GENDER AND ALLEF CAVALCANTE,

LANGUAGE ANDRÉ CARDOSO,

RAFAEL VELOSO E

VARIATION WELLINGTON RUAN

INTRODUCTION
 Few topics in language-variation have witnessed an explosion of
interest on language and gender;
 Studies of languages like Japanese, in which men and women use
different language forms;
 This studies were viewed as relatively minor or uninteresting, but
nowadays situation has changed;
 English language has collection of studies, anthologies and books;
 Social factors rather than biological sex;
 Gender is used to capture the complex of social, cultural and
psychological phenomena;
 “Sex” refers simply to female or male physiology;

How do men and women talk differently?

EXPLAINING CROSS-SEX
LANGUAGE DIFFERENCES:
REPORTED IN DIALECT
SURVEYS
1. Woman tend to use more standard language features than men;
2. Girls tend to use more word-final –ing than boys, who use more
nonstandard –in’ variant;
3. African American females use more the sound in the end of with
than men, which tend to produce as [wit] or [wif];
4. Females produce more postvocalic r’s than men, as well as less
multiple negation (e.g. I didn’t tell nothing);
CONTRADICTION
1. Women are conservative than men. At the same time, women appear
to be more progressive than men, because they adopt new variants
more quickly.

2. Women indeed were more conservative in their use of certain

language features, those connected with stable sociolinguistic
variables (e.g. –in’ vs. –ing) an those which were involved in older
language changes.

3. Labov also showed that the patterning of male-female language

differences depends not only on the language feature in question but
also on the social class of the speaker.
EXPLAINING CROSS-SEX
LANGUAGE DIFFERENCES:
THE PRESTIGE-BASED
APPROACH
 Women are more prestige-conscious than men;
 Women in the lower middle class are most likely to avoid stigmatized features and adopt
prestige features;
Reasons:
1. The transmission of culture through childrearing;
2. The social position of women in our society;
3. The different occupational roles of men and women.
Men are seeing by what they do.
Women are seeing by how they appear.
 The author says that this theory fails in a point. Always relates to women’s speech;
 Some communities do not follow this structure. Ocracoke English on the Outer Banks of
North Carolina;
 CONTACT-BASED
EXPLANATION
 Researchers proposed that cross-gender differences had more to do with contact
than social prestige;
 Vernacular speech communities in US: women had wider language norms than men;

 Nichols (1983) investigated the use of vernacular Creole for two groups of Gullah
speakers in coastal South Carolina:

1. Younger groups of female speakers showed to be ahead of men in standard

norms;

2. Older women used more vernacular than older males

 Nichols attributed that because men had a wider network;

Contact-based explanations can be used for some patterns but not for all the
multifarious patterns we find abroad;
POWER-BASED
EXPLANATIONS
1. Women have little power in most communities when compared with
men, they seek to acquire such power in symbolic ways.

2. Symbolic group affiliation is more important to women than men.

3. In Ocracoke community, which economy is being transformed to one

based tourism, women are gaining increasing earning power as the
economy changes.

4. For men is different: it may well be that vernacular variants are more
closely associated with economic power than standard variants.
 THE “FEMALE DEFICIT”

APPROACH
Otto Jesperson wrote “Language: Its nature, Development and Origin”
(1922);
 Robin Lakoff published an article “Language and women’s place” (1973);
 Three situations Lakoff agrees women’s speech is weaker than men’s:
1. Heavy use of tag questions;
2. Questions intonation on statements;
3. “Weak” directives.
 Lakoff did not research about this statistics and politeness could be confused
with weakness;
 Researchers do not agree with popular beliefs about men’s and women’s
speeches;
 THE CULTURAL
DIFFERENCE APPROACH
Is grounded on the belief that women’s and men’s speech are
different because they grow up in separate speech communities ;
 Women and men have different notions of how conversations are
supposed to work and regards the role of conversational interaction;
 It happens because girls and boys are in single sex groups during
the learning stages of interpersonal interaction;
 Girls: cooperation, equality and emotionally charged friendship;
 Boys: hierarchical, competitive and “proving themselves”
Eg¹: if a man dominates by interrupting or taking long turns, the
woman may feel that he does not care about her ideas;
 Conversations as contests rather than cooperative exchanges;
 THE CULTURAL
DIFFERENCE APPROACH
Eg²: women feel that men “aren’t trying” when they fail to
understand underlying meanings on simple statements
“I wonder what I should do about that problem at work”
“Quit” or “Put up with it”

 Tannen have been criticized for emphasizing that women need to

“learn” how to read men instead of men learning cooperative
conversational styles;
 Perhaps the biggest concern is that this approach tends to
downplay power relations;
THE “DOMINANCE” THEORY
1. “Male conversational style” almost always seem to be
characteristic of speech which is uncooperative or disruptive in
some way.
2. Men take up more conversational time than women.
3. Men’s “misunderstandings” of women’s conversational style are
often quite intentional.
4. Men seem to show no difficulty in understanding and even
engaging in “female-like” conversational behavior when it suit
their purposes.
5. They sometimes derive from unwillingness to understand.
FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS
IN THE STUDY OF GENDER-
BASED LANGUAGE
DIFFERENCES
Researches have shown women are more concerned with the
prestige features than men so it is not related to biological aspects.

Researchers focuses more in how the speaker reacts in the sound

changes. In addition, they are trying to emphasize in other social
factors, as ethnicity, cultural background and age.

