LANGUAGE AND GENDER.

A LITERATURE REVIEWS

INTRODUCTION

Since the dawn of human history, what makes people different from other creatures on the earth is
their ability to use language to communicate with one another. When it comes to language, people
define it as a system of communication based on words and sentences to make our communication
meaningful and understandable. However, the ways language is used are not the same in different
countries, by different people and by different genders. A major topic in sociolinguistics which has been
discussed over the last few decades is whether men and women speaking a certain language use it in
different ways.

Gender is a broad analytical concept which highlights women roles and responsibilities in relation to
those of men. It refers to all the characteristics of men and women which a particular society has
determined and assigned each sex. Gender, according to Mershall (1994), refers to socially-constructed
aspects of differences between men and women. Since its introduction as a social concept, it has been
extended to refer not only to individual identity and personality but also at the symbolic level, to cultural
ideas and stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. The differences in the behaviour of males and
females are learned rather than being the inevitable result of biology.

Since the early 1990s, the theme of men and women metaphorically ‘speaking different languages’ has
become very common in popular culture. According to books like Men are from Mars, Women are from
Venus, women love to talk, whereas men prefer action to words. Women view talking as a way Celal
Bayar Üniversitesi460of connecting with others emotionally, whereas men treat conversation either asa
practical tool or a competitive sport. Women are good at listening, building rapport with others and
avoiding or defusing conflict; men confront each other more directly, and are less attuned to either their
own or others’ feelings (Gray,1992: 21). More recently, a new wave of popular scientific writing has
linked these observations to differences in the way male and female brains work(Baron-Cohen, 2003;
Brizendine, 2006).

LITERATURE REVIEW

Gender and language have become an interesting topic on which some linguists have done research to
find out the relationship between them. Some studies focus on the differences between language that is
spoken by men and women in terms of phonology, syntax, and lexicon and conversation analysis. While
the other studies have investigated the influence of gender-based differences on establishing and
maintaining the imbalance power between the two genders. This paper is a literature review. The paper
looked at literatures which has helped us to understand the topic “language and gender”. It provides a
context on whether women talk more/less than men, women talk faster than men, women break the
‘rules’ of turn-talking less than men, women use more standard forms than men, and women’s speech is
less direct/assertive than men’s.

2. Differences in men’s and women’s speech

WOMEN TALK MORE/LESS THAN MEN

The amount of words a person speaks in a day might not be determined by gender, but gender can
affect how much we talk in certain settings.In The Female Brain, published in 2006, Louann Brizendine,
M.D. claimed that women say about 20,000 words a day, while men say about 7,000. According to
Cameron and Coates (1985), the amount we talk is influenced by who we are with and what we are
doing. They also add that if we aggregate a large number of studies, it will be observed that there is little
difference between the amount men and women talk. On the one hand, in a recent study, Dr.
Brizendine (1994) states that women talk three times as much as men. On the other hand, Drass (1986),
in an experiment on gender identity in conversation dyads found that men speak more than women.

WOMEN TALKS FASTER THAN MEN

Although gender does not determine the English speakers’ rate of speech, many listeners perceive
women as talking faster. Overestimations of how quickly women speak and of the amount that they
speak are both rooted in language ideology.

Studies like this suggest that our cultural bias leads us to believe that we hear women talking more, and
perhaps talking faster.

Our language ideologies about gender make it easy for inaccuracies to spread— in this case, the
misconception that women talk more than men. For Standard American English, there is no evidence to
support this claim. Instead, factors like social context and power dynamics impact the amount of talk
time people perceive in group settings.

In some contexts, it seems that men might talk more, but the data does not support the idea that either
gender speaks more. Individuals vary from day to day, but gender is not a good predictor of who uses
fewer or more words. Indeed, our preconceived ideas about gender may override our actual perception
of language. In some cases so much that reality is distorted.

WOMEN BREAKS THE RULE OF TURN-TAKING LESS THAN MEN

Studies in the area of language and gender often make use of two models or paradigms - that of
dominance and that of difference. The first is associated with Dale Spender (1980), Pamela Fishman
(1980), Don Zimmerman and Candace West (1975), while the second is associated with Deborah Tannen
(1984). Dominance can be attributed to the fact that in mixed-sex conversations, men are more likely to
interrupt than women. The results of a study by Smith-Lovin and Brody (1989) seem to indicate that
men discriminate in their interruptions, choosing to interrupt women more often then men, while
women do not discriminate.

WOMEN USE MORE STANDARD FORMS THAN MEN

Much of the literature in this area seems to indicate that men have a tendency to use more forms in the
vernacular while women gravitate towards the prestige forms of a language. According to Lakoff (1975)
women are likely to use more standard forms of the language than men. This is supported by Macaulay
(1977) who, in a study of lower-middle class men and women in Glascow, found that men tended to
prefer the vernacular pronunciation while women more often used the prestige form. More recently,
Holmes (2001) reports that in Detroit, the vernacular “double negative” appeared more commonly in
men’s speech

WOMEN’S SPEECH IS LESS DIRECT/ASSERTIVE THAN MEN,

Lakoff (1975) was perhaps the first to note many of the linguistic items researchers today use to identify
indirect speech in women’s language. Robin Lakoff published an influential account of women’s
language in her book entitled Language and Woman’s Plac. Holmes (2001) and O’Barr and Atkins (1998)
have both constructed convenient lists of Lakoff’s “women’s language”. The Holmes (2001) version is
reproduced below:

(a) Lexical hedges or fillers, e.g. you know, sort of, well, you see.

(b) Tag questions, e.g. she’s very nice, isn’t she?

(c) Rising intonation on declaratives, e.g. it’s really good?

(d) ‘Empty’ adjectives, e.g. divine, charming, cute.

(e) Precise color terms, e.g. magenta, aquamarine.

(f) Intensifiers such as just and so, e.g. I like him so much.

(g) ‘Hypercorrect’ grammar, e.g. consistent use of standard verb forms.

(h) ‘Superpolite’ forms, e.g. indirect requests, euphemisms.

(i) Avoidance of strong swear words, e.g. fudge, my goodness.

(j) Emphatic stress, e.g. it was a BRILLIANT performance

With the exceptions of d, e, f, g and j, these are all indications of indirect speech. O’Barr and Atkins
(1998) in their study of women’s language in courtroom settings found that while many women did
make use of the language items that Lakoff suggested, there was a great deal of variation in that usage.
As a result of their study, O'Barr and Atkins (1980) concluded that the quoted speech patterns were
neither characteristic of all women nor limited only to women. Therefore, the women who used the
lowest frequency of women's language traits had an unusually high status (according to the
researchers). They were welleducated professionals with middle class backgrounds. A corresponding
pattern was noted among the men who spoke with a low frequency of women's language traits. O'Barr
and Atkins tried to emphasize that a powerful position might derive from either social standing in the
larger society and/or status accorded by the court.

CONCLUSION

The purpose of this paper was to help us understand more about language and gender and how men
and women use language. As it was been shown, there is no much evidence to support many of these
claims. Results in the analysis showed that there does not seem to be a distinguishable difference with
respect to the usage of language by men and women.

Reference

1 https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-
artslaw/cels/essays/sociolinguistics/FOlivieraSocioling.pdf

2 https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/marriage-equals/201910/do-women-really-talk-more-
men

3 https://blog.pimsleur.com/2018/11/19/language-ideologies-do-women-really-talk-more-than-men/