LL-L "Sociolinguistics" 2008.02.08 (04) [E]

[Lowlands-L List]

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L O W L A N D S - L  -  08 February 2008 - Volume 04
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Sociolinguistics" 2008.02.08 (03) [E]

> From: Marsha Wilson <marshatrue at mtangel.net>
> Subject: LL-L "Resources" 2008.02.08 (01) [E]
>
> My 72-year-old husband uses an inhaled elongated "oh" when expressing
> something like astonishment.  It sounds rather like a gasp.  He is
> from Wyoming/Montana but worked for some time in Finland.  He has no
> idea when/where he started doing this.  I, too, find it weird,
> annoying, and in public, embarrassing, as it seems a purely feminine
> habit and an overly exaggerated response.  Why I think that it is
> feminine was lost to me, but perhaps you've explained it for me - a
> inborn "race memory."

I do this in Scots a lot, somewhat less in English. It definitely seems
a feminine thing to me, which I picked up from my mother and her sisters
and friends.

The fact that I learned it from women wouldn't stop me from using it,
though!

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

----------

From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Sociolinguistics" 2008.02.07 (06) [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Sociolinguistics
>
> There are or at least used to be extremes, such as societies
> (especially in Oceania), in which men and women speak different
> languages among themselves and have a lingua franca between them. What
> this means in most cases is that boys start being raised with the
> neutral language but having rudimentary exposure to women's language
> before they move into the men's huts and acquire the men's language.

Something similar happens in Irish Sign Language due to there being two
Dublin schools for the Deaf, St Joseph's for boys and St Mary's for
girls. It's been noted by researchers that although the two sign
languages used by the schools can seem mutually unintelligible (though
this is never such a problem in sign languages as in spoken languages),
in adult life the women tend to adopt the men's language for the sake of
communication.

In British Sign Language (and I guess most other sign languages) gender
differences aren't particularly marked, although I've noticed one or two
things. For example many women seem to have a tendency to keep the
fingers together when signing number signs, possibly to avoid looking
like they're making a rude gesture when signing the number "2". Male
signers never seem to bother with this at all.

It also seems to me that in BSL women will adopt a wider range of
classifiers, using their hands to sign such things as facial expressions
and emotions, whereas men tend to leave that sort of thing to the
imagination or just let their faces show the emotion.

On the other hand it seems to me that in both Scots and BSL (I'm not
really familiar with living, spoken English), women tend to be more
conservative about language use while men are more likely to mix in
words from other dialects or indulge in word play. When I was a boy, for
example, the men and boys in our village had a habit of spoonerising in
Scots, while women didn't seem to consider this to be "talking sense".
Likewise, men using BSL tend to do things like saying "good morning" for
"good evening" and vice versa, fingerspell backwards and suchlike, while
the women mostly seem to ignore such behaviour.

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

----------

 From: Howard Scott <listes at alterego.montreal.qc.ca>
Subject: LL-L "Sociolinguistics" 2008.02.07 (06) [E]

>From: Jacqueline Bungenberg de Jong
><<mailto:Dutchmatters at comcast.net>Dutchmatters at comcast.net>
>Subject: LL-L "History" 2008.02.07 (01) [E]
>
>It seemed to me that that would have been more
>prevalent when the tasks of men and women in
>their society were far more different than they
>are today. It could also be a subject for a Science Fiction novel.

"Native Tongue is the first novel in
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzette_Haden_Elgin>Suzette
Haden Elgin's
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_science_fiction>feminist
science fiction series of the same name. The
trilogy is centered in a future
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopian>dystopian
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States>American
society where the
<
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
>19th
Amendment has been repealed and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women>women have
been stripped of
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights>civil
rights. A group of women, part of a world-wide
group of
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics>linguists
who facilitate human communication with alien
races, create a new language for women as an act
of resistance. The language,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laadan>Làadan, was
actually created by Elgin and instructional materials are available."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Tongue_%28novel%29

parts available in Google Books:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=T3XOjNnLBEsC&pg=PP1&dq=Native+Tongue&ei=YLmsR_nxKIyyiQHU98WnBg&sig=5N_ZMdBRoSeD2a8abXNsemJrkHI

In the real world, there is supposed to be a
secret women's language in a region of Chinese
called Nushu. (Plenty of hits on the Web if you search for "nushu.")

More on topic, in situations of diglossia, one
language can "belong" more to one sex than the
other. Yiddish is, in fact, called the "mama
loshen" since it is seen as belonging more to the
women's sphere of the home, whereas as in
conservative Jewish communities, Hebrew is
definitely much more the province of the men. I'm
sure there are similar divisions of linguistic
labour for many of the other languages discussed on this list.

Howard
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