Li2 Language variation
gender
Today’s topics
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Sex vs gender
Linguistic reflections of
social attitudes concerning
gender
Gender-based linguistic
differences
Inherent vs. grammatical gender
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inherent gender (sex)  socially-constructed
gender
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3rd social gender in Oman: gay men
Some Native American groups distinguish 4
social genders
languages may grammatically encode either
type of gender, or neither
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Neither: Armenian, Turkish, Persian, Abkhaz
Inherent: Tukanoan; English (for humans)
Social: English dialects
Linguistic reflections of social
attitudes concerning gender
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2 main theories of language/gender relationship
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Culture  language
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If a culture is misogynist, the language will be too.
Language  culture
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Language itself can determine gender relations
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e.g. languages with no grammatical gender
Gender markedness in morphology and
vocabulary 
Gender in morphology
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nouns of occupation are simultaneously masculine and generic; female terms are
marked:
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sculptress, actress, usherette, Lady X…
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NB in steward(ess) steward is formally/historically unmarked, but stewardess is semantically/pragmatically
unmarked
exceptions:
 masseuse , widow, nurse, seamstress, male ho
 duck, cow, goose, moorhen
 Armenian skesrayr is derived from skesur, opposite of normal m  f pattern
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because mother-in-law is more culturally salient, since wife always hates her?
cháirman vs. mílkmàn referring to female?
Unmarked/default gender interpretation of nouns with no overt marking: doll…
Pronouns:
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use of he vs. they for neutral singular pronoun—sometimes they is clearly better:
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which Austin Powers star made THEIR movie debut in a film starring Elizabeth Taylor?
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choices: Mike Myers, Michael York, Elizabeth Hurley
“their” is required here in order to avoid specifying gender
NB this “singular they” is used only with indefinite referents
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*Cathyi hurt theiri hand
Gender markedness in vocabulary
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“Neutral” labels for men and women
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Historical outcomes of male and female
pairs
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female labels: Miss, Mrs., Ms.
male labels:
Mr.
implication: more important for woman to show if she’s married
Master : mistress
Hussy, wench
Slang for (promiscuous) men and women 
Slang for promiscuous men and women
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Men:
 cad, cocksucker/(Aus.) cock teaser, gigolo,
horndog, hornytoad, John, lech, mack,
motherfucker (?), pimp, playboy, player, slut (?),
stud, sugardaddy
 Total: 20
Women:
 bimbo, bitch, chick, floozy, harlot, hooker, hussy,
prostitute, skank, slag, slut, tart, tramp, trick,
trollop, wench, whore/ho…
 Total: 220
Sample from the Thesaurus of American Slang
Gender-based linguistic
differences
NB what follows are group-preferential
distributions (speakers from two groups both
use a set of forms, but one group uses them
more often) rather than group-exclusive
patterns, in which speakers from one group
use a form, while speakers from another group
do not.
Do the genders actually differ
linguistically?
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Traditional research (almost all by males, in “male” academic climate)
says YES
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Predominant opinion of gender researchers in last 10-20 years
(almost all by females, in “feminist” research climate) says NO
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Labov, Trudgill, Lakoff, Eckert…
all evidence is anecdotal, focuses on differences rather than similarities,
creates artificially monolithic gender categories
From most recent Linguistics Department meeting: “no scientific evidence
for gender-based linguistic differences”
Is there any scientific/legitimate evidence for gender-based
linguistic differences?
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Yes, as we’ll see especially for non-canonical genders…
Glasgow /s/
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From Stuart-Smith et al. 2000 again
The scatter plot shows the distribution of two measurements ('mean‘(X)/ 'spread‘(Y)) calculated from
the overall energy spectrum of /s/ at the midpoint of the fricative.
The mean value reflects the overall pitch of the fricative, which is expected to be higher for female
than male speakers.
Here females are higher than males overall (all males are below 6000Hz), but there are outliers, in
particular 5 girls, including all four working-class girls, who cluster within the male range. This
demonstrates that the articulation of /s/ is not simply dependent on biological constraints of sex, but
can be finely controlled to signal gender and social group membership.
Vocabulary 1: Japanese
1st person
formal
plain
2d person
deprecatory/
casual
formal
plain
deprecatory/
casual
Other examples: Lakota, Chukchee…
men’s
watakusi
watasi
boku
ore
anata
kimi
anta
omae
kisama
women’s
watakusi
atakusi
watasi
atasi
Ø
anata
anata
anta
Ø
Vocabulary 2: English
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Color terms
Girlfriend (vocative)
Cute
Pee/piss
Fart, take a dump, drop anchor…
Gender-based linguistic
differences, part 2
Traditional variationist differences
Change towards std lg led by women
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Spanish dialect of Ucieda has posttonic [u] where Spanish has [o]
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This vowel has been lowering in Ucieda as an accommodation to the Castilian form.
