Gender is also something we cannot avoid; it is part of

the way in which societies are ordered around us, with

each society doing that ordering differently. As Eckert
and McConnell-Ginet (2003, p. 50) say: ‘The force of
gender categories in society makes it impossible for us to
move through our lives in a nongendered way and
impossible not to behave in a way that brings out
gendered behavior in others.’ Gender is a key component
of identity.
Differences in voice quality may be accentuated by
beliefs about what men and women should sound like
when they talk, and any differences in verbal skills may
be explained in great part through differences in
upbringing.
(It has often been noted that there is far more reading
failure in schools among boys than girls, but it does not
follow from this fact that boys are inherently less well
equipped to learn to read, for their poor performance in
comparison to girls may be sociocultural in origin rather
than genetic.)
The next person you meet on the street may be male or
female, tall or short, long-lived or short-lived, high-voiced
or low-voiced, and so on, with not one of these
characteristics being predictable from any other.
Numerous observers have described women’s speech as
being different from that of men. I should also observe
that there is a bias here: men’s speech usually provides
the norm against which women’s speech is judged.
For example, in discussing language change in
Philadelphia, Labov (2001, pp. 281–2) deliberately
recasts his statement that ‘Women conform more closely
than men to sociolinguistic norms that are overtly
prescribed, but conform less than men when they are
not’ to read that men ‘are less conforming than women
with stable linguistic variables, and more conforming
when change is in progress within a linguistic system.’ He
does this so as to avoid appearing to bias his findings.
Men indulge in a kind of phatic small talk that involves
insults, challenges, and various kinds of negative
behavior to do exactly what women do by their use of
nurturing, polite, feedback-laden, cooperative talk. In
doing this, they achieve the kind of solidarity they prize.
It is the norms of behavior that are different.
1a. Oh dear, you’ve put the peanut butter in the
refrigerator again.
1b. Shit, you’ve put the peanut butter in the refrigerator
again.
In the linguistic literature perhaps the most famous
example of gender differentiation is found in the Lesser
Antilles of the West Indies among the Carib Indians. Male
and female Caribs have been reported to speak different
languages, the result of a long-ago conquest in which a
group of invading Carib-speaking men killed the local
Arawak-speaking men and mated with the Arawak
women. The descendants of these Carib-speaking men
and Arawak-speaking women have sometimes been
described as having different languages for men and
women because boys learn Carib from their fathers and
girls learn Arawak from their mothers.
There is also a very interesting example from English of a
woman being advised to speak more like a man in order
to fill a position previously filled only by men. Margaret
Thatcher was told that her voice did not match her
position as British Prime Minister: she sounded too
‘shrill.’ She was advised to lower the pitch of her voice,
diminish its range, and speak more slowly, and thereby
adopt an authoritative, almost monotonous delivery to
make herself heard. She was successful to the extent that
her new speaking style became a kind of trademark, one
either well-liked by her admirers or detested by her
opponents.
One of the consequences of such work is that there is
now a greater awareness in some parts of the
community that subtle, and sometimes not so subtle,
distinctions are made in the vocabulary choice used to
describe men and women.
This kind of work does two things: it draws our attention
to existing inequities, and it encourages us to make the
necessary changes by establishing new categorizations
(e.g., Ms), and suggesting modifications for old terms
(e.g., changing policeman to police officer and chairman
to chairperson).
There certainly are gender differences in word choice in
various languages. Japanese women show they are
women when they speak, for example, by the use of a
sentence-final particle ne or another particle wa. In
Japanese, too, a male speaker refers to himself as boku
or ore whereas a female uses watasi or atasi. Whereas a
man says boku kaeru ‘I will go back’ in plain or informal
speech, a woman says watasi kaeru wa (Takahara, 1991).
Children learn to make these distinctions very early in
life.
According to Bradley (1998), men use one dialect among
themselves and women use the other. Men also use
men’s dialect to speak to women and women use
women’s dialect to speak to men. Children are brought
up in women’s dialect with boys required to shift – not
always done easily – to men’s dialect as they are initiated
into manhood.
Gal’s study in the Oberwart of Austria (pp. 205–6)
showed how it is not only what women say but who they
are willing to say it to that is important. We have also
noted that there are often different politeness
requirements made of men and women.
Still other gender-linked differences are said to exist.