Men’s speech is not being considered as the “norm”, but it is being

studied as a gender speech.
GENERIC HE AND MAN
 He, his or him to refer a sex-indefinite antecedent:
e.g. If anybody reads this book, he will learn about dialects;

 Alternatives to generic male pronoun were quite acceptable during

earlier period of history (Bodine1975):
e.g. If anybody reads this book, they will learn about dialects;

 These alternatives were gradually legislated out of acceptable

usage by prescriptive grammarians;
 In 1746, the grammarian John Kirby included in his EIGHTY-EIGHT
GRAMMATICAL RULES the rule that “the male gender was more
comprehensive than the female” (quoted in Miller 1994);

 The Lawmakers spoke out against generic they and other alternatives to
generic he;

 A law passed by the British Parliament in 1850 stated that “in all acts words
importing the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include
female”;

 The noun Man to refer to Humankind:

e.g. Man shall not live by bread alone;

 The word man, in Old English, was a real generic and could be used in place
of both the feminine and masculine. (Frank and Anshen 1983)
 In recent year, grammar books increasingly have been legislating
against the use of generic he;
 The inclusion of sections on how to avoid using generic he without
“improperly” using generic they;
1. Students are taught to pluralize sex-indefinite antecedents:
e.g. If people read this book, they will learn about dialects;

2. Using the phrase he or she or she or he:

e.g. If anyone reads this book, he or she will learn about dialects;

3. Alternating generic he with generic she:

e.g. If anyone reads this book, he will learn about dialects. The
student will thus find that her knowledge of language patterning
has been greatly increased;
FAMILY AND ADDRESSES
 The traditional adoption by women of the husband’s family name
may signify “that women’s family names do not count and that there
is one more device for making women invisible” (Spender 1980:24)

 Women traditionally have had to use tittles which indicate their

marital status, Mrs or Miss, while both married and unmarried men
are known simply as Mr.;

 Men are typically more respected and treated with more formality
than women;
Sir x Ma’am
 Women are also more frequently addressed informally as dear,
honey, and sweetie in social contexts where men of comparable
RELATIONSHIPS AND
ASSOCIATIONS
 As we saw before, women are defined in term of the men with
whom they are associated;

 Associations such as man and wife, but not woman and

husband, or more common use of the designation Walt’s wife as
opposed to Marge’s husband;

 Conventional placement of male before female in coordinate

constructions:
Husband and wife but not wife and husband
Host and hostess but not hostess and host
Prescriptive grammarians writing as early as the
mid-1600s indicated that the male gender should
always be placed first because it is the “worthier”.
(Spender 1980:147)

 Well, so why is found in the public address salutation,

“Ladies and Gentlemen!”? How might we explain this
apparent exception to the more general pattern of placing the
male first?
LABELING
 Unequal male-female power relations;
 Unequal levels of respect;
 The age span typically covered by items such as boy-girl and
man-woman;
e.g. Older women are much more likely to be referred girls than
older men are to be referred to as boys:
A person might say “I met this real nice girl” in reference
to a 30-year-old female, but one would hardly say “I met this real
nice boy” to refer to 30-year-old male;
 In paired masculine and feminine lexical items, it has been
noted that the feminine member of the pair often undergoes
SEMANTIC DEROGATION (Schulz 1975);
Mister/Mistress
Governor/Governess
Bachelor/Spinster
 Even when feminine items are directly derived from
masculine items with the addition of a suffix, as in
bachelorette or poetess, the new word often takes on
connotations of lessened significance or respectability;

 One dictionary’s survey shows that masculine words

outnumber feminine words by three times, and masculine
words denoting prestige are six times as frenquent as
feminine words with prestige;
 Vocabularies which are clearly indicatives of male and female
behavior, maintained by de society;
 Julia P. Stanley (1977) found only 20 items describing
promiscuous men:
e.g. animal, letch
 Some of which carried some positive connotations:
e.g. stud, Casanova
 Stanley stopped counting when she reached 220 labels for
promiscuous women:
e.g. whore, slut, tramp
 Women tend to be labeled with reference to consumable items
such as foods, but men not:
e.g. peach, sugar, cheesecake etc.
THE QUESTION OF
LANGUAGE REFORM
 If we change the language will alter the unequal position of
men and women in society or if achieving increased social
equality must precede increased linguistic equality?

 One answer might be that language simply mirrors

sociocultural patterns: if a society treats women as unequal,
then language will simply provide the symbolic mechanism
for displaying society’s underlying discriminatory bases;
HOW TO AVOID SEXIST LANGUAGE?

1. Whenever possible, use plurals (people, they) and other appropriate

alternatives, rather than only masculine pronouns and “pseudo-generics”
such as man, unless referring specifically to males;

2. Avoid generic statements which inaccurately refer only to one sex (e.g.
“Speakers use language for many purposes – to argue with their wives…”
or “Americans use lots of obscenities but not around women”);

3. Whenever possible, use terms that avoid sexual stereotyping. Such terms
as serve, professor, and nurse can be effectively used as gender neutral;
marked terms like waitress, lady professor, and male nurse cannot;

(from the Linguistic Society of America Guidelines for Nonsexist Usage,

approved by the LSA Executive Committee, May 1995)
REFERENCES
WOLFRAM, W. SCHILLING-ESTES, N. Gender and language variation.
In:_______. American English: dialects and variation. Oxford:
Backwell, 1998.