Language and Power

SOAN 103 (N. Seroujian)

Resource: Delaney, Carol, and Deborah Kaspin. 2011.
Investigating Culture: An Experiential Introduction to
Anthropology. Second Edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
 Sociolinguistics

• Sociolinguistics: is the study of the social uses of

language, the study of language in use.

• Sociolinguistics scholars are interested in studying regional

variations in speaking, as well as how race, class, and
gender are intertwined with language use, and how power
is enacted linguistically.
• This week, we will dive into the relationship between I-
language and gender, II- language and race, III- language
and class.
 I - Language and Gender:
First: What is gender? What is the difference between sex and gender?

• Sex refers to the physical and biological differences between male and
female human beings (chromosomes, external and internal genitalia,
endocrine systems, reproductive organs, etc.)
• Gender refers to the expectations of thought and behavior that each culture
assigns to people of different sexes. In other words, gender refers to the
social and cultural meanings of male and female.
• The concept of gender developed in the 1970s following feminist movements.
Before that, most people assumed that “biology is destiny” and that our
biological sex determined our social role. However, if that were the case, then
sex roles and definitions would be the same worldwide, which is absolutely
not the case.
• By 1970s, feminist anthropologists adopted the term “gender” to emphasize
that awareness and to leverage ethnographic knowledge to challenge
prevailing Euro-American definitions of masculinity and femininity.
Anthropology of
Gender
• Anthropologists have long studied the
social and cultural roles assigned to
individuals based on sex.
• Famous American anthropologist,
Margaret Mead, is known for her
pioneering fieldwork in Samoa,
published in “Coming of Age in Samoa”:
 She found that adolescent girls do not
go through similar emotional changes
around the world, and culture plays a
role in bodily acceptance and gender
identity.
 The concept of “gender”:
• The word gender was first and foremost a linguistic term, referring to the way
some languages classify words according to sex.
• For example, the articles le and la in French both mean the, but le modifies
masculine nouns, as in le soleil (the sun), while la modifies feminine nouns, as in
la lune (the moon). The gender of the noun also determines the indefinite article
(“a”), as in un and une.
• Once the anthropological concept of gender was invented, it was adopted and
elaborated by scholars in a number of different fields.
• However, the word (and the concept) gender does not exist in many languages.
Examples:
It does not exist in French, and French feminists have not tried to adopt it;
instead, their strategy is to use only sex but try to show that it is not just about
biology.
Persian, also, does not have a separate word for gender and sex. The same
word, jensit, is used for both concepts.
 Grammatically genderless vs
gender-neutral
Many genders are grammatically genderless, though
they are not necessarily gender-neutral.

Some examples of grammatically genderless languages:

