LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Slide 1
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Slide 2
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
Do men and women speak the same?
Assumptions behind this question:
There may be a difference between men and women’s speech
There is an expected (binary) difference between
men and women in general as distinct social groups
There is linguistic variation
LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Slide 3
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
What are some stereotypes about the way men
and women behave?
MEN
WOMEN
Passive / aggressive
aggressive
Bread winner
Rational
Problem solver
powerful
Math doer
Hysterical
strong
Bug killers
Moody
confident
Good driver
Nurturing
stubborn
Hard worker
Direct/assertive
masculine
Bad listeners
Not emotional - detached
Sports freaks
Irrational
Care-taker / care-giver
Intuitive
Spiritual
Talkative / gossipy
Nagging
feminine
delicate
LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Slide 4
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
What are some stereotypes about the way men
and women talk?
MEN
Do interrupt
loud
Brief/blunt/to the point
Mumble/no enunciate
manipulative (direct)
Non-emotional content/Fact-based content
1st person experiences
Grunt
swearing
lower classes talk less correct
WOMEN
baby-talk
Tangential (going off topic) 3rd person exp
Superficial
more standard
Mumble/speak softly
bigger vocab
Gossip
elegant
Exaggerate
manipulative (indirect)
argumentative
Literal meaning
men don’t talk
Laugh/smile
exaggerate
Cooperative/diplomatic
Boastful
dominating conversation
class?
Chatty Cathy
Lower voices/deeper
Confidence in statement
expressive
High rising intonation
self-effacing
2-faced/catty
hedging
LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Slide 5
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
Robin Lakoff, 1975, “women’s language” (p. 318-19 inWardhaugh)
Tag questions
Rising intonation for declarative statements
“Empty” adjectives (divine, lovely)
Specialized women’s vocabulary (color terms)
Frequent use of emphasis (“speaking in italics” - What a beautiful hat)
Intensive so (You are so fired)
Politeness devices and hypercorrect grammar (women use more
standard language; more indirect requests)
Hedges (well, like, sort of)
Women don’t tell jokes
LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Slide 6
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
Some empirical evidence
Discourse Studies
Many studies have looked at the idea that women talk more than men
 James & Drakich, 1993 - review of all these studies found that in only 2
of 56 studies that women talked more than men. Other factors more
important than gender of speaker - content, situation, etc.
Many studies have looked at interruption
James & Clarke, 1992 - review of these studies shows that men interrupt
others more than women and that specifically, men interrupt women more
than women interrupt men - these trends were not statistically significant also shows that there are very differing opinions of what an interruption is
Both areas or study have some methodological issues involved so not
all studies use the same definitions of amount of talk and interruption
LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Slide 7
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
Different perspectives (lenses) of data analysis
Dominance (1970s and 1980s)
Interprets the differences between women’s and men’s linguistic usage
as reflexes of the dominant-subordinate relationship holding between
men and women.
Zimmerman & West, 1975 - shows that men interrupt women (even if
women are doctors) and directly link this interruption to dominance based
on sex of the interrupter and the interrupted
Interprets women’s language as usage tied to lack of dominance (leads
to a deficit approach)
LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Slide 8
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
Different perspectives (lenses) of data analysis
Difference (Celebrate the difference!) (1980s and 90s)
The differences between women’s and men’s linguistic usage as arising
from the different subcultures in which women and men are socialized
Arose after dominance model became a deficit model (using men’s
language as a standard to which women’s was compared)
Maltz & Borker, 1982 - Linguistic behavior of men and women based
on different subcultures and what is appropriate for those subcultures like intercultural communication when men and women are talking
together
Tannen utilizes this approach
With respect to aggressive verbal behavior like interruption, the
difference approach suggests that women tend to take overt aggressive
behavior as a personal attack, while men view it as a conventional
organizing structure for conversational flow
LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Slide 9
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
Different perspectives (lenses) of data analysis
Power
O’Barr & Atkins, 1980 - show that the features outlined by Lakoff as
“women’s language” were used by witnesses not by gender, but by
degree of power (expert versus non-expert witnesses)
West, 1984 - shows that female doctors were interrupted by their
patients more than male doctors
Problems with “power” analysis is that women’s language features
intrinsically defined as powerless - could have other meanings
When female doctors are interrupted by male patients, is this
performing power or is it simply performing gender-based behavior?
LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Slide 10
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
Different perspectives (lenses) of data analysis
All approaches have problems
Difference approach does not talk about issues of power or dominance
Dominance approach can devalue women’s language and essentially
define women’s language as powerless
The deficit model (stemmed from Lakoff’s list) comes from Dominance
or Power model which compares women’s language to men’s in terms of
men’s language being the norm (NOT the difference model!! Wardhaugh is mistaken on p. 347)
LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Slide 11
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
Synthesis of approaches
Janet Holmes came up with some questions about ling universals of women and
men’s talk (Wardhaugh, p. 342)
Women and men develop different patterns of language use.
 Function: the purpose of the talk - Women tend to focus on the affective
functions of an interaction more often than men do
Solidarity: how the participants relate to each other - Women tend to use ling
devices that stress solidarity more often than men do
Power: who’s in charge - Women tend to interact in ways which will maintain
and increase solidarity, while (especially in formal contexts) men tend to interact in
ways which will maintain and increase their power and status
Status: how speech indicates social status - Women use more standard forms
than men from the same social group in the same social context - Women are more
stylistically flexible than men
But Kiesling - Frat men studies show that men do solidarity through insults
(indirect solidarity) http://www.pitt.edu/~kiesling/skresearch.html#_Language_and_Identity
LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Slide 12
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
Language and gender in ling variation
Non discourse - language change and variation (dialect studies)
Women use less stigmatized forms (th, negative concord, -ing) - conservative
Women lead language change - innovative
Paradox of behavior that women are conservative and innovative at the same
time - resolved in Philadelphia
Interacts with social class
Why do women lead language change? Women are more prestige conscious =
Prestige approach
Is there something inherently masculine about stigmatized language/more
vernacular speech? What about swearing?
LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Slide 13
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
Language and gender in ling variation
Not always true that women use less vernacular/stigmatized forms
Also has access to how the speech community is organized – who has more
access/interaction with standard language – women or men? Class again – Contact
based approach
ECKERT ARTICLE
According to Eckert, the fact that women have less power is the reason they use
linguistic resources for symbolic capital (Eckert handout)
Shows the greater linguistic differences between the girl groups versus the boy
groups and how gender interacts with other social variables
She suggests that gender is the most important social factor - what happens when
you see someone and you can’t figure out what sex they are?
Go here to hear some of these variables:
http://www.stanford.edu/~eckert/vowels.html
LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Slide 14
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
Language and identity - Sex vs. Gender
Zimmerman & West, 1987 - Doing Gender
Language is part of behavior which we use to construct identity (social
construction theory)
Gender different from sex - adopted from Judith Butler - the idea that we perform
our gender
Mismatches between expected gender behavior and sex of performer
How does this change things? If we think about why women or men act the way
they do linguistically this means it is because they are creating gendered identities this is always within the culture that includes the EXPECTATIONS of how women
and men SHOULD behave.
LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Slide 15
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
Language and Gender applied
West, studies of patient/doctor interaction
Found women doctors interrupted more than male doctors
Found women doctors use different request strategies than men: more indirect
requests - could you sit up here? - more inclusive requests - let’s ...
The patient compliance was greater for these types of requests, so physicians are
recently being taught to use these types of “women’s” directives to increase patient
compliancy rates
LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Slide 16
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
Language and Sexuality
How is sexual orientation identity revealed in our speech? (Wardhaudh, p.
353)
Sounding gay and sounding lesbian
The sex/gender difference in transsexuals/transgendered persons
Can you tell the sexual orientation of someone without even seeing them?
What I found in Philadelphia - lesbians lead language change, not necessarily all
women - couldn’t link it to Gender Index, but maybe tomboys or more masculineoriented women?
LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011
Slide 17
Wardhaugh Ch 13
Wardhaugh – Chapter 13 – GENDER
Many instances of gender in various languages
Carib and Arawak example
Japanese example
Malagasay - shows that a male or female style is not universal - also
shows that in patriarchal cultures, that the style or ling features associated
with men are the ones that are valued regardless of what those features
are