Women, Men and Language

A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language

Jennifer Coates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138948778
• eBook ISBN: 9781317292531
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Women, Men and Language has long been established as a seminal text in the field of language and gender, providing an account of the many ways in which language and gender intersect. In this pioneering book, bestselling author Jennifer Coates explores linguistic gender differences, introducing the reader to a wide range of sociolinguistic research in the field.

Written in a clear and accessible manner, this book introduces the idea of gender as a social construct, and covers key topics such as conversational practice, same sex talk, conversational dominance, and children's acquisition of gender-differentiated language, discussing the social and linguistic consequences of these patterns of talk.

Here reissued as a Routledge Linguistics Classic, this book contains a brand new preface which situates this text in the modern day study of language and gender, covering the postmodern shift in the understanding of gender and language, and assessing the book's impact on the field. Women, Men and Language continues to be essential reading for any student or researcher working in the area of language and gender.

Introductory

DOI: 10.4324/9781315645612-1

Language and gender

DOI: 10.4324/9781315645612-2

1.1 Introduction

Do women and men talk differently? Gender differences of all kinds fascinate people, and so it is not surprising that there is curiosity about the way women and men talk and whether there are linguistic gender differences. We all have our own views on gender differences – in language and in other aspects of human life. Tabloid newspapers and television chat shows, for example, provide answers to the question ‘Do women and men talk differently?’ which could be described as ‘folklinguistic’. They are likely to say that women gossip, or that men swear more than women. These answers are widely believed – but are they true? or are they myths?

And what about the question itself? By asking ‘do women and men talk differently’, we make a series of assumptions that are currently under challenge. First, the question assumes that we can divide speakers neatly into two groups called ‘women’ and ‘men’. Secondly, the question assumes that we are interested in differences between women and men rather than similarities between them. At this point, you may think these are ridiculous points to make – of course there are women and men; what’s wrong with being interested in differences rather than similarities. But I want to make clear that if I had asked a different question, there would have been different answers.

I shall attempt to answer the question ‘Do women and men talk differently?’ by drawing on evidence from anthropology, dialectology, discourse analysis, ethnography, sociolinguistics and social psychology. Over the last twenty years, there has been an explosion of research in the field of language and gender. Many books have been published, as well as many articles, both in learned journals and in edited collections. It is one of the aims of this book to provide a coherent account of such work; to bring together the many accounts of gender differences in language that have been written and to make them accessible to the interested reader. The book is intended both for those with an interest in sociolinguistics who want to study one aspect of linguistic variation in depth, and also for those interested in gender differences in general. It will concentrate on sociolinguistic work carried out in Britain and other English-speaking countries.

This book, then, is primarily a sociolinguistic account of the co-variation of language and gender. It is not about the relationship between language and sexism, except in a very general sense; that is, it is not about language which denigrates, or is believed to denigrate, women. It will describe language use, in particular the differing usage of women and men as speakers.

As far as terminology is concerned, gender rather than sex will be the key category under discussion. ‘Sex’ refers to a biological distinction, while ‘gender’ is the term used to describe socially constructed categories based on sex. Most societies operate in terms of two genders, masculine and feminine, and it is tempting to treat the category of gender as a simple binary opposition. Until recently, much of the research carried out on language and gender did so. But more recent theorising challenges this binary thinking. Gender is instead conceptualised as plural, with a range of femininities and masculinities available to speakers at any point in time. (These new conceptualisations will be explored in Chapter 8.)

In this introductory chapter, I shall begin with an overview of the way language and gender studies have developed within sociolinguistics. I shall then give a brief account of the main approaches adopted by linguists to the question of gender differences in language. Finally, I shall provide a brief outline of the structure of the book.

1.2 Sociolinguistics and gender

It is only relatively recently that sociolinguists have turned their attention to gender. Why is this? I should like to suggest three reasons: the first two stem from sociolinguistics’ antecedents in dialectology and linguistics; the third is linked to changes in the position of women in contemporary society.

First, in traditional dialectology, the informants selected were typically non-mobile, older, rural and male (see Chambers and Trudgill 1980: 33). This bias in informant selection was observed by sociolinguists and rejected, but rejection consisted initially of choosing urban rather than rural and younger as well as older informants. While many studies included informants of both sexes, studies confined to male speakers continued to be carried out (e.g. Labov’s (1972b) study of black adolescents in Harlem; Reid’s (1976) study of Edinburgh schoolboys). It was only in the late 1980s that studies appeared which concentrated on female speakers (e.g. Bate and Taylor 1988; Coates and Cameron 1989).

Second, as sociolinguistics began to establish itself as a discipline, reaction against mainstream linguistics led to a shift in emphasis from standard to non-standard varieties. All sorts of minority groups have come under scrutiny, in particular working-class groups, ethnic minority groups, adolescents. Women, however, were not perceived as a minority group. Linguistic variation coextensive with social class, ethnicity or age was what appeared salient to early sociolinguists.

So why wasn’t gender perceived as salient? The answer is that, until relatively recently, men were automatically seen as at the heart of society, with women being peripheral or even invisible. (This pattern of androcentricity will be explored further in the next chapter.) This is difficult to comprehend today, when gender differences are big business (see, for example, the success of books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus or the more recent The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain),¹ but if we look back at the period following the Second World War, all important positions in society were held by men. So Britain was headed by a king, George VI (the father of Queen Elizabeth II), the Prime Minister was male as were virtually all MPs, the most important people in the Law and the Church were male, business was run by men. However, the maleness of these important men was not remarked upon: in the 1940s and 1950s, men were persons first and male persons second. The major change that has occurred since that time, due in large part to the political activism of the Women’s Movement, is that women have achieved the legal right to be treated as the equals of men (both the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act came into effect in Britain in 1975). This has led to changes both in the workplace and in the home – changes in practice and also changes in attitudes.

