Language and Gender

10 Key excerpts on "Language and Gender"

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  Philosophy of Linguistics

  • Dov M. Gabbay, Paul Thagard, John Woods(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • North Holland

    (Publisher)

  How are gendered and sexualized individual and social identities constructed and changed? How are biology and social life intertwined in these processes? What kinds of diversity do we find among those who claim or are ascribed the same gender or the same sexual orientation? How do gender and sexuality interact with class, race, religion, economic status, age, nationality, and other dimensions of social difference? How do they enter into social and power relations? How do they relate to cultural ideologies and values, to default assumptions about ourselves and others? What moral issues are raised? Such questions are central to gender studies. Their answers involve many complex factors far beyond the realm of linguistics, but there are nearly always also significant matters of language and its use involved.

  Gender studies raises many challenging questions about language and about linguistic inquiry.

  • Which identities does language index and how? • Where do linguistic diversity and language change fit in a model of language as part of universal human biological endowment? • How well can speech acts be understood in individualistic terms? • How can available linguistic resources affect individual cognition and joint social pursuits? • How are linguistic forms invested with semantic content? With other kinds of communicative significance? • How and why do substantive conflicts of interest sometimes play out as 'mere' disputes over meaning?

  While not organized around these questions, this chapter explores some of the research on language, gender, and sexuality that have stimulated my own thinking about them.

  1 Indexing Identities

  When linguists first began thinking about gender issues in the early 1970s, the focus was on what was then called women's studies. Linguists began exploring two main topics. One was so-called ‘women's language’ — ways of speaking supposed to be distinctively ‘feminine’, patterns that indicated or INDEXED identity as a woman. The other was ways of speaking about women — e.g., what were described as ‘euphemisms’ like lady and ‘dysphemisms’ like broad. American linguist Robin Lakoff [1975] offered this division into speaking by and speaking of and made a number of impressionistic claims that others sought to test more systematically.1

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  Language, Society and Power

  An Introduction

  • Annabelle Mooney, Betsy Evans(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 6 Language and Gender

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003120957-6

  CONTENTS

  6.1 INTRODUCTION

  6.2 WHAT IS GENDER?

  6.3 INEQUALITY AT THE LEXICAL LEVEL

  6.4 DIFFERENCES IN LANGUAGE USE: DOING BEING A ‘WOMAN’ OR A ‘MAN’

  6.5 GOSSIP

  6.6 GENDER AND POWER

  6.7 GENDERED TALK: PERFORMING IDENTITY

  6.8 SUMMARY

  6.1 INTRODUCTION

  In this chapter, we examine Language and Gender. We begin by considering the meaning of ‘gender’ by contrasting it with ‘sex’. We then turn to issues of hierarchies of gender groups in language. We explore the use of lexical items that represent women less favourably than men as an example of inequality. We then explore pronouns as a way of showing the complexity of sex, gender, and power. We then look at different kinds of talk, including the form of communication known as gossip, in order to evaluate whether and how men and women use language differently. To examine the language of more deeply entrenched ideologies associated with gender, we then consider whether women talk more than men. Finally, we investigate how gender identity is performed through language and the connection between gender and sexuality.

  6.2 WHAT IS GENDER?

  There is a strong relationship between Language and Gender in terms of how language is used and how it is understood. In order to explore these relationships, there are a few key things to remember as you read this chapter. Firstly, we must establish what we mean by ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. In the past, many linguists used the term ‘sex’ rather than ‘gender’ in research about language. In the first wave of linguistic studies of variation, academics were usually interested in broad patterns across a large population. In this context, it can make sense to divide people according to their sex. This was also a time when ‘gender’ was not understood in the way it is now. However, other models developed to explain the linguistic differences found among individuals, and this culminated in a recognition that sex is not always the best category of analysis. For some time, it was considered that sex is biological while gender is socially constructed. However, it is important to remember that biological sex is also not straightforward (Ansara and Hegarty, 2013 ; Lindström, Näslund, and Rubertsson, 2015 .) We tend to think that someone’s biological sex is a simple scientific fact. But this is far from true. In this chapter, we begin by orienting to a binary sex distinction in order to draw out the difference between sex and gender. In Section 6.3.3

