Language and gender

Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between language and gender is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, cultural studies, feminist media studies, feminist psychology, gender studies, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistics, mediated stylistics, sociolinguistics and media studies. Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between language and gender is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, cultural studies, feminist media studies, feminist psychology, gender studies, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistics, mediated stylistics, sociolinguistics and media studies. In methodological terms, there is no single approach that could be said to 'hold the field'. Discursive, poststructural, ethnomethodological, ethnographic, phenomenological, positivist and experimental approaches can all be seen in action during the study of language and gender, producing and reproducing what Susan Speer has described as 'different, and often competing, theoretical and political assumptions about the way discourse, ideology and gender identity should be conceived and understood'. As a result, research in this area can perhaps most usefully be divided into three main areas of study: first, there is a broad and sustained interest in the varieties of speech associated with a particular gender; second, there is a related interested in the social norms and conventions that (re)produce gendered language use (a variety of speech (or sociolect) associated with a particular gender is sometimes called a genderlect); and third, there are studies that focus on the contextually specific and locally situated ways in which gender is constructed and operationalized. The study of gender and language in sociolinguistics and gender studies is often said to have begun with Robin Lakoff's 1975 book, Language and Woman's Place, as well as some earlier studies by Lakoff. The study of language and gender has developed greatly since the 1970s. Prominent scholars include Deborah Tannen, Penelope Eckert, Janet Holmes, Mary Bucholtz, Kira Hall, Deborah Cameron, and others. The 1995 edited volume Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self is often referred to as a central text on 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, and Origin. 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 as the deficit, dominance, difference, and dynamic approaches. Deficit is an approach attributed to Jespersen that defines adult male language as the standard, and women's language as deficient. 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 by using men's as a benchmark. 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 subscribe to this view.