The publication of Robin Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place in 1975 was a symbolic moment. While Lakoff’s book has been criticised for its sweeping claims and lack of empirical evidence, its significance cannot be underestimated, as it galvanised linguists all over the world into research into the uncharted territory of women’s talk.

Men, ironically, remained unexamined for much longer, precisely because man and person were often interchangeable concepts, but in the last decade the whole issue of men and masculinity has come into focus. There has been a shift in men’s view of themselves – a shift from seeing themselves as unmarked representatives of the human race to focusing on themselves as men. A good example of this shift can be seen in the titles of sociolinguistics books. Labov’s study of black male adolescents in Harlem (Labov 1972b, referred to earlier in this section) was one of the most important sociolinguistic works of the 1970s. Its title was Language in the Inner City. This title ignores the fact that the language analysed in the book is male language. By contrast, a collection of articles on the language use of male speakers published in the 1990s is entitled simply Language and Masculinity (Johnson and Meinhof 1997). This latter book was the first to focus explicitly on men and language.

1.3 Differing approaches to language and gender

Since the publication of Lakoff’s classic work, Language and Woman’s Place, in 1975, linguists have approached language and gender from a variety of perspectives. These can be labelled the deficit approach, the dominance approach, the difference approach, and the dynamic or social constructionist approach.² They developed in a historical sequence, but the emergence of a new approach did not mean that earlier approaches were superseded. In fact, at any one time these different approaches could be described as existing in a state of tension with each other. It is probably true to say, though, that most researchers now adopt a dynamic approach.

The deficit approach was characteristic of the earliest work in the field. Most well known is Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place, which claims to establish something called ‘women’s language’ (WL), which is characterised by linguistic forms such as hedges, ‘empty’ adjectives like charming, divine, nice, and ‘talking in italics’ (exaggerated intonation contours). WL is described as weak and unassertive, in other words, as deficient. Implicitly, WL is deficient by comparison with the norm of male language. This approach was challenged because of the implication that there was something intrinsically wrong with women’s language, and that women should learn to speak like men if they wanted to be taken seriously.

The second approach – the dominance approach – sees women as an oppressed group and interprets linguistic differences in women’s and men’s speech in terms of men’s dominance and women’s subordination. Researchers using this model are concerned to show how male dominance is enacted through linguistic practice. ‘Doing power’ is often a way of ‘doing gender’ too (see West and Zimmerman 1983). Moreover, all participants in discourse, women as well as men, collude in sustaining and perpetuating male dominance and female oppression.

The third approach – the difference approach – emphasises the idea that women and men belong to different subcultures. The ‘discovery’ of distinct male and female subcultures in the 1980s seems to have been a direct result of women’s growing resistance to being treated as a subordinate group. The invisibility of women in the past arose from the conflation of ‘culture’ with ‘male culture’. But women began to assert that they had ‘a different voice, a different psychology, and a different experience of love, work and the family from men’ (Humm 1989: 51). The advantage of the difference model is that it allows women’s talk to be examined outside a framework of oppression or powerlessness. Instead, researchers have been able to show the strengths of linguistic strategies characteristic of women, and to celebrate women’s ways of talking. However, the reader should be aware that the difference approach is controversial when applied to mixed talk, as was done in You Just Don’t Understand (1991), Deborah Tannen’s best-selling book about male–female ‘miscommunication’. Critics of Tannen’s book (see, for example, Troemel-Ploetz 2011; Cameron 1992; Freed 1992) argue that the analysis of mixed talk cannot ignore the issue of power.

The fourth and most recent approach is sometimes called the dynamic approach because there is an emphasis on dynamic aspects of interaction. Researchers who adopt this approach take a social constructionist perspective. Gender identity is seen as a social construct rather than as a ‘given’ social category. As West and Zimmerman (1987) eloquently put it, speakers should be seen as ‘doing gender’ rather than statically ‘being’ a particular gender. This argument led Crawford (1995: 12) to claim that gender should be conceptualised as a verb, not a noun! The observant reader will notice that the phrase ‘doing gender’ was also used in the paragraph on the dominance approach. This is because the four approaches do not have rigid boundaries: researchers may be influenced by more than one theoretical perspective. What has changed is linguists’ sense that gender is not a static, add-on characteristic of speakers, but is something that is accomplished in talk every time we speak.

The deficit approach is now seen as out-dated by researchers (but not by the general public, whose acceptance of, for example, assertiveness training for women suggests a world view where women should learn to be more like men). The other three approaches have all yielded valuable insights into the nature of gender differences in language. Whsupile it is true to say that social constructionism is now the prevailing paradigm, discussion of sociolinguistic work in subsequent chapters will demonstrate the influence of the dominance and difference approaches during the 1980s and 1990s.

1.4 Organisation of the book

This book will focus on linguistic variation related to the gender of the speaker. It will describe differences found in the speech of women and men, and will relate these linguistic differences to the social role...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Other
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s acknowledgements
• Other
• Part One: Introductory
• 1 Language and gender
• 2 The historical background (I) – Folklinguistics and the early grammarians
• 3 The historical background (II) – Anthropologists and dialectologists
• Part Two: The sociolinguistic evidence
• 4 Quantitative studies
• 5 Social networks
• 6 Gender differences in conversational practice
• 7 Conversational dominance in mixed talk
• 8 Same-sex talk
• Part Three: Causes and consequences
• 9 Children and gender-differentiated language
• 10 The role of gender differences in linguistic change
• 11 The social consequences of gender differences in language
• Part Four: Looking to the future
• 12 New developments in language and gender research
• Bibliography
• Index