Men, Women, and Language: Linguistic Variation Across Gender

It is commonly accepted that men and women communicate very differently. This is, after all, the basic premise of bestseller books like John Gray’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus and Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand. We’ve all heard the stereotypical claims, for example, that women are more talkative, or that men are less prone to gossip. The idea that men and women speak different languages has become almost a dogma, backed up with countless examples of studies. Yet to what extent—if at all—are these stereotypes accurate? In a closer look at the pseudo-science behind the arguments, we find conclusions that are biased by presuppositions about men and women and their use of language. We must deconstruct and examine these past theorizations, then, in order to recognize the prejudices and biases of our society and reach an accurate understanding of the gender differences in language use. A critical examination of the research reveals that it is primarily the cultural and societal constructions of gender—the contemporary ideas on masculinity and femininity—that create these differences in linguistic usage.

Regarding terminology, the discussion will focus on the word “gender” rather than “sex”; the latter refers to a strictly biological and generally binary distinction, while the difference in language use is a result of the socially constructed categories of male and female. The word “gender,” then, is more appropriate as it refers to the social behaviors, expectations, and attitudes associated with being male or female. In terms of cultural distinctions, the discussion will center around Western society and English-speaking countries.

There is a long history of society’s finding differences in the speech of men and women; from the Middle Ages on, there are records of these beliefs about the differences in the areas of vocabulary, swearing, grammar, and verbosity. In terms of vocabulary, it was believed that women used a much smaller variety of words, instead relying more heavily on adverbial forms. In 1756, Lord Chesterfield observed, “[Women] take a word and change it…to be employed in several occasional purposes of the day. For instance, a fine woman is vastly obliged or vastly offended, vastly glad or vastly sorry. Large objects are vastly great, small ones are vastly little…” (Coates 11). Centuries later, linguist Otto Jespersen reaffirmed this assertion, agreeing that men’s vocabulary was more varied than women’s. He included a chapter called “The Woman” in his book Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin; in it, he generalizes that “the vocabulary of a woman as a rule in much less extensive than that of a man” (Coates 12). In terms of swearing, it was believed that women’s language was more polite and refined; the idea of the ladylike gentlewoman was pervasive in the courtly tradition of the Middle Ages and persisted through the centuries. An article in a journal in 1754 asserts, “D--n [sic] my blood is of Male extraction, and Pshaw, Fiddlestick I take to be female” (Coates 15); the more taboo swear words (the author does not dare even write out the full word!) are associated with men’s language, while the gentler expressions are associated with women’s language. 200 years later, linguist Robin Lakoff made the same observation, claiming, “women don’t use off-color or indelicate expressions” (Coates 15). There were also distinctions made between women’s grammar as opposed to men’s; observations on language claimed that women were more prone to grammatical incorrectness. In 1713, for example, Richard Steele noted women’s “negligence in grammar” and Lord Chesterfield remarked in 1741, “most women…speak in open defiance of all grammar” (Coates 17). Jespersen specifically claimed that women were fond of the more “primitive” parataxis form (a sequence of juxtaposed clauses with no links), while men constructed sentences based on the hypotaxis form (composed of sequences of clauses joined by subordinating conjunctions), which he considered more intricate and complex. Finally, the perception of women’s volubility has persisted throughout time. Even in Shakespeare’s As You Like It from the early 17th century, the character of Rosalind declares, “Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak.” This idea was restated and reaffirmed over the years; in the 20th century, Jespersen again noted women’s “common fluency of speech” (Coates 25).

There are a variety of problems with accepting such claims, even as accurate portrayals of the observers’ contemporary societies. For one thing, the majority of the recorded commentaries on differences were written by men in an androcentric society; the comments, then, reflect more clearly the ideas of their times in terms of gender roles. Jennifer Coates goes so far as to suggest that in their views on women and swearing, for example, “these writers claim to describe women’s more polite use of language, but we should ask whether what they are actually doing is attempting to prescribe how women ought to talk” (Coates 15). In 1980, scholar Dale Spender took this idea further; having conducted research that indicated men’s greater verbosity, Spender suggested, “The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men, but with silence” (Spender 42) as an explanation of the gap between the myth and reality of women’s talk. Her radical assertion proposed that when silence was the desired state for women, “then any talk in which a woman engages can be too much” (Spender 42). In support of her argument are all the images of the silent woman as a virtuous woman: an old English proverb stating “Silence is the best ornament of a woman”; the Latin proverb, “A silent woman is always more admired than a noisy one”; the rhyme, “Maidens should be mild and meek/ Swift to hear and slow to speak”…The list of such adages is long; the model of the silent woman is a pervasive one. Furthermore, dialectologists, who did carry out scientific studies and could have contributed more objective observations on gender differences in language, often failed to fairly represent women in their surveys. Looking at data surveys reveals an uneven pattern of sampling; in a survey of English dialects in the 1900’s, women were only interviewed in a few of the counties, and even then, only a small percentage of them were included. The prejudices of androcentricity are evident; we must then look skeptically at old theories of language differences.

