Gender Talk and Tension- Sociolinguistic view

          One of the important traits that affects individual’s communicative competence in virtually every language; particularly English, and one that has drawn increasing attention recently, is the effect of one’s sex (gender) on production and performance of language. Differences between men and women talk have been noted for some time now. Among English speakers, it has reported that males use assertive, strong expletives showing freedom and deference; therefore, women are not expected to use such language. On the other hand, females use forms that sound polite, indirect, soft and less assertive showing solidarity and cooperation. According to Deborah Tannen (1986), linguistics professor, females use language that expresses more uncertainty than men, say hedges, suggesting less confidence on what they say. Additionally, she believes that men and women differ in the focus behind their communication. Men converse with a focus on achieving social status and conversational interaction, while women focus on achieving personal connection, fulfilling their role as more elaborative and facilitative participants in an interaction; men want to report, women want to rapport.

Differences in men and women’s talk attracted scholars’ attention since the feminist movement in the 60’s and the 70’s. “The very semantics of the language reflects women’s condition. We do not even have our own names, but bear that of the father until we exchange it for that of a husband” (Morgan, 1977, p. 106). This was the high time of women’s feminist movement that targeted Language in particular. Since then, considerable research relating to language and gender has been carried out focusing on different features of language (lexicon, syntax, semantics…) and shifted, later on, to gender differences in discourse. Differences in conversational styles actually turn out to disadvantage women, contributing to women being effectively silenced.

 It is worthy to mention that the subject of mixed-gender conversation has entertained audiences even outside the academic frame in books by linguists such as, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, by Deborah Tannen (1990). For Tannen, it is un-negotiated to view men in any sort of conversations as vulgar, direct and confident. Men’s driving force in any interaction is obtaining information and avoiding failure. Unlike women who are deemed less confident and soft avoiding social isolation rather, and willing for being more “cooperative and facilitative conversationalists, concerned for their partner’s positive face needs”(Holmes 1991, p. 210). Based her research on Brown and Levinson’s idea of positive and negative face and included in her book Gendered talk at work, Holmes (2006) suggests that the reason behind this stereotypical view is “Exposing sexist assumptions and challenging covert patterns of male domination is important, and the workplace is a significant location for such taken-for granted assumptions” (p.26). She asserts that women use more positively orientated politeness and men use more negatively orientated politeness. That is; men use language as a tool to give and obtain information where women, on the other hand, use language as a means of keeping in touch with others.

With the advent of technology, researches in the field have substantially grown and scholars have studied language and gender in cyberspace proposed that typed text becomes a mask in which gender becomes obscured. She explains because only text is visible in computer-mediated communication (CMC), men and women could become freer to experiment with different gender identities through communication and women could take advantage of this medium to “avoid being harassed sexually or to feel free to be more assertive” (p.130). Other studies have shown that in chatrooms, discussion boards, instant messaging (IM), and emails, that equality in cyberspace is not present (Baron, 2003; Herring, 1992; Soukup, 1999). Typed text is not a mask for gender and online participation is not equal between genders. In short, men are still always dominant and report, women are uncertain and rapport. However, in spite of such hopes, oral conversations between socially distant genders do not yield practically the same findings.

 In her “Language and women’s Place”, Lakoff made her claims based on her own intuitions and anecdotal observation of her peers’ language use, lacking any empirical basis such as collecting corpora of males and females speech. She claimed that there were certain features of women’s language that gave the impression women are weaker and less certain than men. Holmes suggests that the reason lies behind that is ultimately “women and men have different perceptions of what language is used for”. Tannen, as well, has explored conversational interaction and style differences relating to gender and cultural background focused on miscommunications between men and women who were, actually, her friends while working on her Ph.D. 

As stated above, the use of hedges and the focus-genre on communication strongly indicate femininity and masculinity; they are often used to illustrate stereotypical women and men. These different patterns are found in disparate scripted conversations. In those written conversations, women are consistently enforcing their femininity and men their masculinity. However, according to some researchers, gender-related languages are not used as frequently in real conversations as they are in written ones, and some are even disappearing. Moreover, both rapport/report talk and hedge are subtleties drawn from different cultures and form significant tapestry in individual’s "socio-pragmatic" competence. In this sense, different backgrounds of conversationalists, social distance, discourse and context are all to be considered.