Language and Gender - Studies of Language and Gender

Studies of Language and Gender

In 1975 Robin Lakoff identified a "women's register," which she argued served to maintain women's (inferior) role in society. Lakoff argued that women tend to use linguistic forms that reflect and reinforce a subordinate role. These include tag questions, question intonation, and "weak" directives, among others (see also Speech practices associated with gender, below).

Studies such as Lakoff's have been labeled the "deficit approach," since they posit that one gender is deficient in terms of the other. Descriptions of women's speech as deficient can actually be dated as far back as Otto Jespersen's "The Woman," a chapter in his 1922 book Language: Its Nature and Development. Jespersen's idea that women's speech is deficient relative to a male norm went largely unchallenged until Lakoff's work appeared fifty years later. Nevertheless, despite the political incorrectness of the chapter's language from a modern perspective, Jespersen's contributions remain relevant. These include the prospect of language change based on social and gendered opportunity, lexical and phonological differences, and the idea of genderlects and gender roles influence language.

Not long after the publication of Language and Woman's Place, other scholars began to produce studies that both challenged Lakoff's arguments and expanded the field of language and gender studies. One refinement of the deficit argument is the so-called "dominance approach," which posits that gender differences in language reflect power differences in society.

Jennifer Coates outlines the historical range of approaches to gendered speech in her book Women, Men and Language She contrasts the four approaches known the deficit, dominance, difference, and dynamic approaches.

"Deficit" is an approach established by Lakoff (1975) that introduces a 'women's language' as classified by linguistic trends in women's speech. This approach created a dichotomy between women's language and men's language. This triggered criticism to the approach in that highlighting issues in women's language treated men's language as the standard. As such, women's language was considered to have something inherently 'wrong' with it.

Dominance is an approach whereby the female sex is seen as the subordinate group whose difference in style of speech results from male supremacy and also possibly an effect of patriarchy. This results in a primarily male-centered language. Scholars such as Dale Spender and Don Zimmerman and Candace West ascribe to this view.

Difference is an approach of equality, differentiating men and women as belonging to different 'sub-cultures' as they have been socialised to do so since childhood. This then results in the varying communicative styles of men and women. Deborah Tannen is a major advocate of this position. Tannen compares gender differences in language to cultural differences. Comparing conversational goals, she argues that men tend to use a "report style," aiming to communicate factual information, whereas women more often use a "rapport style," which is more concerned with building and maintaining relationships.

The "dynamic" or "social constructionist" approach is, as Coates describes, the most current approach to language and gender. Instead of speech falling into a natural gendered category, the dynamic nature and multiple factors of an interaction help a socially appropriate gendered construct. As such, West and Zimmerman (1987) describe these constructs as "doing gender" instead of the speech itself necessarily being classified in a particular category. This is to say that these social constructs, while affiliated with particular genders, can be utilized by speakers as they see fit.

Scholars including Tannen and others argue that differences are pervasive across media, including face-to-face conversation, written essays of primary school children, email, and even toilet graffiti.

Deborah Cameron, among other scholars, argues that there are problems with both the dominance and the difference approach. Cameron notes that throughout the history of scholarship on language and gender male-associated forms have been seen as the unmarked norm from which the female deviates. For example the norm 'manager' becomes the marked form 'manageress' when referring to a female counterpart. On the other hand, Cameron argues that what the difference approach labels as different ways of using or understanding language are actually displays of differential power. Cameron suggests, "It is comforting to be told that nobody needs to 'feel awful': that there are no real conflicts, only misunderstandings. But the research evidence does not support the claims made by Tannen and others about the nature, the causes, and the prevalence of male-female miscommunication." She argues that social differences between men's and women's roles are not clearly reflected in language use. One additional example is a study she has done on call center operators in the UK, where these operators are trained to be scripted in what they say and to perform the necessary 'emotional labor'(smiling, expressive intonation, showing rapport/empathy and giving minimal responses) for their customer-callers. This emotional labor is commonly associated with the feminine domain, and the call center service workers are also typically females. However, the male workers in this call center do not orient to the covertly gendered meanings when they are tasked to perform this emotional labor. While this does not mean that the 'woman's language' is revalued, nor does this necessarily call for a feminist celebration, Cameron highlights that it is possible that with time, more men may work in this service industry, and this may lead to a subsequent "de-gendering" of this linguistic style.

Communication styles are always a product of context, and as such, gender differences tend to be most pronounced in single-gender groups. One explanation for this, is that people accommodate their language towards the style of the person they are interacting with. Thus, in a mixed-gender group, gender differences tend to be less pronounced. A similarly important observation is that this accommodation is usually towards the language style, not the gender of the person . That is, a polite and empathic male will tend to be accommodated to on the basis of their being polite and empathic, rather than their being male.

However, Ochs (1992) argues that gender can be indexed directly and indirectly. Direct indexicality is the primary relationship between linguistics resources (such as lexicon, morphology, syntax, phonology, dialect and language) and gender. For example, the pronouns "he" and "she" directly indexes "male" and "female". However, there can be a secondary relationship between linguistic resources and gender where the linguistic resources can index certain acts, activities or stances which then indirectly index gender. In other words, these linguistic resources help constitute gender. Examples include the Japanese "wa" and "ze". The former directly index delicate intensity, which then indirectly indexes the male "voice" while the latter directly indexes coarse intensity, which then indirectly indexes the female "voice".