The height of this vowel distinguishes:
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Ucieda trabaju : Castilian (= Std) trabajo ‘work’
those engaged in agriculture vs industrial sector
those engaged in traditional mountain agriculture vs the more modern dairy farming
Women (most noticeably in agriculture/farming) lead this change.
Holmquist’s analysis:
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agricultural life is unattractive to women, who share in the farm work and do the housework too.
For this reason women are quicker than men to leave the farm, and quicker to signal their distance from
their current way of life in their speech.
Holmquist, Jonathan. 1985. Social correlates of a linguistic variable: A study in a Spanish village. Language in Society 14:191-203.
Jocks and Burnouts
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Eckert 1989 study of a suburban high school in Detroit,
focusing on two social groups:
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jocks: middle class bkgd, establishment, extracurricular activities,
school-based social life, intend to leave
burnouts: working class bkgd, local friends, intend to stay,
vocational training
Eckert, Penelope. 1989. Jocks and burnouts: Social categories and identity in the high school. New York: Teachers College Press.
Gender asymmetry by age (Labov)
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Women lead men in most linguistic changes in progress that have been
studied by quantitative methods (Labov 1990).
The figure below shows M and F patterns by age for the devoicing of (j)
in calle, llame, etc. in the Spanish of Buenos Aires (Wolf and Jiménez
1979).
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Women show higher % devoicing from the outset; males lag behind.
The dotted arrows suggest, moreover, that this is a lag of one generation:
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Males 15-24 approximate the values of women 38-55
12 year old males have values in the range of women 24-35.
Non-canonical genders
Non-canonical genders
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Intonation
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Stereotypically, female speech includes a
greater intonation range than male speech
(McConnell-Ginet 1983, Henton 1989)
What about non-canonical genders?
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Female
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Stereotypical lesbian speech includes a narrow pitch
range and generally flat intonation patterns (Queen
1997)
Disconfirmed experimentally by Waksler 2001
Male
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Schuler 2003: significant correlation between 95% pitch
range, speaker orientation, and listener rating
Waksler, Rachelle. 2001. Pitch range and women’s sexual orientation. Word 52.1:69-77.
Influence of sexual orientation on
vowel production
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Pierrehumbert et al 2004
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Phonetic study of vowel production in gay, lesbian, bisexual (GLB), and
heterosexual speakers
Differences in the acoustic characteristics of vowels were found as a function of
sexual orientation:
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Lesbian and bisexual women produced less fronted /u/ and /a/ than heterosexual
women.
Gay men produced a more expanded vowel space than heterosexual men.
However, the vowels of GLB speakers were not generally shifted toward vowel patterns
typical of the opposite sex.
These results are inconsistent with the conjecture that innate biological factors
have a broadly feminizing influence on the speech of gay men and a broadly
masculinizing influence on the speech of lesbian/bisexual women.
They are consistent with the idea that innate biological factors influence GLB
speech patterns indirectly by causing selective adoption of certain speech
patterns characteristic of the opposite sex.
Gender-based linguistic
differences, part 3
Pragmatics
Question tags
70
60
50
uncer t aint y
40
f acil it at ive
30
sof t ening
20
conf r ont at ional
10
0
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Showing solidarity:
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men
women
His portraits are quite static by comparison, aren’t they?
Indicating uncertainty:
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You were missing last week, weren’t you? (Coates/Cameron 1989: 82)
This particular utterance could be confrontational with the right intonation
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Men use question tags more often to express uncertainty while women use them largely to facilitate
communication (Holmes 1992:319).
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Coates, Jennifer/Cameron, Deborah. (eds.) (1989): Women in Their Speech Communities. London.
Holmes, Janet (1984): "Women's Language: A Functional Approach". General Linguistics 24/3: 149-178.
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Interruptions
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Eakins/Eakins 1978: status seems to be a factor in the pattern of interruptions.
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Males initiated more interruptions than females in their study of faculty meetings, but…
there was a clear ranking along status lines.
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But, Holmes 1992:
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The chair of the department suffered the least number of interruptions
Nevertheless, the most interrupted person was a woman.
in doctor-patient conversations female doctors were interrupted more often than male
physicians
in business organisations, men but not women tended to dominate the interactions
And West 1998: study of interaction between doctors and patients: female
physicians were interrupted more often by patients of all social status groups
than male physicians.
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Gender of Physician
# of Interruptions
by Physicians by Patients # of Patients
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Male
Female
188
59
67%
32%
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33%
68%
17
4
Eakins, Barbara/Eakins, Gene: "Verbal Turn-Taking and Exchanges in Faculty Dialogue". In: Dubois, Betty/Crouch, Isabel (eds.)
