gender and language

[Irene van Baalen]

Tommy has asked a very interesting question indeed and I agree with Kari that the fact that until recently women were mostly confined to their homes may definitely play a role in their use of more formal language.
However, I'd like to look at this issue from another point of view: could it be that for men it is more important to use slang, or popular language, in order to belong to a group or to have a certain status among (male) colleagues and (male) friends? And wouldn't it be interesting to find out whether men also use slang in conversations with superiors or in face-to-face conversations with women?
When talking among friends or (female) colleagues, women don't seem to have that need to adjust their language in order to be accepted as a peer. They can speak in any way and will be taken seriously even if they do not use the latest kind of slang. Using a special kind of language (formal, RP) may only be important for women when dealing with male colleagues or superiors. The question is whether the use of formal language actually helps women in being taken seriously, or does it perhaps only show men that women are not part of "their group" and will not fit in?
I've done (a small-scale) research on the difference in language use between men and women, especially with regard to their use of hedging devices. The general opinion is, or at least used to be, that women use more hedges than men. The outcome of my study was quite surprising in that, regarding the frequency of hedges in their speech, there was hardly any difference between men and women, and there was only a small difference in the sort of hedges that were used.
Men and women may also be more alike in other aspects of language use, so perhaps differences in language use are not as big as we believe them to be.
Irene van Baalen (former linguistics student)
  Kari Sommers <swingkitten99 at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote: Your question was interesting, and it made me think long enough to come up
with my own theories as to why women use Standard English (what we here in
the US might call Standard American English, depending on who you ask). One
thing I might throw out is that until the last forty years or so, women were
somewhat confined to the home and not out in society as much as the male
breadwinners, and so when someone came up with a new variation within the
language (e.g., slang), men were more likely to pick it up because they
interacted with a larger number of people with different backgrounds and
whatnot. This does not explain why it's still true today (and I've observed
myself that it is), but I might go so far as to say that it might have
something to do with women still not having equality with men (we need only
to consider that women still make less money than men while doing the exact
same job). Since we females have this inequality still facing us today, we
may subconsciously use more formal English in an attempt to be taken more
seriously, since we automatically have the pitfall of gender to get over. I
think this possibility was even discussed in a linguistics class I had last
semester, but take it for what it's worth.

Kari Sommers
another student of linguistics

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