Lesson 3: Gender and Language: Theoretical Movements
What to Expect?
At the end of the lesson, the students can:
1. list different theories in gender and language;
2. describe and differentiate Deficit Theory, Difference (Subculture
Theory), Dominance Theory (or Social Power Theory),
Communicative Strategy Theory, Identity Theory, Community of
Practice Theory, and Agency Theory; and,
3. appreciate the philosophies behind theoretical movements.
Pre-discussion
In 1922, Jespersen tried to seriously examine how women and men
spoke in various languages and ended up saying some things that, in retrospect,
sound incredibly silly.
He believed that women’s language developed because of their “almost exclusive
concern with the care of the children, cooking, brewing, baking, sewing, washing, etc., things
which for the most part demanded no deep thought, which was performed in the company and
could well be accompanied with lively chatter.
Today, (1) women talk more than men; (2) leave sentences half-finished; (3) use adverbs,
adjectives, and hyperbole excessively; (4) avoid gross and coarse expressions; and (5) have a
preference for veiled and indirect expressions.
“Men will certainly with great justice object that there is a danger of the language
becoming languid and insipid if we are always to content ourselves with women’s expressions…
Men, thus, become the chief renovators of language, and to them are due those changes by
which we sometimes see one term replace an older one, to give way in turn to a still newer one,
and so on.”
Lesson Outline
Deficit Theory. In brief, it views women’s language as deficient or
ineffective compared to men’s. It explains “women’s manner of speaking as a
reflection of women’s insecurity and powerless place in society” (Freed, 2003).
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In the mid-1960s and early 1970s, phonological differences as markers of social class
were being investigated by William Labov and his students, and they suggested that gender
might be marked similarly.
Accordingly, Robin Lakoff’s influential work, Language and Women’s Place (1975). She
found phonological differences and differences in lexicon and syntax. Compared to men, she
found that women demonstrated:
1. greater use of tag questions (“ . . . , right?”; “ . . . don’t you think?”)
2. greater use of polite forms (“If you don’t mind, could you . . . ”)
3. greater use of wh-words (“Why don’t we go to the store?”)
4. greater use of hedges (“I kinda like it”)
5. greater use of qualifiers (“I think that might be true”)
6. greater use of apologies (“Sorry to bother you, but . . . ”)
Difference Theory ( or Subculture Theory). This argues that men and women live in
different linguistic worlds because they live in different subcultures. Women and men use
specific and distinct verbal strategies and communicative styles developed in same-sex
childhood peer groups.
This theory claims that women's social lives lie in a subculture somewhat apart from the
mainstream. Women and women’s languages are marked as different from men's and men’s
languages. This is why we find certain marked terms for women, such as actress, waitress,
woman, bachelorette, and female, derived from the masculine forms. In other words, men’s
language is thought to offer the normative forms from which women’s terms are derived.
Similarly, Deborah Tannen calls gender-associated varieties of language genderlects.
Each gender has a different means of accomplishing conversational goals and perhaps ultimate
ends. The goal for men in communication is to send factual information, which Tannen calls the
report style. On the other hand, women want to build and maintain relationships among
participants in the conversations, which she calls the rapport style.
Dominance Theory (or Social Power Theory). This focuses on patriarchy and male power.
Researchers use this theory to characterize the “social and political arrangement between the
sexes as one in which women were viewed and treated as unequal to men because the norms
of society” have been established by men; the “division of labor between women and men was
seen to include a division of language practices, one belonging to the powerful and the other
belonging to women” (Freed, 2003). Language differences are manifestations of an unequal
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social structure, wherein men and women do not compete on a level playing field of economic
opportunity, access to social perks, or influence.
Communicative Strategy Theory. Some scholars argue that women’s language is also
significantly shaped by the style of communicative strategy. For example, Jane Hill (1987)
studied the social expectations, gender roles, power differences, and language in the Malinche
Volcano communities near Mexico City. She found that local women changed their native
language, Nahuatl, to be “more Spanish.”
By the mid-1970s, many Nahuatl-speaking men earned relatively good wages in Mexico
City, where Spanish was the elite language. They saw Spanish as the language of capitalism and
hegemonic power, but they used Nahuatl to maintain local social solidarity.
The women remained behind to take care of the farm fields. They had the responsibility
to pass the Nahuatl language on to the children. They saw the Spanish language as a modern
and elite language and Nahuatl as a traditional language.
Understanding the importance of maintaining the language of their ethnic group but
also wishing to show their appreciation of modern things and education, the women began to
speak a form of Nahuatl highly influenced by Spanish pronunciation. Hill argues, however, that
this was largely unconscious. To maintain Nahuatl, they intentionally did not use Spanish
loanwords, but less obvious features, such as Spanish phonology, influenced the use of their
native language.
Identity Theory. Identity is the linguistic construction of membership in one or more
social groups or categories; though other factors may be significant, language and
communication often provide important and sometimes crucial criteria by which members
define their groups and are defined by others (Kroskrity, 2001). As Bucholtz (1999) has pointed
out, if language and gender scholarship is to explore issues of identity, it must engage feminist
theory, which has discovered that identity is much less static than previously believed.
Identity is a dynamic construct—a multifaceted assemblage of racial, ethnic, class, social,
cultural, and gender properties, each also in a state of flux. We never belong to just one
category, and at any given moment, these identities emerge, disappear, mutate, and mix—either
through our intention, performance, or presentation of self or as a reaction to those imposed
upon us. No aspect of our identity is privileged, or any language associated with these identities.
Community of Practice Theory. Its notion is an influential alternative to the speech
community concept favored by ethnographers of communication. The main difference between
them is that although both are interested in shared rules and norms of language use, the idea
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of a community of practice entails examining the social relations among members and being
cognizant of the differences among members. “A community of practice is an aggregate of
people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavor” (Eckert & McConnell-
Ginet, 1992). By doing so, practices—ways of doing things—emerge.
Agency Theory. Linguists and philosophers use the term agency to mean the human
capacity to act, especially for oneself (Ahearn, 2001b). Marxist scholars remind us that human
beings make society as much as society makes them, a notion sometimes called practice theory.
“The riddle practice theorists seek to solve is how social reproduction becomes social
transformation—and they believe agency is the key” (Ahearn, 2001a).
Summary
Research on language and gender traditionally has been dominated by
three major themes: women’s language as somehow being an inadequate
approximation of standard, that is, men’s speech (deficit theory); women’s
language as a reflection of their living in their subculture (difference theory); and
women’s speech being a result of, and re- flection of, male patriarchy (dominance
theory).
Recent work has shown that even categories like gender, supposedly natural and
interminable, are context-bound and emergent within social interaction. Rather than striving to
make broad generalizations—“Men speak like this; women speak like that”—current researchers
are interested in looking at things like communities of practice, which are groups of people who
come together around mutual engagement and activities and—at least in some ways—a shared
linguistic repertoire. This theoretical construct helps us examine how language is involved in
creating identity, gender, and sexual orientation.
Assessment/Enrichment
Linguistically, are men really from Mars and women from Venus? Discuss!
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References
Jourdan, C., & Tuite, K. (Eds.). (2006). Language, culture, and society: Key topics in
linguistic anthropology (Vol. 23). Cambridge University Press.
[Link]
Salzmann, Z., Stanlaw, J., & Adachi, N. (2014). Language, culture, and society: An introduction to
linguistic anthropology. Westview Press.
[Link]
Stanlaw, J., Adachi, N. & Salzmann, Z. (2017). Language, culture, and society: An introduction to
linguistic anthropology. New York: Routledge. [Link]
[Link]/s/language%20culture%20society
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