(1976): The Sociology of the Languages of American Women. San Antonio, TX: 53-61.
Holmes, Janet (1992): An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. London.
West, Candace: "When the Doctor is a 'Lady': Power, Status and Gender in Physician-Patient Encounters". In: Coates, Jennifer (ed)
(1998): Language and Gender: A Reader. Oxford: 396-412.
Zimmerman, Don/West, Candice: "Sex Roles, Interruptions and Silences in Conversations". In: Thorne, Barrie/Henley, Nancy (eds.)
(1975): Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance. Rowley; MA: 105-129.
Conclusions
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Gender surfaces in language in a wide variety of
ways: phonetic, lexical, pragmatic…
The interactions between gender and other social
variables, goals, etc. are extremely complex.
Though language can affect social systems…
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exogamy
phone prejudice?
…the primary direction of influence is socio-cultural
 linguistic.
References
Labov, William. 2003. The reinterpretation of social categories in the course of linguistic change. Paper presented
at the LSA.
Chambers, J. K. 1995. Sociolinguistic theory: Linguistic variation and its social significance. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cheshire, Jenny. 1982, Linguistic variation and social function. In S Romaine, ed. 1982, Sociolinguistic variation in
speech communities, 153-166. [Excerpted in J. Coates ed. 1998, Language & Gender: A Reader, 29-41.]
Coates, Jennifer. 1993 (2nd ed.). Women, Men and Language. London: Longman.
Coates, Jennifer, ed. 1998. Language and Gender: A Reader. (Blackwell Publishers).
Coupland, Nikolas, & Adam Jaworski, eds. 1997. Sociolinguistics: A reader. Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press.
Eckert, Penelope. 1989. The whole woman: sex and gender differences in variation. Language Variation and
Change 1:245-267.
Eckert, Penelope. 1998. Gender and sociolinguistic variation. In J. Coates ed. 1998, Language & Gender: A
reader, 64-75.
Gordon, Elizabeth. 1997. Sex, speech, and stereotypes: why women use prestige speech forms more than men.
Language in Society 26: 47-64.
Guy, Gregory. 1988. Language and social class. In F. Newmeyer, ed., Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, vol. 4.
(Language: The Socio-cultural context.), 37-63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Labov, William. 1990. The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change. Language
Variation and Change 2: 205-254.
Patrick, Peter L. To appear 2001. The speech community. In J.K. Chambers, P. Trudgill and N. Schilling-Estes,
eds., Handbook on Language Variation. Oxford: Blackwell.
Pierrehumbert, Janet, Tessa Bent, Benjamin Munson, Ann Bradlow, and J. Michael Bailey. 2004. The influence of
sexual orientation on vowel production. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 116.4:1905-1908.
Trudgill, Peter. 1983. Sex and covert prestige. In P Trudgill On Dialect, Chap. 10. [Revision of the original 1972
article in Language in Society; which is excerpted in J. Coates, ed. 1998, Language & Gender: A reader, 2128.]
Further notes for those
who are interested
Sociolinguistic universals of gender
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Women and men develop different patterns of
language use. (462)
Women tend to focus on the affective functions of
an interaction more often than men do. (463)
Women tend to use linguistic devices that stress
solidarity more often than men do. (468)
Women tend to interact in ways which will
maintain and increase solidarity. (472)
Women are stylistically more flexible than men.
(475)
Holmes, Janet (1998). Women's talk: The Question of Sociolinguistic Universals. In
Language and Gender: A Reader , Jennifer Coates, ed. Oxford: Blackwell.461-483.
Power vs. Prestige
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Eckert, Penelope (1989). The whole woman: Sex and gender
differences in variation. Language Variation and Change 1:245267.
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Ecket argues against the claim that women are more linguistically
conservative than men in order to symbolically enhance their
socioeconomic status. Eckert suggests that power underlies women's
orientation toward linguistic markers of status: lacking power, women
claim authority through symbolic capital rather than socioeconomically.
She demonstrates that there is greater differentiation in female speech
than in male speech across social-class groups in a high school that are
defined locally as "jocks" and "burnouts." I
Labov, William (1990). The intersection of sex and social class
in the course of linguistic change. Language Variation and
Change 2:205-254.
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Labov rejects Eckert's hypothesis that power, not prestige, accounts for
gender differences in language use, and maintains instead that gender
differences indicate the increased socioeconomic mobility of women of
the lower middle class. Labov's explanation does not account for his
own observation that lower-middle-class women do not merely lead in
use of prestigious forms, but may lead in the use of stigmatized forms as
well. This pattern can be accounted for by Eckert's theory, because
stigmatized forms may have covert prestige for women as well as men.
Masseuse : masseur : male masseuse