Language and gender

How is gender reflected in

language?

January 2011

‘In the eighteenth century, when logic

and science were the fashion, women
tried to talk like men. The twentieth
century has reversed the process.’

Aldous Huxley, Two or Three

Graces

(In)equality, difference,

domination

Physiological differences: men’s vocal cords

vibrate at a lower frequency than women’s

‘The vocal tract is like a trumpet. You cannot make

it sound like a double bass or a piano, but there
are still many different ways of playing it’
(Coulmas 2005: 36).

Speaking is part of cultural tradition and therefore

variable.

Korean: deliberate high pitch.
Japanese: 1950s-1980s, the average pitch of

female voices rose significantly (ibid.)

Pitch

• Ohara (1997) recorded natural conversations

and reading of sentences in Japanese and
English by the same speakers.

• She found that women speak with a higher pitch

in Japanese than in English, whereas men’s
pitch remained the same.

• How deep a male voice is and how high a

female voice is depends on some extent to
variation and choice.

• Social and other cultural factors affect other

features.

Linguistic forms used by women and men differ

in all speech communities that have been

studied

Difference
Should sex-specific behaviour be

understood in terms of difference or
domination? (Cameron 1992)

NYC – women use fewer non-standard

forms than men

WHY?

( ) (Labov

1990) (Norwich: Trudgill 1984)
(Amsterdam: Brouwer & van Hout 1992).

principal caregivers, status-
conscious

Dominance

The dominance approach focuses on power

and inequality. Sex-specific variation in
language behaviour is seen as expressing
and reinforcing power differentials (e.g.
patronymic surnames Gibbon 1999: 61).

Linguistic determinism and relativism

(‘Sapir/Whorf hypothesis’): ‘It is language
which determines the limits of our world,
which constructs our reality’ Spender
(1985: 139) [Man Made Language].

Gender and phonetic

variation

1

2

3

4

5

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Women
Men

Distribution of –in pronunciation across social groups and broken
down for sex of speaker (Trudgill 1984)

Middle range: women orientate their speech

behaviour towards the prestige norm in order
to improve their social position.

Fasold (1990): women try to sound less local

and thus have a voice more suitable for
rejecting social expectations that place
women in an inferior position to men.

A woman aims ‘to modify her speech in order to

indicate her respectability’ (Gordon 1997: 61).

Women ‘make choices in the context of

particular social networks rather than as some
generalized response to the universal
conditions of women’ (Nichols 1983: 54).

Gender across cultures

Context-orientated research has led to the

view that gender and language use is
mediated more by social practice.

Differing gender identities and accompanying

speech styles are a component of the
different practices women and men engage
in (Cameron 1992).

Gender-specific speech forms are more

pronounced in some cultures than in others.

Difference/dominance

approach

• Difference
Humanity has produced a multiplicity of

cultural systems just as it has produced a
multiplicity of languages

Dominance
Quasi-social Darwinist ideas: degrees of

equality is a measure of progress
Traditional societies practised exogamy
Western societies have levelled linguistic
differences

• Problems associated with the

dominance model:

• Associating social developments with

cognitive and linguistic ones

• Hard to reduce sex to gender, i.e.

The sociocultural construction of
maleness and femaleness is
everything and the biological
constitution of men and women
nothing.

Preferences based on

gender

Swan 1992
Swedish speeches and interviews:

higher proportion of unique words

Women’s sentences were longer than

men’s

Kakavá 1997
Men express disagreement more

directly in Greek

Politeness

A higher level of politeness is generally expected of women than of men
Some East Asian languages (Javanese, Korean, Japanese) encode levels of

politeness in the grammatical system rather than in lexical and phonetic
choices, e.g. Sentence-final particles in Japanese:

Kaa Wane
Yona Noyone
Yonaa Kashira
Ze Nanone
Monna Wayo
Monnaa
Tara

100% Male 100% Female

But boku (‘I’) being used by female high-school students (Backhaus 2002)

Marked and unmarked

forms

The male form is considered unmarked:

prince princess
authorauthoress
count countess
actor actress
hosthostess
poet poetess
heir heiress
hero heroine
Paul Pauline

Many of the marked female forms have been replaced by the male

forms.

Semantic differences in gender

pairs

Governor

Governess

Master

Mistress

Major

Majorette

Unmarried mothers
Career women

Househusband
Bachelor Spinster

Generic ‘he’

• E, hesh, po, tey, co, jhe, ve, xe, he’er,

than, na
(Pinker, The Language Instinct)

Thomas Jefferson: ‘all men are created

equal’

‘governments are instituted among

men deriving their just power from
the consent of the governed’

Lord Chesterfield (1759) ‘If a person is

born of a gloomy temper ... they
cannot help it.’

• 1850: British parliament act

sanctioned the generic use of ‘he’

• This was ignored: Massachussetts

Medical Society (1879) barred
women doctors based on the bylaws
of the organization which referred to
‘he’

Changes

Mankind People
ManpowerPersonnel
Mothering Nuturing
To man To operate
Chairman Chairperson / chair / moderator
Mailman Postal worker
Fireman Firefighter
Policeman Public safety officer

If the English language had been

properly organised ... Then there would
be a word which meant both ‘he’ and
‘she’, and I could write, ‘If John or Mary
comes, heesh will want to play tennis.’
which would save a lot of trouble.
AA Milne, The Christopher Robin
Birthday Book
he

(s)

Discussion: Stereotypes

VIDEO CLIP

Do women talk faster than men? Do

they talk more than men?

Do men swear more than women?
Do men use less standard language

than women?