Chapter 12. How Does Language Reflect Gender Relations?

The Consequences of Language: How Does Language Reflect Gender Relations?Chapter 12 age 1

The Consequences of Language

Chapter 12. How Does Language Reflect Gender Relations?

1. Background.

The study of language and gender represents a coming together of two distinct areas of study: Sociolinguistics and Gender Studies. At the time, sociolinguistics (in the narrow sense) represented one of the few areas where the study of language and society could benefit gender studies and gender studies, a multidisciplinary field, was open to new approaches to the study of gender.

In the field of gender studies, and indeed in the field of anthropology as a whole, the term gender is juxtaposed to the term sex to emphasize the contrast between social and biological phenomena. We also note that the terms: man, woman, boy, girl are gender terms, while male and female, are sex terms. By biological, I mean those aspects of our physical, emotional and behavioral presence that are inherited through and determined by our genes. Although, gender rests on a biological base, it is socially constructed (see Chapter 10 - Berger and Luckmann), and consequently leads to different notions of gender from community to community. The failure to distinguish between gender and sex often results in attribution of socially defined gender roles to biology. This process, we noted in Chapter 10 (ideology), is termed naturalization because it assigns socially constructed behavior to the natural world.[1]

For example, because women’s vocal cords are shorter (a statistically accurate fact), one could argue biologically that women have higher voices. However, this observation fails to explain why, when compared to their British counterparts, the voices of French women so high. Nor does it account for the fact that sometimes men employ a high pitch in some circumstances, such as the Wolof griots discussed in Chapter 8. Furthermore, while it is statistically true that women’s voices are higher than men’s voices, the voices of all women are not higher than the voices of all men. There is a considerable overlap here. But even more important, while we find considerable variation among individuals in the biological (sex) domain, we find distinct socially defined roles for each gender in the social (gender) domain. The importance of maintaining this biological/social distinction is not to deny a role for biology in determining our behavior (of course it does), but to note that all to frequently what has been ascribed to biology, upon closer examination, turns out to be social (cultural).

Accordingly, one could argue that women are biologically, submissive meaning that their behavior was sex determined as opposed to gender determined. But this would not explain why there is so much variation in both men and women within a community or from one community to the next.
2. Gender Variables:

When sociolinguistics is applied to the domain of gender, the kind of sociolinguistic variables that are identified are termed gender variables, that is, sociolinguistic variables that correlate with gender roles. These may be phonological, lexical or syntactic. In fact, the claim has been made that in some communities, women speak one language (Carib) while the men speak another (Arawak), though this report has not been confirmed. Mary Haas reports that in the language of Koasati, a Muskogean language spoken in Louisiana, that in the speech of women and men words are marked by different endings. At the time of the article, Haas reports that younger women have abandoned the special women’s forms and are adopting those used by the men. However, because Haas offers little social information about the gender roles of the Koasati, little more can be said, other than to note that it is a clear example of a linguistic variable.

2.1. Gender Bias.

As evidence of gender bias in English, we note several lexical gender pairs for which the woman’s form is in some way inferior to the man’s form. This lexical bias reflects a social bias in the culture.

Another example of gender bias comes from the choice in English and many languages in the third person singular between he and she. The bias arises out of the fact that the masculine form is also the default form, when either gender could be intended, such as in sentence (1). This usage has become problematic because, people have noted that reference to women are excluded in the default form and suggested that one should either avoid such constructions or replace his, with his or her, or some equivalent form, as in sentence (2). Interestingly, popular English avoids this by using the neutral pronoun ‘their’ which agrees with the underlying plural concept of everyone, as in sentence (3). But sentence c has been declared by prescriptivist unacceptable in formal written English and should be avoided in writing. In other words, the usage of their in sentence (3) now stands as a sociolinguistic variable to his, in sentence (1), and for that matter the his or her usage in sentence (2). Note that sociolinguistists, who are descriptivists, in that they describe usage, rather than prescribe it, would prefer to state the sociolinguistic variables and their social meaning rather than saying as, prescriptivists do, that one is correct and one is wrong.