Women and men may have different paralinguistic
systems and move and gesture differently. The
suggestion has been made that these often require
women to appear to be submissive to men. Women are
also often named, titled, and addressed differently from
men. Women are more likely than men to be addressed
by their first names when everything else is equal, or, if
not by first names, by such terms as lady, miss, or dear,
and even baby or babe. Women are said to be subject to
a wider range of address terms than men, and men are
more familiar with them than with other men. Women
are also said not to employ the profanities and
obscenities men use, or, if they do, use them in different
circumstances or are judged differently for using them.
(However, the successful American television series ‘Sex
and the City’ might seriously challenge that idea!)
Women are also sometimes required to be silent in
situations in which men may speak. Among the
Araucanian Indians of Chile, men are encouraged to talk
on all occasions, but the ideal wife is silent in the
presence of her husband, and at gatherings where men
are present she should talk only in a whisper, if she talks
at all.
In setting out a list of what she calls ‘sociolinguistic
universal tendencies,’ Holmes (1998) does offer some
testable claims. There are five of these:
1. Women and men develop different patterns of
language use.
2. Women tend to focus on the affective functions of an
interaction more often than men do.
3. Women tend to use linguistic devices that stress
solidarity more often than men do.
4. 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.
5. Women are stylistically more flexible than men.
Stereotype:
Women spoke less forcefully than men, and men swore
much more than women. Men were also more blunt and
to the point in their speaking.
Mills (2003) contests the view that women are more
polite than men. She says that ‘politeness’ is not a
property of utterances; it is rather ‘a set of practices or
strategies which communities of practice develop, affirm,
and contest’ (p. 9).
When the two genders interacted, men tended to take
the initiative in conversation, but there seemed to be a
desire to achieve some kind of accommodation so far as
topics were concerned: the men spoke less aggressively
and competitively and the women reduced their amount
of talk about home and family.
Another interesting claim is that in cross-gender
conversations men frequently interrupt women but
women much less frequently interrupt men (Zimmerman
and West, 1975). James and Clarke (1993) looked at fifty-
four studies that addressed the claim that men are much
more likely than women ‘to use interruption as a means
of dominating and controlling interactions’ (p. 268).
One explanation is that languages can be sexist.
1. The first claim is that men and women are biologically
different and that this difference has serious
consequences for gender. Women are somehow
predisposed psychologically to be involved with one
another and to be mutually supportive and non-
competitive.
2. The second claim is that social organization is best
perceived as some kind of hierarchical set of power
relationships.
3. The third claim, which does not actually deny the
second claim, is that men and women are social beings
who have learned to act in certain ways.
They conclude that women and men observe different
rules in conversing and that in cross-gender talk the rules
often conflict.
Language behavior reflects male dominance. Men use
what power they have to dominate each other and, of
course, women, and, if women are to succeed in such a
system, they must learn to dominate others too, women
included. Men constantly try to take control, to specify
topics, to interrupt, and so on. They do it with each other
and they do it with women, who, feeling powerless, let
them get away with it, preferring instead to seek support
from other women. Consequently, since women are
relatively powerless they opt for more prestigious
language forms to protect themselves in dealing with the
more powerful. At the same time the use of such forms
serves to mark them off from equally powerless males of
the same social class. Women may also have weaker
social networks than men but they show a greater
sensitivity to language forms, especially standard ones.
The genders have different views of what questioning is
all about, women viewing questions as part of
conversational maintenance and men primarily as
requests for information; different conventions for
linking; different views of what is or is not ‘aggressive’
linguistic behavior, with women regarding any sign of
aggression as personally directed, negative, and
disruptive, and men as just one way of organizing a
conversation; different views of topic flow and topic
shift; and different attitudes toward problem-sharing and
advice-giving, with women tending to discuss, share, and
seek reassurance, and men tending to look for solutions,
give advice, and even lecture to their audiences.
We may expect that the more distinct the roles, the
greater the differences, and there seems to be some
evidence to support such a claim, for the greatest
differences appear to exist in societies in which the roles
of men and women are most clearly differentiated. Most
of those differences can be explained by the different
positions men and women fill in society. Men have more
power and may be more assertive; women tend to be
kept ‘in their place’ but aspire quite often to a different
and ‘better’ place. Women therefore appear to be more
conscious of uses of language which they associate with
their ‘betters’ in society, that is, those they regard as
being socially superior
Language and gender studies have seen an interesting
development in recent years, known by such terms as
queer linguistics and lavender linguistics. These studies
deal with the language of non-mainstream groups such
as gays, lesbians, bisexuals, the transgendered, etc., and
focus on ‘sexuality’ rather than sex or gender. In fact, a
major claim is that the focus on sex or gender may have
been misdirected.