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  The Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Competence in a Study Abroad Context

  • Vera Regan, Martin Howard, Isabelle Lemée(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  This is what defines our social identity and our gender, not simply physical or biological characteristics. Gender can no longer be adequately analysed as a simple dichotomy, but as ‘the accomplishment and product of social interaction. Language is a resource which can be drawn on creatively to perform different aspects of one’s social identity at different points in an interaction’ (Holmes & Meyerhoff, 2003: 11). Gender is something you ‘do’ or perform. 4 Gender and L2 Acquisition As we have seen, a considerable amount of research in recent years has been done on how speakers use linguistic variants to express gendered identities in different contexts in native speaker speech. Keeping in mind the important body of recent research (Coates, 1993; Ehrlich, 2001; Holmes, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998; Mendoza-Denton, 2004) which cogently demonstrated the dangers and limitations of an overly simplistic interpretation of the category of sex in investigations of the role of gender in language, there is nevertheless much evidence that speakers use language to mark their gender in different contexts or types of talk (Freed, 1996). People make linguistic choices and even seem to be aware from a very early age that language behaviour is gendered. In relation to L1 acquisition, variationist studies have found that children, even at a very young age, seem to be conscious of and are capable of adopting the gendered variation patterns of the context in which they find themselves. For instance Roberts and Labov (1995) and Roberts (1997) found that American English-speaking children as young as three years old were using the adult speech patterns in relation to t/d deletion and in/ing variation

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  The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender

  • Luise von Flotow, Hala Kamal, Luise von Flotow, Hala Kamal(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  é criture inclusive” which promotes changes in the orthography of French (Haddad 2017, 5). Language generally “resists” any imposed change, but such initiatives are evidence of an open debate which cannot be ignored: all over the Anglo-American/European world, professionals working in a plurilingual dimension are having to make choices related to gender agreement on the basis of sociocultural contextual features. In this contemporary and multilingual environment most speakers know more than one language. In some cases, bilingual speakers operate between languages with different gender systems, which doubtless increases their awareness of sex and gender as language categories.
• 3 Therefore, investigations from the perspective of bilingualism could complement research work on translation and gender seen as an abstract system of language. This is already the case with a number of studies on the “gender interference effect” of L1 on L2 in the field of picture naming and comprehension tasks when the gender of nouns or noun phrases do not match (see Bordag 2004; Bordag and Pechmann 2007 and the unpublished works quoted therein). Further studies (Bordag and Pechmann 2008) illustrate, however, that interference factors affecting gender retrieval are not present in the field of translation thus advocating the need for further experiments on processes occurring when moving from one language to another. Extensive future investigation is thus required in this field through an interdisciplinary lens.

Related Topics

Feminist translation, gender and language, translation and gender, feminist linguistics, gender and grammar, intersemiotic translation, morphology and semantics.

Further readings

Hellinger, Marlis and Hadumod Bußmann, eds. 2001/2002/2003. Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men, vol. 1, 2, 3. Amsterdam: Johns Benjamins.

Hellinger, Marlis and Heiko Motschembacher, eds. 2015. Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men, vol. 4. Amsterdam: Johns Benjamins.

This four-volume reference work (the first three published between 2001 and 2003, and a fourth volume added in 2015) provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical, lexical, referential, social) in 42 languages of diverse genetic, typological, and sociocultural backgrounds.

Corbett, Greville G., ed. 2014. The Expression of Gender. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

An edited volume by an expert and prolific author in the field of gender which shows the many different perspectives of this issue, from the morphosyntactic to the psycholinguistic; from the main to minority languages.