An Introduction to Sociolinguistics:GenderSupervisor : Dr. ElyasiPresented by : Hanieh Habibi

Introduction

▪To see if there is any connection between the structures, vocabularies, and ways of using particular languages and the social roles of the men and women who speak these languages.▪If it is possible to describe a particular language as ‘sexist,’ or reserve such a description for those who use that language?▪To see what some of the underlying facts are and to avoid the kinds of rhetoric and dialectic that characterize much of the discussion of ‘sexism in language’, a topic which often seems to invite ‘large’ arguments based on ‘small’ data.

Sex or Gender?

▪Gender was a technical term in linguistics and many of the issues dealt with in the chapter focused on claims about ‘sexism’.▪The current vogue is to use gender rather than sex as the cover word for the various topics discussed in this chapter.▪Sex is to a very large extent biologically determined whereas gender is a social construct involving the whole gamut of genetic, psychological, social, and cultural differences between males and females.▪Wodak : Gender is ‘not a pool of attributes “possessed” by a person, but something a person “does” ’. she adds that ‘what it means to be a woman or to be a man [also] changes from one generation to the next.▪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.

One purpose will be..

▪There are gender differences in language use.▪That languages can be sexist?▪ That those who use languages may be sexist? ▪That language-learning is almost inevitably tied to gender-learning? ▪That such learning is almost always skewed in such a way as to favor one gender over the other? ▪That change is not only desirable but possible?

Differences

▪Females have two X chromosomes whereas males have an X and a Y.▪Females have more fat and less muscle than males.▪Females are not as strong, and weigh less. ▪Females mature more rapidly and live longer. ▪The female voice usually has different characteristics from the male voice.▪Females and males exhibit different ranges of verbal skills.

Reason of differences

▪Women may live longer than men because of the different roles they play in society and the different jobs they tend to

fill. ▪Differences in voice quality may be accentuated by beliefs about what men and women should sound like when they

talk,▪Differences in verbal skills may be explained in great part through differences in upbringing.▪Many of the differences may result from different socialization practices (see Philips et al., 1987).

Differences, cont.

▪As Labov says:1.Women conform more closely than men to sociolinguistic norms that are overtly prescribed, but conform less than men when they are not.2. Men are less conforming than women with stable linguistic variables, and more conforming when change is in progress within a linguistic system.

Judgments without solid evidentiary support

▪women’s speech is not: trivial , gossip-laden, corrupt, illogical,

idle, euphemistic, deficient!▪Nor is it necessarily : more precise, cultivated, or stylish, or even less profane.▪It is the norms of behavior that are different.

Lesser Antilles Language

▪The most famous example of gender differentiation.▪Male and female speak different languages.▪It is the result of a long-ago conquest in which a group of invading Caribspeaking men killed the local Arawak-speaking men and mated with the Arawak women. ▪boys learn Carib from their fathers and girls learn Arawak from their mothers.▪Differences do not result in two separate or different languages, but rather one language with noticeable gender-based characteristics.

Phonological differences

▪In Gros Ventre women have palatalized velar stops where men have palatalized dental stops, e.g., female kjatsa ‘bread’ and male djatsa.▪any use of female pronunciations by males is likely to be regarded as a sign of effeminacy.▪In Yukaghir, both women and children have /ts/ and /dz / where men have /tj/ and /dj/. Old people of both genders have a corresponding /7j/ and /jj/. ▪The difference is not only genderrelated, but also age-graded.▪In Bengali men often substitute /l/ for initial /n/; women, children, and the uneducated do not do this.

Phonological differences, cont.

▪In Chukchi, men, but not women, often drop /n/ and /t/ when they occur between vowels, e.g., female nitvaqenat and male.▪In Montreal many more men than women do not pronounce the l in the pronouns il and elle. ▪Schoolgirls in Scotland apparently pronounce the t in words like water and got more often than schoolboys, who prefer to substitute a glottal stop.▪In Koasati men often pronounced an s at the end of verbs but women did not, e.g., male lakáws ‘he is lifting it’ and female lakáw. This kind of pronunciation appeared to be dying out.

Margaret Thatcher!

▪A woman being advised to speak more like a man in order to fill a position previously filled only by men. ▪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!

