Gender-based speech today

Tendencies towards gender-based linguistic differentiation, then, are the result of different social attitudes towards the behaviour of men and women, and of the attitude men and women have to language as a social symbol. These attitudes may be of particular importance in an educational situation. In the West Indies, for example, it has been found that children begin to acquire sex-bound attitudes towards Standard English as early as the age of six or seven. In a study of children who were native speakers of English Creole learning Standard English it was found that, although there were no sex differences in their speech to begin with, after six months of learning, the girls' speech had changed more extensively towards the prestige norm they were being taught than that of the boys - although both had changed to some extent. At the end of the six-month period, for example, boys were using 29 per cent non-standard verb-phrases, while girls were using only 7.5 per cent. It was also noticed that, when they thought they were not being observed, some of the boys enjoyed themselves by mimicking in girlish voices, some of the standard forms that they had learnt. They associated standard speech with femininity, and their motivation to learn was presumably, therefore, that much weaker than the girls'.

It is equally true that what society lays down will change if enough members of the society feel that it is desirable that this should happen. In most Western societies, for instance, many people have been altering the way they feel about what is appropriate as far as gender roles are concerned. And these beginnings of a move away from gender-role stereotyping probably explain the fact that linguistic differences between younger men and women - a very interesting finding from sociolinguistic research - are statistically smaller than in the case of older speakers. However, much of this reduction in linguistic gender differentiation appears to be taking place as an unconscious reflection of social and attitudinal changes. However, overt social movements to reduce sexual discrimination and gender-role stereotyping have also led to a number of conscious attempts to influence and change languages and linguistic behaviour.

Most attention has in fact been directed at the structure and vocabulary of languages themselves. As far as English is concerned, attention has been focused, for example, on words like chairman. This is because words of this type appear to be discriminatory since, while they can in fact apply to people of both sexes, they are apparently male-orientated in that they contain the element -man. Formerly, people taking on the role of chairman were exclusively male, and the word was obviously originally a compound of chair and man. Many English speakers, however, have ceased to perceive this word as a compound and no more feel it to be composed of two units - chair and man - than they perceive clipboard (a small writing table with a clip for holding papers) to be composed of clip and board. (And the final syllable of chairman is, of course, pronounced m 'n rather than man, like the final syllable of woman.) Nevertheless, many other speakers do perceive it as a compound, and some of them have drawn attention to its apparent male bias. This has led in recent years to heightened awareness of the issue, and to the increased use of clearly non-discriminatory terms such as chair or chairperson and, for women, chairwoman.

In English, as in many other languages, the traditional, formal way of pronominalizing nouns like person for which sex is not specified has been by the pronoun he, not she. Phrases like The first person to finish his dinner can refer to people of both sexes, but The first person to finish her dinner can refer only to females. The fact that he can be used in this way and she cannot may well reflect the traditionally male-dominated structure of our society. In recent years, speakers and writers have tried to avoid this appearance of inequality by actually using she in this generic way, or by employing the form s/he (this only works in writing, of course). Colloquial, informal English, though, has always had a very sensible way out of this problem, the use of the singular they: The first person to finish their dinner.

English also has a number of pairs of words for males and females, which appear, at first sight, to be equivalent:

gentleman - lady

man – woman

boy - girl

The terms of this type have become the topic of some comment because, as closer examination will reveal, they are not equivalent at all in actual usage. Moreover, it is highly probable that the ways in which their usage differs reflect, and presumably also reinforce, different attitudes in our society to men and women and to gender roles generally. The connotations of the word lady, for example, are rather different from those of the word gentleman, and as far as usage is concerned, lady is in many respects actually an equivalent to man. Many English speakers tell their children that it is impolite to call or refer to someone as a woman (but not a man). Shop assistants in Britain may be referred to as sales ladies (but not sales gentlemen). Ladies' wear can be found for sale alongside men’s wear - and so on.

Robin Lakoff has argued that this is because lady is a euphemism for woman. A euphemism has become necessary because of the unfavourable connotations that woman has for some people, which is in turn because of the lower status women typically had in our society, and because of the sexual implications the word woman has in a male-dominated society, for example, She's only thirteen, but she's already a woman and She's only thirteen, but she's already a lady.)

Similarly, girl and boy are also by no means precise equivalents. Boy refers of course to a young male person, but many people feel uncomfortable about using it to refer to anyone older than early teenage, and it is certainly not in very wide use for individuals aged over about twenty. On the other hand, girl can be used for women considerably older than this, and it is not unusual to hear of a group of people that it consisted of, say, five men and six girls. It has been, in other words, more usual to use the more childlike word for women than for men.

As we have said, the implications of this unequal usage have not escaped notice in recent years, and increased awareness of the discriminatory nature of this differentiation seems currently to be leading to a linguistic change for some speakers. A number of speakers have begun to avoid using the word girl to refer to adult women. For some of them, however, it is not entirely clear what they should use instead. Some young women are happy to be referred to as a woman, but some are not, and it is not always easy to know what reactions will be to the words woman and girl. This seems to be leading, as a way of avoiding this problem, to an increase in the usage of the word lady where formerly girl would have been more usual - and in a manner which shows that the sexual implications of woman have now been acquired by lady also, as in: John is going out with a new lady tonight. Robin Lakoff writes that it would not make sense to say something like After ten years in gaol Harry wanted to find a lady. This would formerly indeed have been anomalous. For many younger speakers, however, it would now be quite usual.

Because language and society are so closely linked, it is possible, in some cases, to encourage social change by directing attention towards linguistic reflections of aspects of society that one would like to see altered. Then, it is hoped, language and society will both be changed. In some instances, attempts to change the language, at least, have been very successful. In the USA, for example, names for hurricanes are now equally distributed between male and female names (whereas before they were entirely female), and, perhaps more importantly, job description labels are no longer marked for gender.

In the case of lady, woman and girl, however, the linguistic change achieved seems, for some speakers at least, not to have been the one desired. Traditionally, man has been used more often than woman, while lady and girl have been employed more often than gentleman and boy. Conscious attempts at change have been directed at reducing the use of girl (as demeaning for adult women) and of lady (as a trivializing euphemism), and at increasing the usage of the less discriminatory woman. It is quite possible, however, that in future it will actually be the term lady that will see an increase in usage. Linguistic changes follow social changes very readily, but it is not always a simple matter to make them precede social changes.

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