Language and Sex
A major issue in the sociolinguistics of speech is the relationship between sex and language. Since the mid-1970s research on language and sex has concentrated on the role language plays in the location and maintenance of women in a disadvantageous position in society.
Before this, linguists had taken an interest in sex and language in two other respects. The earlier of these was the presence in a few languages of lexical, phonological, morphological forms that are used only or predominantly by speakers of one sex or the other. More recently, in earlier research in sociolinguistics, sex was investigated as an independent variable related to linguistic variables, along with social status, style, age and ethnicity.
At the time most of the studies were done, linguists were most interested in sex-related linguistic features as purely linguistic phenomenon, and secondarily as a possible cause and effect of the relation between men and women in a social and political sense was not to develop until sixties.
Do women and men speak differently? English speakers are often aware that the answer to this question is almost “yes” for all speech communities.
The linguistic forms used by women and men contrast – to different degrees – in all speech communities. There are other ways too in when the linguistic behaviour of women and men differ. It is claimed women are more linguistically polite than men, for instance, and that women and men emphasize different speech functions.
Sex differences in language are often just one aspect of more pervasive linguistic differences in the society reflecting social status or power differences. If a community is very hierarchical, for instance, and within each level of the hierarchy men are more powerful than women, then linguistic differences between the speech of women and men just one dimension of more extensive differences reflecting the social hierarchy as a whole.
I can give you one particular example of an experience I had during my several journeys to the Indian subcontinent:
In Bengali society, for instance, a younger person should not address a superior by first name. Similarly wife, being subordinate to her husband, is not permitted to use her husband’s name. She addresses him with a term such as s u n c h o ‘do you hear?’ When she refers to him she uses a circumlocution. One nice example of this practice is provides by the Bengali wife whose husband’s name was t a r a , which also
means ‘star’. Since she could not call him t a r a, his wife used the term n o k k h o t r o or ‘heavenly body’ to refer to him. This point – the inter-relationship of sex with other factors – is illustrated even more clearly later.
The fact that there are clearly identifiable differences between women’s and men’s speech in the communities discussed here reflects the clearly demarcated sex roles in these communities. Sex-exclusive speech forms (i.e. some forms are used only by women and others are used only by men) reflect sex-exclusive social roles. The responsibilities of woman and men are different in such communities, and everyone
knows that, and knows what they are. There are no arguments over who prepares the dinner and who puts children to bed.
Not surprisingly in western communities where women’s and men’s social roles overlap, the speech forms they use also overlap. In other words women and men do not use completely different forms. They use different quantities or frequencies of the same forms.
Across all social groups women use more standard forms then men and so, correspondingly, men use more vernacular forms than women. In Detroit, for
Instance, multiple negation (e.g. I don’t know nothing about it), a vernacular feature of speech, is more frequent in men’s speech than in women’s. this is true in every social group but the difference is most dramatic in the second highest social group (the lower middle class) where the men’s multiple negation score is 32 per cent compared to only 1 per cent for women.
This pattern is a typical one for many grammatical features. In many speech communities, 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. What is the explanation for it? Why does female and male speech differ in this way?