Sex, Politeness and Stereotypes

The issue of women’s language may illustrate the concept of register and style, the use of language, and linguistic attitudes.

Women’s language and confidence

Robin Lakoff, an American linguist argues from an example that women were using language which reinforced their subordinate status. Then, in the 2nd example that is a conversation between a lawyer, a female witness, and male witness, she focus on syntax, semantics and style rather than on differences between women’s and men’s speech in the areas of pronunciation and morphology, with some attention to syntactic construction. She identified many linguistic feature of women used to express uncertainty and lack of confidence.

• Features of ‘women’s language’ 

Lakoff suggested that women speech was characterized by some linguistic features that simply divided into two; the first is linguistic devices used for hedging or reducing the force of an utterance. The second is the device that may boost or intensify a proportion’s force. So, she claimed women use hedging devices to express uncertainty, and they use intensifying devices to persuade their addressee to take them seriously. 

•  Lakoff’s linguistic features as politeness devices 

In example 5 about the use of question tags, we know that they not only express uncertainty as claimed by Lakoff, but also express affective meaning. They may function as positive politeness device. Tags also used by someone who responsible for the success of interaction to make the addressee participate like what we found in example 7. A tag may also soften a directive and negative comment as in example 8. Tag may also be used as confrontational devices. In example 9 there is an example of a tag used to force feedback. From the example we can conclude that tag can also be classified in boosting devices. We can also summarize that in using tag, women tend to emphasize in polite function of tag, and men used more tags for the expression of uncertainty.

The examples above are example form western culture that might be different in other cultures. For instance in Malagasy, it is the men rather than women who qualify and modify their utterances, and who tend to use indirect language that considered the more polite speakers.

Interaction

There are many features of interaction that differentiate the talk of women and men.

• Interruption

From the conversation in example 11, we can see that in same sex interactions, interruptions were pretty evenly distributed between speakers. In cross sex interactions almost all the interruptions were from males. And the study of pre-schoolers found that boys learn to dominate the talk at very early age.

•  Feedback 

Women illustrated as cooperative conversationalist. This is the evidence that women provide more encouraging feedback to their conversational partners than the men do. In the other hand, men tend to be more competitive and less supportive of others.

•  Explanations 

The difference between women and men in ways of interacting may be the result of different socialization and acculturation patterns.

Gossip

Women’s gossip focuses on personal experiences and relationships, personal problems and feelings, and may include indirectly criticism. But men, they mainly discuss things and activities rather than personal experiences and feelings.

Sexist language

Sexist language is one example of the way a culture or society conveys it values to one group to another and from one generation to the next. In practice, research in this area has concentrated on the ways in which language conveys negative attitudes to women.

•  Can a language be sexist? 

Feminist have claimed that English is a sexist language that involves inequality between women and men. For example, in semantic area, the English metaphor tends to describe women using derogatory images compared to those used to describe men. For example, in animal imagery, women describe as negative and weak animal like bitch, and chicken, whereas men symbolized with such a strong and positive animal like wolf. In food imagery, women are also described as equally insulting as above.

It also suggests that suffixes –ess and –ette diminish women for its meaning that represents connotation of lack of seriousness. English also renders women invisible, when it uses he and men as generic forms of human.

The relative status of the sexes in a society may be reflected not only in the ways in which men and women use language, but also in the language used about women and men. The linguistic data also supports the view that women are assigned and treated linguistically subordinate.