The Female Register

Register

• Recognizable style of speech attached to certain contexts

• Styles commonly associated with certain demographics

The Female Register

• Robin Lakoff’s Language and Women’s Place (1975)

• Research based on informal observation and introspection

• Used as key work in examining gender differences in speech

Principles of Female Register

• Women’s speech differs stylistically from men’s

– Proposed Women’s American English

• Sets forth 10 distinctive features

• Created generalizations about men’s and women’s speech

Features: Lexical Usage

• Color terms and specialized terminology

• “Empty” adjectives

• Swearing, expletives, and coarse language

Politeness

• Lakoff’s Politeness Principle

• Encourages “good” interaction

–Don’t impose

–Give options to the receiver of speech

–Make receiver feel good

Politeness & Cooperation

• Super-polite forms

– “Would it be alright if…?”

• Indirect Requests

– “I sure am thirsty” as opposed to “I want a drink”

• Inflections and pitch modulation

– Questioning statement and affected speech

• Less likely to interrupt others

Politeness & Cooperation

• Hedging– Adding qualifiers to soften statements and

questions

– e.g. “sort of” “maybe” “I think that”

• Tag Questions– Adding questioning phrases and seeking

affirmation in direct questions and statements

– e.g. “It’s nice out today, isn’t it?”

Politeness and Prestigious Forms

• Greater adherence to grammatical rules

• Tendency to use prestigious forms more than men; avoid common forms and dialects

Roots of the Female Register

• The subordinate role of women in society

– Avoid conflict

– Seek solidarity

– Push to be “lady-like”

• Enforced and Ingrained Patriarchy

– Shared nature of culture

– Socio-cultural pressure

Roots of Female Register

• Gender relations are manifest in language

– We are how we speak

• Female register used to facilitate interactions between men and women, as well as women and women

Criticisms of Female Register

• Validity of Lakoff’s research

– Criticism of sampling and use of introspection

• Over-generalization

– Reflects educated, white, middle-class women

• Lakoff asserts limited scope, but grammatical choices support generalized set

Subordinate Register?Polite Register?

• Cheris Kramer’s re-examination of Female Register

– “weaker” forms of speech ascribed to women speaks more to social position than sex or gender

– Reflects subordinate speech forms

• Politeness

– Aspects of Female Register being used to standardize politeness in public relations training

Who uses the Female Register?

• Ambiguity of terms

– Female and woman are used interchangeably

• Disassembling the conflation of terms

FEMALE WOMAN FEMININE

SEX GENDER DESCRIPTOR

PHYSICAL MENTAL & SOCIO-CULTURAL

EXPRESSION

Problematic Usage

• Queering the Female Register:– Transgender applications?

– Gay and Lesbian speech studies

– Queerly Phrased (Livia and Hall [eds.] contains a lot on the topic and is available through IDS

– Heteronormativity

• Foundations– Necessary to expand and re-examine

– Still valuable as a benchmark