Gender, language, and taboo

Wiki encyclopedia defines taboo as a strong social ban relating to any area of human activity or social custom declared as sacred and forbidden; breaking of the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent by society. The term was borrowed from the Tongan language and appears in many Polynesian cultures. In those cultures, a tabu (or tapu or kapu) often has specific religious associations. It was a word brought back by Captain James Cook in 1777 after a long sea voyage to the South Seas and introduced into the English language.

Otto Jespersen has advanced another explanation, which will perhaps apply to other cases as well. He suggests that gender differentiation, in some cases, may be the result of taboo. He points out that it is known that when Carib men were on the war-path they would use a number of words which only adult males could employ. If women or boys used these words, bad luck was likely to result. Taboo may perhaps therefore have a powerful influence on the growth of separate gender vocabularies generally.

Examples of taboo as an explanatory factor come also from other parts of the world. In Zulu, for example, a wife was not allowed to mention the name of her father-in-law or his brothers, and she might be put even to death if she broke this taboo. Moreover, taboo can extend to the words, which simply resemble the original tabooed words. In Zulu, it appears that this process could go so far as to include particular sounds of the language. Say, for example, that the tabooed name contained the sound [z]. This might mean, apparently, that the woman in question would not be able to use a word like amanzi - 'water' without converting it to a form without the tabooed sound, amandabi. If this kind of process became generalized to all the women in the community, then it can be seen that distinct gender dialects might result.

Taboo, however, is not a particularly good explanation of linguistic gender differentiation. Firstly, it is not clear how differences of the above type could become generalised to the whole community. And secondly, in many other cases it is quite clear that we are dealing with cases, which are far from taboos. In some of these cases the explanation is quite readily apparent.

Social status (male/female speech)

For example, in Chiquito, an American Indian language of Bolivia, if a woman wants to say 'my brother' she says icbausi, whereas a male speaker would say tsaruki. This, however, does not constitute gender difference of the same order as those we have already discussed; rather it is a result of the Chiquito kinship and gender systems. Just as sociolinguists distinguish in English between the sex of close relations (brother, sister, uncle, aunt, cousin, niece), so many other languages also have different terms according to the gender of the speaker and the relative to be addressed. This is simply the recognition of the fact that the relationship brother-sister is different from the relationship brother-brother.

This differentiation is similar to that found in the pronominal systems. In English we differentiate between the genders only in the third-person singular: he - she. In French the third-person plural is also differentiated: ils - elles, while in Finnish there is no distinction even in the singular: hän can be equivalent to either he or she. In other languages of the world, gender differentiation extends to the second person and even to the first person. In Thai, for example, in polite conversation between equals, a man will say phom for the first person singular pronoun ' I’, whereas a woman will refer to herself as dichan.

There are other cases where taboo words are clearly not a factor, but where the explanation is not so simple as these gender and kinship examples. In researches done in 1930s, for example, quite notable sex differences were found in the American Indian language Koasati spoken in Louisiana. The differences involved the phonological shapes of particular verb forms. Consider the following examples:

male female

‘He is saying [ka:s] [ka:]

‘Don’t lift it’ [kakauci:s] [kakaucin]

A very interesting phenomenon was marked by sociolinguists: the female variety appears to be older historically than the male one. In other words, it seemed that linguistic changes took place in the male variety, which had not been followed, however, (or were only just beginning to follow) in the women's speech. In some dialects of Chukchi, for example, the female variety has inter-vocalic consonants in some words, particularly [n] and [t], which are not present in male forms. For example, male [nitvaqaat], female [nitvaqenat]. This kind of distinction would appear to provide a clear indication that the female variety is older than the male dialect.

Let us discuss some linguistic gender problems in English, where the differences are generally of a smaller, less obvious and more subconscious type. There are, it is true, a number of words and phrases which tend to be sex-bound (some sort of exclamations, taboos). It is traditionally more acceptable in our society for men to swear and use taboo words than it is for women. However, differences within English are phonetic and phonological, and taboo cannot be used as an explanation. These differences are generally so insignificant that most people are not at all consciously aware of them.

Most of the evidence we have in English has come from the urban dialect surveys carried out in Britain and America. These surveys have shown that, allowing for other factors such as social class, ethnic group and age, women on average use forms which more closely approach those of the standard variety or the prestige accent than those used by men, although we cannot predict which form a given man or woman is going to use on a given occasion. In other words, female speakers of English tend to use linguistic forms, which are considered to be 'better' than male forms.

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