And yet stereotypes today, although perhaps less androcentric, continue to tinge our perceptions of men and women’s speech. A study conducted in 1990 investigated the influence of speaker gender on a listener’s judgment of speaker verbosity. In the study, a dialogue from a play where each person contributed equal amounts of speech was recorded, and then replayed with the gender of the speakers being switched. It turned out that “when the dialogue was between a man and a woman, the woman was judged to be talking more than her conversation partner who was a man. When members of the same gender performed the dialogue, then each speaker was judged as contributing to the conversation equally” (Weatherall 125). A similar study conducted the same years asked participants to rate written scenarios describing communicative behaviors attributed to “Michael” or “Valerie.” Ultimately, the communicative behavior was judged as more competent when the speaker was male. In both cases, the studies reveal the extent to which people’s perceptions are prejudiced by their stereotypical and cultural beliefs about gender and speech.

In fact, these preconceptions have directed much of how researchers have even approached the question of language differences in the field of sociolinguistics. In 1975, Lakoff first generated interest with her publication of Language and Women’s Place, galvanizing linguists into research, and since then, research has generally taken four different forms: the deficit approach, the dominance approach, the difference approach, and the social constructionist approach. The first makes claims about female language as being an inferior version of male language, implying that there is something intrinsically wrong with it. Jespersen’s writing is an example of the deficit approach (although the term had not yet been coined); in “The Woman,” he wrote that women’s deficiency in language stemmed from their “incoherent sentences,” “inferior command of syntax,” and “less extensive vocabulary” (Litosesseliti 28). The dominance approach interprets linguistic differences in speech in terms of man’s dominance and women’s subordination. Lakoff pioneered this dominance approach through her explanation that “women are socialized into using linguistic features that connote tentativeness, deference, and a lack of authority, because women occupy a marginal and powerless social position” (Weatherall 65). In contrast, the difference approach does not inherently suggest inferiority or superiority in men and women’s language, but only emphasizes the idea that they belong to different and separate subcultures. Linguist Jennifer Coates suggests that this approach became more popular in the 1980’s as a “direct result of women’s growing resistance to being treated as a subordinate group” (Coates 6). The fourth approach is the most recent, and sees gender identity as a social construct rather than a given social category; this dynamic approach focuses on what is being done with language, rather than its quality and style.

Yet conducting research with the deficit, dominance, or difference approach results in biased results. All three presuppose the conclusion, as data is analyzed though the lens of preset social expectations. In fact, Jespersen’s argument was based solely on intuition, rather than empirical research; he recognized in women’s speech that which he wanted to recognize. In following these approaches, social scientists interpret data by focusing on those elements which match their expectations of women’s language, whether these expectations focus on inferiority or simply difference. Furthermore, this scientific methodology closely observed speakers’ conversational pattern and strategies, but was generally blind to specific social and economic patterns. As a result, the deficit and dominance approach often confused gender and power; Lakoff, for example, contended that interruptions, a conversational strategy understood to signal power, were more often found in men’s speech than in women’s. One of her studies related that men interrupted more than women in an office meeting. Yet in 1978, a closer examination of this study by Barbara and Gene Eakins revealed that the pattern of interruptions was “almost perfectly correlated with a hierarchy of status based on rank and length of time in that department” (Weatherall 65). It was status, rather than gender, which accounted for the quantity of interruptions. And several years later, researchers William O’Barr and Bowman Atkins suggested that even the idea of “women’s language” itself was a misnomer; the correct term should be “powerless language,” as the features described by Jespersen and Lakoff were not functions of gender but functions of power found in the speech of men and women. In contrast, the difference approach has the advantage of allowing women’s speech to be examined outside this framework of deficiency or powerlessness; however, the analysis remains mired in preconceived notions. Because so much of raw data is ambiguous or unclear, approaching it with the expectation that there will be a difference in the speech of men and women can result in inaccurate conclusions, however subconsciously or subtly these expectations influence the analysis.