In the area of morphology and vocabulary

▪ As Lakoff says:–women use color words like mauve, beige, aquamarine,

lavender, and magenta but most men do not.–adjectives such as adorable, charming, divine, lovely, and sweet

are also commonly used by women but only very rarely by men.–Women have their own vocabulary for emphasizing certain

effects on them, words and expressions such as so good, such fun, exquisite, lovely, divine, precious, adorable, darling, and fantastic.

▪English language makes certain distinctions of a gender-based Kind:–actor*actress, waiter*waitress, master*mistress.– Joan is Fred’s mistress’ is correct, while ‘Fred is Joan’s master’ is

not.– ‘He’s a professional’ vs. ‘She’s a professional’.

Consequences of such work

▪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.▪There is a frequent insistence that neutral words should be used as much as possible in describing occupations.▪Such changes might be expected to follow, so that judgeships, surgical appointments, nursing positions, and primary school teaching assignments are just as likely to be held by women as men.▪It draws our attention to existing inequities▪It encourages us to make the necessary changes by establishing new categorizations and suggesting modifications for old terms.

connections between gender systems and gender differences

▪The he–she–it gender system of English or the le–la or der–die–das ‘grammatical’ gender systems of French and German.▪Ideological factors in the form of cultural beliefs about women . . . enter into gender assignment in [grammatical] systems that are supposedly purely formal and arbitrary.▪Such connections sometimes create problems for us in finding the right pronoun.▪It is the people who use languages who are or who are not sexist.▪It would be difficult to maintain that males who speak Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Turkish languages are less sexist than males who speak English!

Gender differences in word choice

▪Japanese women show they are women when they speak by the use of a sentence-final particle ne or another particle wa.▪A male speaker refers to himself as boku or ore whereas a female uses watasi or atasi.–boku kaeru VS watasi kaeru wa means ‘I will go back’.

▪the use of boku by junior high school girls has recently become quite common in Tokyo.▪In Thai, too, women emphasize a repeated action through reduplication, whereas men place a descriptive verb, mak, after the verb instead.

Different forms used by genders

▪Yana language contains special forms for use in speech either by or to women. ▪The language of the Dyirbal people, in the normal everyday language both genders use Guwal; but, in presence of mother-in-law or father-in-law, they use Dyalnuy, a ‘mother-in-law’ variety. Phonology and grammar are almost the same, but its vocabulary is entirely different.▪Yanyuwa has gender-differentiated dialects. The dialects has the same word stems but different class-marking prefixes. A person can use the other sex’s dialect only in very well-defined circumstances.

Grammatical matters in English

▪The intonation patterns of men and women vary somewhat. ▪Women may answer a question with a statement that employs the rising intonation pattern usually associated with a question rather than the falling intonation pattern associated with making a firm statement.▪Women often add tag questions to statements.▪This might be because they are less sure about themselves and their opinions than are men.

End of Ronald Wardhaugh

The meaning of the terms sex and gender

▪Sex has come to refer to categories distinguished by biological characteristics▪Gender is more appropriate for distinguishing people on the basis of their socio-cultural behavior, including speech.▪Gender focuses largely on contrasts between empirically observed features of women’s and men’s speech.▪The concept of gender allows describing masculine and feminine behaviors in terms of scales or continua rather than absolute categories.

Gender-exclusive speech differences

▪Some forms are used only by women and others are used only by men.▪Between Amazon Indians men must marry outside their own tribe, so the language used by a child’s mother is different from her father’s language.▪Less dramatically, particular linguistic features occur only in the women’s speech or only in the men’s speech, like small differences in pronunciation or word-shape (morphology).▪In Bengali, a language of India, the women use an initial [l] where the men use an initial [n] in some words.

different affixes, different word-shape

▪A South American Indian language, some of the words used between men are longer than the equivalent words used by women and to women, because the men’s forms sometimes add a suffix.

Differences between the vocabulary items

▪These are never very extensive, but traditional standard Japanese provides some clear examples.

▪In modern standard Japanese, these distinctions are more a matter of degrees of formality or politeness than gender.

Signaling the gender of the speaker

▪In Japanese there are a number of words for ‘I’ varying primarily in formality, but women are traditionally restricted to the more formal variants:–ore -> men in casual contexts –boku -> men in semi-formal contexts, –Atashi -> women in semi-formal variant–Watashi -> wemen in formal variant–Watakushi -> wemen in the most formal variant

▪Modern young Japanese women are increasingly challenging such restrictions.

