Language And Gender Research Paper

1. Gender-Exclusive vs. Gender-Preferential Differences

As long ago as the seventeenth century, differences in the language used by women and men were remarked upon in anthropological writings. Missionaries and explorers came across societies in which they claimed to find distinct languages for male and female speakers. In fact, their accounts exaggerated the reality; what can be found in some languages are phonological, morphological, syntactic, or lexical contrasts where the speaker’s gender determines which form is chosen. An example of this is Yanyuwa, an Australian aboriginal language; in this language, the choice of particular case-marking suffixes depends on the gender of the speaker.

Gender-exclusive differences of this kind mean that speakers who use a form inappropriate to their gender will be strongly reprimanded. Bradley (1998) quotes a Yanyuwa male who reminisces ‘I spoke like a woman and [my mother] yelled at me, ‘‘Hey! you are a man, you have no foreskin, why do you talk like a woman?’’ I was shamed.’ Such linguistic differences clearly function to keep gender roles distinct. However, most of the linguistic variation associated with gender found today involves gender-preferential rather than gender- exclusive differences. This means that, rather than there being linguistic forms associated exclusively with one gender, there is instead a tendency for women or for men to use a certain form more frequently. The difference between gender-exclusive and gender preferential usage seems to correlate with differences between nonindustrialized societies, such as the Yanyuwa, and industrialized societies, such as Britain and the USA. Nonindustrialized societies tend to have clearly demarcated gender roles, whereas in modern industrialized societies, gender roles are much less rigidly structured.

2. Quantitative Sociolinguistic Research

Researchers investigating gender-preferential differences in grammar and pronunciation use a quantitative approach; results showing phonological or grammatical differences are presented in terms of either raw numbers or percentages, and statistical tests are used to demonstrate the significance of these findings. This approach is common throughout the sciences and social sciences, and it has proved a valuable tool for sociolinguists exploring gender-preferential differences (as it can demonstrate gender difference despite the fact that women and men are using the same linguistic forms). This approach was developed by Labov in his pioneering book, Sociolinguistic Patterns (1972), and it has provided sociolinguists with a model for work on linguistic variation; the model is often referred to as the Variationist Paradigm.

In terms of gender, the most robust finding to emerge from research in a wide range of speech communities is that female speakers tend to use linguistic forms closer to the prestige norm more frequently than male speakers of a similar social background (see, for example, Trudgill 1998, Eisikovits 1998, Milroy 1980). It has even been claimed that this should be viewed as a sociolinguistic universal (Holmes 1998). Many explanations have been put forward for this finding, none of them wholly satisfactory; four of these will be examined briefly here.

2.1 Explanations For Gender-Differentiated Language Use

First, the notion of covert prestige was developed to describe the positive value assigned to vernacular (nonstandard) forms by working class and male speakers. It is argued that male speakers tend to orient to the covert prestige of vernacular forms while female speakers tend to orient to the overt prestige of standard forms.

A second explanation derives from social network theory which demonstrates how individual speakers are members of social networks which have the power to enforce group norms (Milroy 1980). In the case of language, social network theory predicts that group pressures will enforce linguistic norms. Since women and men tend to belong to different (gender-based) social networks, then different norms are maintained.

A third explanation emphasizes the role of economic factors, that is, the pressures exerted by the job market which bring some speakers, but not others, into contact with more standard speech forms (see, for example, Nichols 1998).

Finally, a more recent explanatory framework is proposed by Eckert (1998, 1999) in her research into the speech of adolescent speakers in Detroit, USA. Eckert found that girls’ linguistic usage was more extreme than that of boys: girls with more middle-class values used forms closest to the prestige standard, while girls with more working-class values used the most advanced vernacular forms. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of a symbolic market, Eckert argues that female speakers have to use more standard (or more vernacular) speech because they are marginalized in the linguistic marketplace.

3. Gendered Communicative Competence

Early research on language and gender concentrated on what were seen as core features of language: phonetics, phonology, syntax, and morphology. Later, researchers began to turn their attention to broader aspects of talk, the conversational strategies characteristic of male and female speakers which constitute their communicative competence. Communicative competence is a phrase coined by Dell Hymes. He argued that it was essential to incorporate social and cultural factors into linguistic description, since when children learn to talk they learn not just grammar but also a sense of appropriateness. It is not sufficient for a child to be linguistically competent; he/she must also known when to speak, when to remain silent, how to tell a joke, how to be polite, etc.

As children become more competent as speakers, so they learn to talk in ways appropriate to their gender. Becoming a girl or a boy means talking like a girl or a boy. Women and men characteristically draw on different strategies in conversational interaction, strategies such as paying compliments, hedging, apologizing, swearing. Women’s and men’s behavior in conversation suggests that they have a different understanding of how a compliment or an apology is done. (Examples of such differences can be found in Holmes’ paper on compliments in New Zealand English, Brown’s paper on politeness in a Mayan community in Mexico, and Goodwin’s paper on directives in Black peer groups in Philadelphia, USA, all in Sect. 2 of Coates 1998.) Such differences have led some researchers to talk of different female and male ‘styles’ in conversation (see Maltz and Borker 1998).

At a broader level, it even seems that male and female speakers prefer different modes of conversational organization (see Coates 1996, 1997a). Male speakers tend to choose a one-at-a-time model of turn-taking, where speaker turns are carefully demarcated, and where speakers occupy the conversational floor one at a time, often for long solo turns. By contrast, female speakers in relaxed informal conversation with friends characteristically opt for a more collaborative model of turn-taking, which allows speakers to share the conversational floor and construct talk jointly. This latter mode of conversational interaction can be called the ‘jam session’ model.