Finding flaws in studies that find language differences, however, does not exclude the possibility that the differences may exist. And in fact, modern sociolinguist research has shown variation in the speech of men and women—and has also shown that the variation is inexorably tied up with gender identity. These differences are revealed in studies that aim to examine the correlation between linguistic variation and other variables; gender then becomes a stratified variable within the study and is thus less biased by expectations of difference. These studies allow for a more complex look at gender as just one factor in linguistic variation, and provide a more accurate—if less clear-cut—idea of the differences.

The clearest and most consistent results in terms of differences relate to men and women’s use of standard versus non-standard forms of speech. (The standard form is the one designated as the language of formal written English, and is also known as the prestige form, associated as it is with social group of the highest social standing; the non-standard is often referred to as the vernacular.) The principle, as stated by linguist Richard Hudson, posits that, “In any society where males and females have equal access to the standard form, females use standard variants of any stable variable which is socially stratified for both sexes more often than males do” (Gregoire). The qualification is significant; women’s access to the standard forms through education and the professional world was limited in earlier times. This gender/prestige correlation is thus strictly contemporary.

Jenny Cheshire’s 1982 study, in Reading, England attests to this correlation in her examination of the relationship between use of grammatical variables and adherence to peer group culture by adolescent boys and girls. She distinguished eleven various non-standard morphological and syntactic features in their speech. These included using ain’t instead of the auxiliary have or to be and the non-standard use of has (“you has to do it”) and was (“you was with me”). In terms of frequency, she found that although there was large variation among the individuals, the non-standard forms were all used less often by the girls than by the boys (Cheshire).

Yet there have also been studies which directly contradict this theory (and these results); research conducted in other communities in Britain (notably in Belfast and Wales) revealed that it was the women who were closer to the vernacular. What, then, are we to conclude? Examining the studies more closely reveals the importance of other variables in accounting for this linguistic variation. For Cheshire found that those who conformed the most to a group were most loyal to the vernacular of the group—and the boys who were most tightly linked to a group conformed linguistically most of all. The greater prominence of the vernacular in the tight-knit groups can be explained by the idea that the vernacular—as a non-standard and different way of speech—both creates and reflects the closeness of a group as it establishes the group as a separate subculture. Cheshire also found that within the more formal school context, girls’ use of non-standard forms decreased more sharply than the boys. As Coates theorizes, the girls’ less cohesive groups in this circumstance meant that “they are less under pressure from the group to use vernacular form, and consequently more exposed to the prestige norms of Standard English valued by institutions such as school” (Coates 81). This suggests that it was the tight-knit social network of the boys which served to maintain the vernacular speech norms. The counter-examples of Belfast and Wales reinforce this idea. Researcher Lesley Milroy developed a system of giving each person, male and female, a Network Strength Score (based on individuals in the community’s knowledge of other people in the community, the workplace and at leisure activities) and investigated the correlation between the integration of individuals in the community and the way those individuals speak. What she found was that a high Network Strength Score correlated with a greater use of the vernacular; the women in these communities had stronger network ties, which were related in the homogeneity of their (non-standard) linguistic forms. Studying this added variable—the social networks—reveals the extent to which gender identity can be manipulated; the linguistic differences here are shown to be contingent on social factors, rather than a reflection of biological differences in men and women.

The same idea applies to another claim of linguistic differences between men and women: the use of hedges in women’s speech. Hedges are linguistic forms (such as “I think,” “you know,” or “like”) expressing a speaker’s uncertainty or used as a mitigating device to lessen an utterance’s impact; various studies have shown that women use significantly more hedges than do men (Coates 90). A 1986 study conducted by Bent Preisler, for example, recorded both mixed-sex and single-sex groups discussing controversial topics such as corporal punishment. His analysis showed that the women in the sample—both in the mixed-sex and single-sex groups—used incorporated more hedges into their speech. Here again, however, there are other variables that could be influencing the linguistic form. In a study of courtroom language of 1980, O’Barr and Atkins found that the greatest linguistic differences between witnesses (defined specifically by ten features—including hedges—that they had judged characteristic of women’s language) was dependent more on the speaker’s social status and previous court experience than on the speaker’s gender (Weatherall 65). Again, the gender identity can be manipulated, as power and status are reversed.

