’
Social constructionist theory (e.g. Bergvall et al. 1996; Butler 1990; Crawford 1995;
also see Norton, this volume) suggests that males and females are not born, or even
simply socialised into a pre-fixed gender identity, but they become gendered through
their interactions. The post-modern perspective argues that males and females do not
have an individual essence. Any apparent characteristics are the effects we produce by
way of particular things we do. Thus, according to Butler (1990), people’s identities
are performative.
 Gender and sexuality
Like gender, sexuality is perceived as fluid, multi-faceted and a form of
desire/identity that is constructed and performed through speech and behaviour, and
not simply determined by the sex of people’s bodies at birth or by early socialisation.
One line of research has examined how the hetero-normative principle is achieved
through the linguistic performance of heterosexual identities. Gender and sexual
identities can be convincingly enacted by a person of any sex, simply by adhering to
stereotypical assumptions about male and female language and behaviour.
 The salience of gender
The move away from theories of a ‘women’s language’ or separately gendered speech
styles, and towards notions of complex social identities and linguistic diversity has
indeed challenged gender as a super-ordinate category.
In the ‘local’ corner, theorists of Conversation Analysis (CA) such as Weatherall
(2000) argue that an epistemological construct such as gender needs to be made
explicitly salient by research participants in order to be considered relevant to any
scholarly analysis.
In the ‘global’ corner, a number of theorists have challenged the CA premise that
unless participants signal their orientation to the salience of gender within linguistic
interactions there is no evidence that it is relevant.
Other linguists of ‘a post-structuralist turn’ have theorised the continuing salience of
gender in more abstract terms. For example, Ochs (1992) used the social semiotic
concept of ‘indexing’ (‘pointing to’) to suggest that speaker have a range of ‘linguistic
resources’ available to them in order to signal their gender and other aspects of their
cultural identities.
 Future trajectory and new debates
The rise of biological essentialism, an extended role for communities of practice, and
exploiting the plurality of research methodologies. positive evaluations of women’s
talk perpetuate a restrictive, essentialist, gender difference perspective. language and
gender scholars should not simply engage in this debate on the level of discourse and
social practices; it is important to challenge the factual, scientific evidence and the
epistemological bases on which this is produced.
A second new direction in the field is a proposal to extend the well-established
concept of ‘communities of practice’ (CofPs; Wenger 2000) within language and
gender research in order to enable an ‘articulation between the local, the extra-local
and the global’ (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2007: 28).
The second way of extending the CofP concept is relationally, by locating
communities of practice in relation to a world beyond – other communities, social
networks, institutions and more global, imagined communities.
 Summing up
The field has been driven by a dual mission both to capture ethnographic evidence to
argue that gender makes a difference within many linguistic interactions, and to
challenge from a feminist standpoint the gendered inequalities that are routinely
enacted through language in many contexts. A powerful issue that currently divides the
field is the category of ‘woman’ and by association ‘gender’.