Interruption

1. ... we were walking .

Overlap

In fact, attempts have been made to correct this bias by offering alternatives to words like postman, and the like. This correction raises the question of what happens when you try to correct lexical bias? Here we note, that once alternatives have been offered, each speaker is faced with a choice of which form to use. Once this has been done, what started out as gender bias, has now become a gender variable.
2.2 Interactional Variables.

As we saw in chapter 7, interactional choices also constitute an important domain of sociolinguistic variables. One such area is that of interruptions and overlaps. An interruption occurs where the speech of one member is interrupted by another so that the first speaker yields his/her turn. An overlap is similar, but the first speaker continues to speak without yielding a turn.

This occasioned the now famous study by Zimmerman and West (1975) who, apparently board from the events of a faculty meeting, undertook to record examples of interruptions and overlaps of their colleagues during the meeting. They recorded examples of men interrupting men (M_M) and so forth. The data show that interruptions and overlaps between people of the same gender are about the same for men and women. However across gender women almost never interrupt and overlap, while men almost always do. Thus, we see the use or non-use of an interruption or overlap is a gender-based, linguistic variable too.

Swearing is another gender-based, conversational sociolinguistic variable usually associated with men in casual situations, at least traditionally. This kind of usage shows the opposite distribution from that of interruptions and overlaps and represents an exclusionary meaning. Men can swear to show their solidarity, but women can’t. However, more recent evidence (Rubin 19xx) shows that women swearing as well, though more among one another. Rubin notes that older women swear more than younger/unmarried women and that women who characterize themselves as “traditional” swear more frequently than those who consider themselves liberated. Despite the lack of quantitative data, we can see that the meaning of swearing is far more complex than simply one of marking solidarity among, for it can mark that among women as well. The fact that this variable is largely restricted to casual use, it may also signal not only that the encounter is to be taken as casual, but that the solidarity precludes any asymmetries. This may help to explain the meaning of intergender usages, which may carry the meaning by the speaker that “here, we will disregard gender asymmetries and converse as equals.”

2.4 Conversational Topics.

Men and women, too, differ on the topics that they bring up in their conversations. Komarovsky (1962) reports a similar gender-based asymmetry, based on choice of topics. In addition, Komarovsky also found, that men made fun of the women’s choice of topics, something that the women were aware of, “but did not reciprocate, although they did complain about a lack of communication in their marriages . . . even in social situations involving couples, the sexes split up for conversation”(p21). We note that this behavior is gender-based, and not sex based, because we find other situations where the topics chosen by men and women is substantially different.

3. Trudgill’s Analysis of Language and Sex

Peter Trudgill (1985), a well-recognized sociolinguist, noted that in surveying the sociolinguistic practices of women in a number of western countries displayed a number of almost identical patterns. The Detroit data in the sidebar is taken from Labov (19xx) and the Norwitch data is from Trudgill.

Sentence (1) uses multiple negation, sometimes confused with double negation (3). In multiple negation, each use intensifies the negativity of the sentence so that sentence (1) is more negative than sentence (2). Double negation reverses the negativity of the sentence, but not without a change in meaning. Some varieties of English use multiple negation and some use double negation.

A postvocalic R is an occurrence of the phoneme /r/ following a vowel as in car, beer, pear. Many varieties of English do not pronounce this phoneme in this position and either eliminate it altogether (car = [ka:]) or replace it with a reduced vowel (beer = [bi_]) in so-called ‘r-less speech.’[2]

Each of these usages represents a sociolinguistic variable in the context in which they are found such that 1) multiple negation, 2) loss of postvocalic r and 2) use of -in are considered less prestigious than their complement, though we note that there are places where. The ‘r-less variant is considered more prestigious (Britain, Boston and several varieties of English spoken in the southern US.

Trudgill in reviewing these and several other examples from other European countries notes a common pattern.

The sets of data these surveys have provided have one striking feature in common. In all the cases so far examined, it has been shown that, allowing for other factors such as social class, ethnic group and age, women consistently use forms which more closely approach those of the standard variety or the prestige accent than those used by men (Trudgill 1985).

