SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Language and Gender

7.5 GENDER AND POLITENESS

RESEARCH FINDINGS

Lakoff (1975): part of womens social

role was arbiter of morality,

judge of manners

Woman more linguistically

polite than man

Japan: womens language is

polite, deferential, or "soft
Africa: Hlonipha
- system of avoidance speech.
- associated with married women
in respect to senior male
relatives.
Linguistic behaviour differs
in contexts

RESEARCH FINDINGS

TAG QUESTION
Women
Men
- Used more
facilitative tags:
inviting the addressee
to contribute to the
conversation
E.g Youve got a new
job, Tom, havent you?
That was amazing
acting, wasnt it?

- Used more epistemic

modal tags: expressing
uncertainty about
information conveyed.

Eg: Fay Weldons

lecture is at eight isnt
it?
She was behind the
2-meter line, wasnt
Facilitative tags show positive
politeness
she?
They were positively polite than men (Holmes,

7.6 CONTEXTUALISED APPROACHES:

PERFORMANCE & PERFORMATIVITY

Conceptions of Language &

Gender
- Language functions are seen as not
simply in the language, but as
negotated between speakers.
- Gender is relatively fruid.
+ salient in some contexts but not
others
+ embeded in other social categories
(race, class, sexuality, etc)
- Recent research focus on
peformativity - the act of speaking
E.g: I promise to pay you - the act of

Contextualised Approaches in
Empirical Research
1. Holmes (2006) emphasises the
complex nature of gendered talk in
the workplace.
Example: a male doctor and a female
nurse

Doc:
Context: Doctor to nurse in theMale
nurses
station of a
- several hedges
hospital ward.
- hesitations
Doc: [softly]: theres another um:
+ thing that I
- repetitions
would like to ask for
- indirect request
Nur: whats that
Feminine
style
Doc: somewhere in delivery suite
or at Ward 11
er
Female
Nur:for ++
there are those plastic er read
containers
- direct
for blood tests
- unmitigated
I need I need beside the the line theres a
speech
plastic end for this . .
just
Masculine
Doc: yeah so er we + could you
could we
style
maybe have one from er ward
eleven oh this
stuff er +
Nur: well you go down to ward eleven and get it cos
I dont want to have to

Contextualised Approaches in
Empirical Research
1. Holmes (2006) emphasises the
complex nature of gendered talk in
the workplace.
Example: a male doctor and a female
nurse
Relevant : - professional status
- parcticular context of
utterance
- the nurses age

Contextualised Approaches in
Empirical Research
2.Barrett (1999): how African American
drag queen adopt stereotypical white
womens language.
3. Hall (1995): many of the telephone
sex workers used a stereotypical
womens language:
+ speak in breathy or whispery voices
+ ask lots of questions
+ use rising intonation & feminine
vocabulary.

Continuing challenges &

Debates
Swann & Maybin (2008) face challenges
in contextualised approaches:
- The focus on the local, contextualised
playing out of gender plays down &
sometimes rejects
- To see the relevance of gender within
an interaction, researchers themselves
must have some prior conception.
- Untangle the maze of interconnections
between the aspects of language and
gender.

7.7 CONCLUSION
- Language and gender cover several
different aspects of language.
- Studies of gender and interaction have
adopted both quantitative and qualitative
methods (increasing contextualised
approaches)
- Gender is in the course of everyday
language use.
- Gendered language use raises issues of
power and inequality between women