3

1. Introduction The language and gender (L&G) Studies begun as part of the much larger Women’s movement, which Tucker 2003:199). Two different views have been advanced as to the relationship between language and gender.

The first view is that the gender differences in the language are the reflection of the way society works. And the second view states that “the language serves as a primary means of constructing and maintaining the society” (O’grady & Dobrovolsky 1997:517). There is truth in both of these views. To clarify the two statements made by O’grady and Dobrovolsky, my term paper shall treat the correlation between sexual orientation of the speaker and fought against the “ever present inequality between the sexes” (Paulston & language use. The words language and gender can lead to confusion, when we use the both words in the same context. It may help to start with short explanation of the terms sex and gender.

The word gender is a social construct, which we can associate with certain behaviour (Thomas et al.). Today feminists make a difference between sex and gender. In comparison with gender, sex is based on biology and it is a category, predetermined before birth (Thomas et al.). On the basis of these two definitions, I will try to give an answer of questions like “Do women and men talk differently? “ or “What is meant by sexist language?” and if there is sexist language against men, is there a linguistic discrimination? I will study both the reasons for different varieties used by women and men and the consequences from these gender differentiations. My term paper shall look at the typical forms of language use, in this case, in relation to gender. I will aim to find the possible reasons for genderbased differences. There are many factors which define the women’s language, how do the women speak, why they use certain vocabulary, which is not typical of men. Some of the influencing factors could be social and political, the long odds in the education between the women and men in the past. How does influences and shapes the women’s language? The answer so that and many other questions shall be the subject of my term paper.

4

2. The forms and functions of talk 2.1 Do women and men often talk differently?

I would like to begin this chapter with a classic example of linguistic sex differentiation. The Europeans discovered and reported that men and women ‘spoke different languages’ after they arrived in the Lesser Antilles. On the base on their contacts and conversations with the native Caribbean Indians, the Europeans made this discovery (Trudgill 1983). A report from the seventeenth century says:

The men have a great many expressions peculiar to them, which the women understand but

never pronounce themselves. On the other hand the women have words and phrases which the

men never use, or they would be laughed to scorn. Thus is happens that in their conversations it

often seems as if the women had another language than the men (Trudgill 1983:79).

From the above quotation we could establish that there were clear differences between men’s and women’s speech but this doesn’t mean that they spoke two different languages. They spoke two different varieties of the same language (Trudgill 1983). In this case the mentioned differences were only lexical. But we can talk about lexical, phonological and ideological differences. There has been a considerable amount of research in this area. The research findings testify that there are quite dramatic differences in the ways men and women talk. The evidence suggests that “men on the whole talk far more than women” (Thomas et al. 2004:86). This is important because it shows ideology at work. The assumption of the fact that the women talk more than men is not true. Many research papers show quite the contrary and namely that it is men who tend to dominate the conversation. In this way the women and their activities tend to be undervalued. There are many terms which described women’s talk as gossip, chatter, nag and rabbit (Thomas et al. 2004). All these terms are seldom used about men’s talk. These definitions of women’s language aim to create the impression that the women’s talk is “plentiful but rather pointless” (Thomas et al. 2004: 86). Lakoff characteristics of women’s language include adjectives such as empty, divine and cute (Coates & Cameron 1988). Other researches shows that the men interrupt women more often than they interrupt other men, more than women interrupt men and far more than women interrupt women. All this confirm

5

the false conviction that the men have much more right to speak than women (Thomas et al. 2004).

There are many differences between men’s and women’s use of language. They can be quite small or big. There is evidence, that at the level of phonology women and men vary in their pronunciation. Trudgill noticed that women’s vowels are more peripheral (more front, more back, higher and lower) than men’s in many accents of the American English (Trudgill 1983). At the times the differences can be quite large. For example, in Gros Ventre, palatalized dental stops in men’s speech correspond to palatalized velar stops in the speech of women- men: /djarsa/; women: /kjatsal/ ‘bread’ (Trudgill 1983). Trudgill makes it clear that even from phonetic point of view there are some differences between the speech of women and men.

2.2 Back channel support At the very beginning of this chapter I have to make clear what does Back channel support means? Back channel support could be verbal and non- verbal feedback which the listeners give to the speakers (Thomas et al. 2004). Nicola Wood has written on this and her research is the workplace. She focuses on six groups of three speakers: three groups consisted of a male boss with one female, and three of a female boss with one male. At the end of this research Wood’s results showed quite clear that male speakers interrupt more frequently and they received far more minimal responses (Coates & Cameron 1988) like mmm, uhuh, oh, yeah. Listeners can give back channel support by nodding, smiling or by other body language. This verbal or non- verbal feedback ensures the speakers that they are being listened to. Sometimes the back channel support can have also a negative side, namely it can lead to speakers hesitating and confusion. That’s why we have to be careful when we are giving back channel support.

2.3 Basic assumptions of women’s languages

Some studies published a set of basic assumption about what marks out the language of women. Women have been shown to use more hedges. Hedges are “linguistic forms which ‘dilute’ an assertion” (Thomas et al. 2004:88). Such phrases are: sort of, kind of, it seems like, and so on. The women are often using (super)