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LANE 422 SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Summarized fromSOCIOLINGUISTICS

An Introduction to Language and SocietyPeter Trudgill

4th edition. 2000,

Prepared byDr. Abdullah S. Al-Shehri

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Chapter 4

Language and Sex

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In this chapter…

We deal with language and sex as yet another aspect of linguistic differentiation.

We will see that there are two linguistic phenomena related to ‘Language and Sex’:

Lexicalization and grammaticalization of gender Linguistic variation between male and female speech

Our focus will be more on the second since it reflects a ‘sociolinguistic’ phenomenon.

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Lexicalization & Grammaticalization of Gender The lexicalization and grammaticalization of gender is a

linguistic universal which is found in all languages of the world.

Languages, however, differ considerably in the way gender is reflected in their lexical and grammatical structures.

In almost all languages of the world there is a difference between the words for ‘male adult human’ and ‘female adult human’ e.g. man – woman; rajul – imra’ah; homme – femme etc.

However, in some languages the word for ‘friend’ has to have an ending that specifies if ‘friend’ is male or female, e.g. Arabic ‘sadeeq’ – ‘sadeeqah’; German ‘freund – ‘freundin’; French ‘ami’ – ‘amie’.

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Grammatically…

The male - female difference is also very often signaled grammatically in the languages of the world with varying degrees.

Some languages, like Hungarian and Finnish, have no sex-marking on pronouns at all. In Finnish, the word hän can be equivalent to either ‘he’ or ‘’she’, and in Hungarian ‘on’ also means both ‘he’ and ‘she’.

Other languages, like English, have sex-marking but only in third person singular – ‘he’ versus ‘she’ – while others, such as French, have it also in the third person plural: ‘ils’ (‘they’, masculine) as apposed to ‘elles’ (they, feminine)’.

Other languages have it also in some forms of the second person: Spanish has ‘vosotros’ (you, plural, masculine)’ and ‘vosotras’ (you, plural, feminine)’. Arabic has ‘antum’ – ‘antunna’.

Some languages have sex-marking in the first person plural ‘we’: Spanish has ‘nosotros’ – ‘nosotras’.

Gender can also be indicated through the use of articles and adjectives, as in French: ‘une étudiante tres intelligente’ (feminine) versus ‘un étudiant tres intelligent’ (masculine).

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Lexical and grammatical gender is..

A structural peculiarity of languages that does not correlate with social variables and may not be explained sociolinguistically.

Lexical and grammatical gender marking is usually explained within the domain of descriptive linguistics.

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Linguistic Variation between Male & Female Speech

The other linguistic phenomenon, which is the sociolinguistic one, is the difference in the speech of men and women across languages of the world.

In many societies the speech of men and women differs in all sorts of ways.

In some cases, the difference may be quite large, overtly noted, and even taught to young children acquiring their native language.

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Generally speaking…

Differences of this kind may not be explained in terms of social distance.

In most societies men and women communicate freely with one another, and there appear to be few social barriers likely to influence the density of communication between the sexes.

We cannot therefore explain the development of gender differences in language in the same way as class, ethnic-group, or geographical dialects.

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So…

The question we need to ask is:

Why do men and women speak differently and how do such differences arise?

Let us take a few examples of the kind of differences that have been reported, and attempt to see what factors may have been important in their development:

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The West Indies

The classic example of linguistic sex differentiation comes from the West Indies.

It was reported that when Europeans first arrived in the Lesser Antilles and made contact with the Carib Indians, they discovered that the men and women ‘spoke different languages’.

This of course would have been a very important discovery, and one that does not appear to have been paralleled anywhere else in the world.

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However…

It seems that these reports were stretching things somewhat. What actually was happening is the following:

The men and women did not speak different languages. Rather, they spoke different varieties of the same language and the differences were lexical only.

But, even so, how can we explain these particular differences?

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The ‘invasion’ theory…

The differences, that is, were believed (by the Indians themselves) to be the result of the mixing of two language groups, Carib and Arawak, divided on sex lines, as a result of an ‘invasion’ of the islands by the Carib people.

The invaded people were the Arawak, whose men are believed to have been exterminated by the Caribs, and their women were taken as wives by the Carib invaders in order to populate their tribe.

This historical explanation, however, even if it is true, is less plausible, not scientific, and may not be applied to the origin or development of linguistic gender differences in other parts of the world.

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The ‘Taboo’ explanation…

A more plausible explanation of this phenomenon and other cases around the world is what has been suggested by the linguist Otto Jespersen:

Jesperson suggests that linguistic sex differentiation, in some cases, may be the result of the phenomenon of taboo. He points out that when Carib men were in a war they would use words which only adult male were allowed to use. If women or children used these words bad luck may come to them.

‘Taboo’ may have a powerful influence on the growth of separate sex vocabularies generally, not only in the case of the West Indies but also in many other parts of the world.

If ‘taboo’ is associated with women’s use of particular words, new words are thus likely to be used instead, hence language variation between men and women.

In Zulu, a wife may not mention the name of her father-in-law or his brothers, and she may be put to death if she broke this taboo.

Also in Zulu, some sounds were tabooed for women, and women would have to change their pronunciation of such words, thus resulting in linguistic differentiation.

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Taboo explanation is not enough…

Taboo alone is not particularly good overall explanation of linguistic gender differentiation.

It is not really clear how such differences could become generalized to the whole community.

In the American Indian language Koasati, for example, male-female differences involved different phonological shapes of particular verb forms which has nothing to do with taboo.

It is quite clear from the many non-lexical cases in many languages that taboo is not involved.

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How can we explain differences of this type?

In Koasati and other languages, some female forms appear to be older than the male forms.

Linguistic change seems to have taken place in the male variety.

Women’s speech thus seems to be more conservative and less innovating than that of men.

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The English-Speaking Communities

In all the cases examined in the English-speaking countries, it has been shown that women on average use forms which more closely approach those of the ‘standard variety’ or the ‘prestige’ accent than those used by men.

In other words, female speakers of English tend to use linguistic forms which are considered to be ‘better’ than male forms.

Women, it is suggested, are far more sensitive to the stigmatized nature of some linguistic features than men.

Again, women have been found to use a higher percentage of ‘better’ forms than men do.

For example, in London English, men are more likely than women to use glottal stops in words like butter and but.

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In the Arabic-speaking community…

The investigation of men’s versus women’s speech has produced its own version of male-female differentiation.

Researchers have found that male speech approximated the standard variety.

Studies have shown that, in some Arabic-speaking communities, there are prestige varieties of spoken (colloquial) Arabic (usually dialects of major urban centers) which differ from the standard language, and that women approximate such ‘prestigious’ varieties more often than men.

These studies have shown that men use standard prestigious norms more than women who prefer urban colloquial prestigious norms.

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Finally…

Language, as a social phenomenon, is closely related to social attitudes.

Men and women are socially different and societies often expect different behavior patterns from them.

It is expected that if these social roles change, so will gender language differences.

We now have to suppose that, like signaling one’s ethnic identity through language use, signaling one’s gender identity is equally important.