- Indo-European languages: Persian, Armenian
- Uralic languages: Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian
- Turkic languages: Turkish, Tatar, Kazakh
 Pronouns
• One of the first linguistic issues concerning gender had to do with pronouns,
Namely, the use of he to stand for both she and he is similar to how the generic man
intends to stand for both men and women.
Although we assume that the general pronoun covers men and women, it is not
immediately obvious. Sometimes it does include both, but just as often it is intended to
refer only to males.
• Through the consciousness-raising movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, women
began to hear themselves excluded in the very language around them:
 For example, when a teacher said to a mother of a daughter, “every student must do his
own homework,” or when a politician said that “every voter must follow his own conscience”
• Along with the discussion of pronouns came the awareness that a woman's marital status,
but not a man's, was linguistically indicated.
Two forms of address, Miss and Mrs., contrast with just one, Mr., for men.
To change this unequal treatment, women campaigned for Ms. to apply to all women, but
this has only been met with limited success.
In addition, married women's identities are further erased when addressed as Mrs. John
Smith. Other words distinguish gender in English, such as actor and actress, waiter and
waitress, and poet and poetess.
Exclusionary language in
scholarly texts:
Excerpt from famous
anthropologist and ethnographer
Bronislaw Malinowski’s
Introduction to his book “The
Argonauts of the Western Pacific”
(1922), which became a
foundational text in modern
anthropology.
 What does gendered language
do?
• Gendered language, even something seemingly neutral as a
pronoun, creates images that are difficult to supplant in the
mind.
• They affect the way we imagine things to be, and that
affects the way we respond.
• What happens to girls when the books they read use only
the male pronoun to refer to doctors, lawyers,
archaeologists, or professors, and the female pronoun only
in reference to nurses, teachers, or librarians?
 Gendered Talk
• Other scholars were interested in the way that language is used by each
gender
Noticing that gender hierarchies display themselves in all domains of social
behavior, not the least of which is talk.
Girls are socialized to talk differently than boys.
• As a result, women's talk is more tentative and does not command the same
attention as men's speech:
in part because of rising intonation (at the end of sentences that are not
questions),
"hedges" (as in "I kind of wanted to go"),
qualifiers ("That was so very, very nice of you"), distinction phrases ("Oh dear, I
dropped the house keys"),
tag questions ("That looks okay, doesn't it?") versus direct commands.
• Others, such as Deborah Tannen, have observed conversation style among
men and women. See next slide for discussion on Tannen’s text.
 Conversation Style – Deborah
Tannen
1. How can we define conversation style? How do we interpret
conversations?
2. According to Tannen, gender is a fundamental categorization. Explain.
3. What is the reason why ways of talking or other forms of everyday
behavior come to seem as natural?
4. How do different conversation styles cause misunderstanding in the
workplace?
5. “Someone who takes a job is entering a world that is already functioning,
with its own characteristic style already in place”. Explain.
6. According to Tannen, why do men avoid asking others for directions or
help in the workplace?
7. What conclusions do men and women draw about each other when they
display typically different approaches to asking directions?
II- Language and Race
First, how to define race?
 Mainstream idea about race: Belonging to a specific group based
on physical characteristics and shared ancestry.

 Anthropological view of race:

- There is no such thing as race
- Overlap between people whose surface physiognomy appears
different is so great as to make the category of “race” meaningless.
- Recent breakthroughs in genetics, DNA, and the human genome
confirm this.
- We are all one human race: we share 98 percent of our DNA with
chimpanzees.
 Race as a social construct
• Even though anthropologists believe that race does not exist as a “natural”
category, it does exist as a social category, and it holds enormous power, often
causing division and suffering.
• The concept of race has been created to draw differences between an “us” and
a “them”.
• Rather than dismiss the notion of race, as the biological and genetic data would
dictate, it is important to investigate its construction.
 As a social category, race denotes a particular way in which communal
differences come to be constructed and therefore it cannot be erased from the
analytical map.
We understand racism is a mode of exclusion, inferiorization, subordination, and
exploitation based on the assumption of racial differences.
 In Orientalism, Edward Said examined the racist attitudes of Europeans toward
the “Orientals”. He reflected on the language employed by European writers
and scholars in their works that depict the Orient as a backward place.
 Racist Language
• Many derogatory terms have been used throughout history in
the context of colonization, slavery, and occupation. These
terms hold enormous symbolic power and showcase the
threat of violence. They are not simply used to hurt but to
invoke power and reveal colonial authority.
• Language is a tool to perpetuate racism. Many people make
derogatory remarks about someone’s intelligence based on
their manner of speaking and ethnic accent. For example,
Linguist Nicholas Subtirelu has studied how, in student
evaluations of Asian American professors, many students
have mentioned the instructor’s accent, questioning their
competency.
 III – Language and Class
• How can we define class?
• Class: is a system of power based on wealth, income, and status. Systems of class
stratify individual’s life chances and impact their possibilities for upward social mobility.

• How does class impact speech and language? According to sociolinguists, people from
different class backgrounds speak differently:
“Bankers clearly do not talk the same as busboys, and professors don’t sound like
plumbers. They signal the social differences between them by features of the phonology,
grammar, and lexical choice, just as they do extralinguistically by their choices in clothing,
cars, and so on.” (Guy 1988: 37).
• People are judged by the way they speak, and the judgments determine how others will
respond, if at all.
• Speaking is a marker of class, but grammar plays a role too. Grammar mistakes could
define a person’s background and education, though even educated people could make
grammatical mistakes.
• Some examples: The difference between “I” and “me”. Good vs. well. Pronunciation:
Breakfrist for breakfast, nukular instead of nuclear.