The previous examples have shown that linguistic differences are primarily the result of the social circumstances. Examining the linguistic differences between men and women with the idea that they reflect the differing social constructs, then, reveals a great deal about contemporary gender identity. For example, men’s tendency to interrupt more frequently than women during mixed-sex conversations, for example, suggests an inequity of power in conversation. While the Eakins’ study (see above) showed that the interruptions during the meeting reflected status more than it did gender, linguistic research has found that women in general interrupt less than men do; looking at these two results together suggests that women’s status is generally lower—although status in this case may not be defined strictly in employment terms. Specifically, Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s 1983 analysis of thirty-one conversations between two participants showed a profound difference between interruptions in same-sex versus in mixed-sex conversations; this difference emphasizes that the linguistic differences between men and women are not inherent or fixed, but rather reflect the socially sanctioned relations of dominance and submission between men and women. That is, men and women are not biologically programmed to interrupt more or less; rather, the men could adjust their speaking patterns when they approached a different sociological situation. In the thirty-one conversations—ten between two women, ten between two men, and eleven between one man and one woman—West and Zimmerman found that although the total number of interruptions in the twenty single-sex conversations was only seven, there were forty-eight interruptions in the eleven coed conversations—96% of which were caused by the man interrupting the woman; these results are confirmed by other research looking at interruptions. The fact that men’s rate of interruptions increased significantly during conversations with women indicate that “men infringe women’s right to speak, specifically women’s right to finish a turn” (Coates 115). Preventing the speaker from finishing his turn, while gaining a turn for himself, the interruptor clearly asserts his dominance; men’s greater use of interruptions places them in the dominant role.

In the case of interruptions, we learn more about the allocation of power between men and women; research findings on further linguistic differences—from style to form to quantity—can be further analyzed in this way to better understand the social construct of gender. For the reality is that we cannot help but carry our notions of what it means to be masculine or feminine wherever we go. The theory behind stereotype threat is testimony to this idea that our engrained social perceptions directly impact our behavior; the research on the stereotype threat effect indicates that when a person’s social identity is attached to a negative stereotype, the person will perform negatively “in a manner consist with the stereotype” (Steele). For example, when test administrators told women that certain math tests showed no gender differences, women performed equal to men, while those who were told nothing did significantly worse than men. Unless they were specifically directed otherwise, the women’s abilities were influenced by their preconceptions about gender and mathematic performance

The stereotype threat effect, then, only reinforces how powerful our judgments and ideas about identity are in shaping our behavior. And language is one of the most revealing modes of behavior in expressing and reflecting these ideas, especially as they relate to gender. For although it is easy to criticize the existence of linguistic variation as it was described in the past, reflective as the views are of an androcentric society, modern research conducted outside the frame of a dominance or deficit approach continues to show the existence of variation: women’s greater use of the standard forms and of hedges and men’s greater use of interruptions are only a few examples of such differences. And the manipulation of these linguistic devices when status is reversed or social circumstances change attests to the social identities inherent in our definitions of the masculine and feminine genders that create the differences. For the world we live in sends us messages about the different gender roles from the moment we are born, and how we use language is a direct result of this socialization.

Cheshire, Jenny. “Sex and Gender in Variationist Research.” 7 December, 2007. http://alpha.qmul.ac.uk/~uglv003/sex%20and%20gender.pdf

Coates, Jennifer. Women, Men, and Language. 3rd ed. Pearson Education Ltd: London, 2004.

Grégoire, Suzanne. “Gender and Language Change: The Case of Early Modern Women.” 9 December 2007. http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6362-gregoire.htm 2006

Holmes, Janet. Women, Men, and Politeness. Longman Publishing: New York: 1995.

Litosseliti, Lia. Gender & Language: Theory and Practice. Oxford University Press: New York, 2006.

Spender, Dale. Man Made Language. 4th ed. Rivers Oram Press: London, 1998.

Steele, C. M. A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. American Psychologist, 52, 613-619. 1997

Weatherall, Ann. Gender, Language, and Discourse. MPG Books, Ltd: Cornwall, 2002.