Trudgill termed the usage by women as hypercorrection[3], which he defined “as when scores for prestige form are actually higher than the scores of highest status group indicating conscious overcompensation, meaning that the women’s usages was more (= hyper) correct (i.e., prestigious) than was representative of the social class. For example, in the above table, frequently women’s usage at for one social class is closer to men’s usage at the next higher class level. For example for -in usage, MWC women and UWC men had the same percentage of 81.

While we have noted that sociolinguistics tends to shy away from explanation's, preferring to simply state correlations, Trudgill did offer four possible explanations as to why women ‘hypercorrect’ which he termed: conservatism, status consciousness, and covert prestige.

1. Conservatism: Trudgill claims that women are linguistically more conservative, that is, they stick to older patterns than men. Thus, their ‘hypercorrection’ is simply a consequence of a historical fact that says that men are the linguistic innovators which women much later begin to use.
2. Status Consciousness: Trudgill argues that because women are more status conscious than men, they will prefer the more prestigious forms. “Sociological studies have demonstrated that women in our society are, generally speaking, more status-conscious than men. For this reason, they will be more sensitive to the social significance of social-class-related linguistic variables such as multiple negation. Secondly, it seems that working-class speech, like certain other aspects of working-class culture in our society, has connotations of or associations with masculinity, which may lead men to be more favorably disposed to non-standard linguistic forms than women.... Trudgill p 87 [4]
3. Covert Prestige. Trudgill also argues that less prestigious forms are in general more masculine, and that the working class is more masculine than the middle class. This would explain why women would shy away from the non-prestigious forms and men would favor them.
4. Feminism.

It appeared for a while, that Trudgill’s explanations were non problematic, until they were subjected to a feminist critique. My understanding of this term is simply that women and the values, beliefs and practices espoused by women be treated with the same kind of scrutiny and fairness as those of men. In this regard, feminism is necessary because of a period of exclusion of women in a large number of public arenas including the academic world. We note that women are not alone in this, and that there are other blocks of people (blacks, Jews and Muslims) who have been denied the full privileges of citizenship and that their struggle toward full societal privileges tends to follow the same sequence.
Stages of decreasing underprivilege. In the US, there has been a slow, but persistent tradition of incorporation of underpriviledged groups into the mainstream. This process seems to follow a sequence beginning with invisibility and proceeding through a marginality stage, then a deviance stage before resolution. When applied to academic research on gender, the invisibility stage would be characterized by no research on women. Piaget, for example, conducted his research on intellectual development (see chapter xx) using little boys and not girls. Carol Gilligan (19xx) challenged and showed that girls follow somewhat different development. The advantage of a feminist perspective in the area of academic research, and especially gender research, is that as victims of discrimination, women are more likely to sense the ideological content of purported explanations.

5. A Feminist Critique of Trudgill.

Cindy Coats and Deborah Cameron point this out in their 1989 collection of essays entitled: Women in Their Speech Community. They begin by articulating the critique of sociolinguistics by pointing out that it focuses on distribution of sociolinguistic variables and stays away from questions of power, privilege and dominance which they say is an integral component of matters of gender, “the issue here is not simple difference but dominance” (1989:xx). As such, traditional academic research is not disposed to dealing with gender issues because academic research stays away from political research. I interpret political in this sense, not only as one of dealing with public issues of policy, but from the academic perspective, that if you keep doing this you may lose your sources of funding. This awareness of political matters has led most academic disciplines to stay away from matters of power and privilege.

From this perspective, gender, as found in the United States and most Western societies can be seen as an institution with roles (men (and boys) and women (and girls) in which {“rights (privilege and power) are not evenly distributed between men and women” (1989:xx). Associated with this institution and its practice are “privileges are “legitimizations of the "hidden agenda" which is female inferiority” (1989:xx) and it is the feminist critique of the social sciences ( . . . has made it its business to seek out the challenge of this hidden agenda in social research. They take Trudgill’s article “Women and Sex” as a case in point.