Introduction

Lecture 9. Language and Gender

It is well known from different linguistic researches that in many societies the speech of men and women differs. In some cases these differences are quite small and are not generally noticed: they are probably taken for granted in the same way as, say, different gestures or facial expressions. For example, in many accents of American English it has been found that women's vowels are more peripheral (more front, more back, higher, or lower) than men's. In other cases the differences may be quite large and perhaps even actively taught to young children. In Gros Ventre, an American Indian language, for example, palatalised dental stops in men's speech correspond to palatalised velar stops in the speech of women: thus, men call bread [djatsa]. women [kjatsa].

Generally speaking, one can’t explain differences of this kind in terms of social distance. In many societies men and women communicate freely with one another, and there appear to be few social barriers likely to influence the density of communication between the sexes. Sociolinguists cannot, therefore, account for the development of gender differences in language in the same way as class, ethnic-group, or geographical dialects.

How, then, do such differences arise? Why do men and women often speak differently? To answer these questions one has to begin with a classic example of linguistic gender differentiation, well known to students of language. When Europeans first arrived in the Lesser Antilles and made contact with the Carib Indians they discovered that men and women 'spoke different languages'. This would of course have been a very startling discovery: nowhere else has sex differentiation been found so great that people have been puzzled to suppose that there were actually distinct men's and women's languages. A report from the seventeenth century says:

The men have a great many expressions peculiar to them, which the women understand but never pronounce themselves. On the other hand the women have words and phrases, which the men never use, or they would be laughed to scorn. Thus it happens that in their conversations it often seems as if the women had another language than the men.

From the evidence of this quotation, it seems certain that, although there were clear differences between men's and women's speech, only a relatively small number of vocabulary items were involved. The men and women, that is, did not speak different languages, rather they spoke different varieties of the same language - the differences were lexical only. Even so, how can sociolinguists explain these particular differences? The Indians themselves had an explanation, which has also been quite widely accepted.

The savage natives of Dominica say that the reason for this is that when the Caribs came to occupy the islands they were inhabited by an Arawak tribe, which the Caribs exterminated completely, with the exception of the women, whom they married in order to populate the country. It is asserted that there is some similarity between the speech of the continental Arawaks and that of the Carib women.

The differences were believed to be the result of mixing the two language groups, Carib and Arawak, divided on sex lines, as the result of an invasion. This may or may not be true, but one thing is clear, however: even if this explanation is true, sociolinguists cannot apply it to the origin of linguistic gender differences in other parts of the world. First, the reported differences amongst the Carib Indians resemble to a considerable extent those found elsewhere in other American Indian languages.

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