More pervasive linguistic differences

▪In very hierarchical communities , and more powerful men than women within each level of the hierarchy, linguistic differences between the speech of women and men is just one dimension of more extensive differences.▪In Bengali society, a younger person should not address a superior by first name, or a wife is not permitted to use his name.▪So, there is an interrelationship between gender and other social factors.▪Gender-exclusive speech forms reflect gender-exclusive social roles.

Gender-preferential speech features

▪Where women’s and men’s social roles overlap, the speech forms they use also overlap. They use different quantities or frequencies of the same forms.▪Women use more -ing [i] pronunciations and fewer - in’ [in] pronunciations than men in words like swimming and typing.▪In all these examples, women tend to use more of the standard forms than men do, while men use more of the vernacular forms than women do.

Gender and social class

▪Does the speech of women in one social class resemble that of women from different classes, or does it more closely resemble the speech of the men from their own social class?▪In every social class where surveys have been undertaken, men use more vernacular forms than women.▪In the lowest and the highest social groups the women’s speech is closer to that of the men in the same group than to that of women in other groups. In these groups, class membership seems to be more important than gender identity.▪In other groups, women identify more strongly with women from the next social group than with men from their own social group.

Gender and social class, cont.

▪When women use more of a linguistic form than men, it is generally the standard form –the overtly prestigious form – that women favour.▪When men use a form more often than women, it is usually a vernacular form, one which is not admired overtly by the society as a whole, and which is not cited as the ‘correct’ form.▪This widespread pattern is also evident from a very young age, differences of this sort were observed in the pronunciation of girls and boys as young as 6 years old.

Explanations of women’s linguistic behavior

▪The social class and its related status for an explanation▪Women’s role in society▪Women’s status as a subordinate group▪The function of speech in expressing gender identity, and especially masculinity.

The social status explanation

▪Women are more status-conscious than men.▪Women are more aware of the fact that the way they speak signals their social class background or social status in the community.▪Standard speech forms are associated with high social status, and women use more standard speech forms as a way of claiming such status.▪This is especially true for women who do not have paid employment, since they cannot use their occupations as a basis for signaling social status. It is a try to acquire it by using standard speech forms.

Doubt on the social status explanation

▪There is at least some indirect evidence:▪Women in the paid workforce should use fewer standard forms than women working in the home, but those in paid employment used more standard forms than those working in the home.▪So, standard or prestige forms represent linguistic capital which people can use to increase their value or marketability in some contexts.▪Where women have few other sources of prestige, language may become especially significant as a social resource for constructing a professional identity.

Woman’s role as guardian of society’s values

▪society tends to expect ‘better’ behaviour from women than from men.▪rule-breaking of any kind by women is frowned on more severely than rule-breaking by men.▪Women are designated the role of modelling correct behaviour in the community.

Doubt on woman’s role as guardian

▪Interactions between a mother and her child are likely to be very relaxed and informal, and it is in relaxed informal contexts that vernacular forms occur most often in everyone’s speech.▪Standard forms are typically associated with more formal and less personal interactions.▪It seems odd to explain women’s greater use of more standard speech forms by referring to a woman’s role as a speech model in her very intimate and mainly unobserved interactions with her child.

Subordinate groups must be polite

▪People who are subordinate must be polite.▪Children are expected to be polite to adults.▪Women as a subordinate group, it is argued, must avoid offending men – and so they must speak carefully and politely.▪Why polite speech should be equated with standard speech?!▪By using more standard speech forms women are looking after their own need to be valued by the society.

Aberrant assumption of this explanation

▪Men’s usage is being taken as the norm!▪ what people are trying to explain is why women are using the standard!▪Standard behavior does not need explaining!▪Instead of asking ‘why do women use more standard speech forms than men?’, it makes more sense to ask ‘why don’t men use more standard forms?

Vernacular forms express machismo

▪Q : Why don’t men use more standard forms?▪ A : Men prefer vernacular forms because they carry macho connotations of masculinity and toughness.▪Supportive evidences:▪More likely to win in a street fight, more usage of vernacular forms.▪Norwich men tended to claim more usage of vernacular forms than they actually did.▪Men regard vernacular forms positively and value them highly.▪ These forms have ‘covert prestige’.

Some alternative explanations

‘women continue to be one of the mysteries of the universe.’ (Shuy 1969: 14)

▪How are women categorized?▪The influence of the interviewer and the context