3.1 Conversational Dominance

One cluster of conversational strategies has been observed to function in conversation as a way of enabling certain speakers to dominate their partners in talk. Asymmetrical patterns of talk are always a sign of power imbalance, and asymmetry has been found in research which focuses on mixed talk in a variety of social contexts, with men’s greater usage of certain strategies being associated with male dominance in conversation (see the papers in Coates 1998, Sect. 3).

The following linguistic strategies can be involved in conversational dominance: interrupting another speaker; failing to respond to another speaker’s utterance, or delaying a response; talking too much (that is, occupying the conversational floor for long stretches of time and thus preventing other speakers from participating); or talking too little (silence can be a very effective device to control the direction in which conversation goes, or whether conversation can take place at all).

The research evidence is that male speakers regularly use these strategies to dominate talk. Research on language in the classroom reveals that boys get to talk on average twice as much as girls, and this pattern persists in public arenas with adult speakers. In the private sphere, male speakers in a range of studies have been found to dominate their female friends or partners through using these strategies.

4. Difference Or Dominance?

Two approaches to gender variation in language have dominated sociolinguistic research in the area of language and gender until very recently; these are the difference approach and the dominance approach. To put it very simply, research which takes a dominance perspective interprets the differences between women’s and men’s linguistic usage as reflexes of the dominant– subordinate relationship holding between men and women. Research which takes a difference perspective, by contrast, sees the differences between women’s linguistic usage and men’s linguistic usage as arising from the different subcultures in which women and men are socialized (this approach is sometimes called the subcultural or two-cultures approach).

Early work on language and gender took a dominance approach. The reaction against this, and the subsequent flourishing of the difference approach, arose not because researchers denied the existence of dominance and oppression in male–female relationships, but because researchers, particularly feminist researchers, became unhappy at the negative portrayal of women in work using the dominance approach. Women’s language was described as weak, unassertive, tentative, and women were presented as losers, as victims.

Researchers who began using the difference model in the 1980s argued that the dominance model had become a deficit model, that is, a way of interpreting the linguistic facts which represented men’s language as the norm and women’s language as deviant. The advantage of the difference model is that it allows researchers to show the strengths of linguistic strategies characteristic of women and to celebrate women’s ways of talking. For those carrying out research involving mixed talk, the dominance approach provides a useful explanatory framework, but for researchers investigating same-sex talk it seems less appropriate, since dominance and oppression are not obviously helpful categories for the description of all-female talk (or of all-male talk, for that matter, but it is only very recently that sociolinguists have turned their attention to the informal talk of men—see Johnson and Meinhof 1997).

Probably the main problem with the difference approach is its assumption that all interactional difficulties between women and men can be called ‘miscommunication.’ However, the idea that miscommunication is at the heart of male–female problems has immense popular appeal, and has become widely known throughout the English-speaking world since publication of the book You Just Don’t Understand (Tannen 1990) and other similar works.

The popularization of the discussion about male– female differences and miscommunication means that the difference approach is now seen as problematic, because it is associated with a political stance which ignores male dominance. However, interesting work on same-sex talk continues to be carried out which implicitly draws on a difference or subcultural approach. But in many areas researchers have moved on, assimilating ideas from European social theory. In particular, current research into linguistic variation takes the view that gender is not a given but is accomplished through talk, and that speakers have available to them a whole range of (often conflicting) discourses (see Coates 1997b, Fairclough 1992, Weedon 1987).

5. Language And Gender Research: New Directions

In the early years (the 1960s and 1970s), research into the interaction of language and gender relied on a predominantly essentialist paradigm which categorized speakers primarily according to biological sex, and used mainly quantitative methods. Next, in the 1970s and 1980s, came a period which recognized the cultural construction of categories such as gender. During this period, more qualitative, ethnographic approaches predominated. In recent research, a more dynamic social constructionist approach has emerged which makes possible the combination of quantitative and qualitative research.

Researchers are now urged to ‘think practically and look locally’ (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1998). In particular, researchers are urged to work in terms of communities of practice, a concept which they adopt to assert the dynamism of living communities, and to underscore the fact that personal identity is not constructed in a vacuum, but in the many communities of practice individuals belong to. Gender, one aspect of personal identity, is not a given, but is constantly created and recreated in social interaction with others in these communities of practice.

Moreover, gender is complex: the binary distinctions men–women, male–female, masculine–feminine tend to distort—and oversimplify—our thinking. It is unhelpful to think of men and women as being totally different: male and female speakers differ in many ways, but there are also many areas of overlap. It is also important to realize that using the terms ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ in the singular is a stylistic convenience: there is no singular masculinity or femininity. Gender is fluid and variable and at any point in time there will be a range of masculinities and femininities extant in a culture, and these will vary in terms of class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, etc., as well as intersecting in complex ways. Finally, masculinity and femininity cannot be understood on their own: the concepts are essentially relational. In other words, femininity (for example) is only meaningful when it is understood in relation to masculinity and to the totality of gender relations (see Connell 1995).

At the end of the twentieth century, sociolinguistic research has moved on from the simple correlation of linguistic form with social category. Researchers now analyze spoken and written data with the aim of understanding how gender is constructed in everyday life and of assessing the role of language in the creation and maintenance of contemporary masculinity and femininity. There is increasing emphasis on the need to be aware of similarities as well as differences between male and female speakers, as well as to assert the plurality of masculinities and femininities. Finally, the spread of language and gender research to non-English speaking communities is widening understanding of the key issues, since it seems that whatever the language of a community, gender politics manifest themselves in similar ways all over the world.

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