DO WOMEN AND MEN SPEAK DIFFERENTLY?

 

    Women and men do not speak in exactly the same way in any community.

 

    There are communities where the language is shared by women and men, but particular linguistic features  occur only in the women’s speech or only in the men’s speech. These features are usually small differences in pronunciation or word-shape which is called Morphology. Word-shapes contrast in other languages because women and men use different affixes.
Example:

 

Women’s form     Men’s form
          Ba                    ba-na
          Yaa                  yaa-na

 

    Sex differences in language are often just one aspect of more pervasive linguistic differences in the society reflecting social status or power differences.

 

    The fact that there are clearly identifiable differences between women’s and men’s speech in the communities, sex exclusive speech forms; where some forms are used only by women and others are used only by men reflect sex-exlusive social roles. Everybody know that we have responsabilities as women or men in every single community, so there are no arguments over who prepares the dinner and who puts the children to bed.

 

 

    There are some disadvantages as women we have:

 

Ø      Violence against women

Ø      Inequalities and inadequacies in and unequal access to education and training.
Ø      The persistent and increasing burden of poverty on women.
Ø      The effects of armed or other kinds of conflict on women, including those living under foreign occupation.
Ø      Inequality in economic structures and policies, in all forms of productive activities and in access to resources .
Ø      Inequality between men and women in the sharing of power and decision-making at all levels.
Ø      Insufficient mechanisms at all levels to promote the advancement of women.
Ø      Lack of respect for and inadequate promotion and protection of the human rights of women.
Ø      Stereotyping of women and inequality in women's access to and participation in all communication systems, especially in the media.
Ø      Gender inequalities in the management of natural resources and in the safeguarding of the environment.
Ø      Persistent discrimination against and violation of the rights of the girl child .

 

 

 

 

 

“ SMALL ”     DIFFERENCES

 

    Women speak more standard forms.                         Men speak more vernacular forms.
     English speaking women tend to use more.             Male speaker’s tendency to use forms that are                        
     Socially prestigious speech forms than  men       generally considered “ correct ” less frequently
as well as higher pitch and more variable                 than women.
     Intonation patterns.                                                                Some words such as handsome and beautiful
     Some english words, such as adorable and         are more appropriately used in reference to
lovely, are associated more appropriately used        females and males respectively. 
women speakers.                                                           Males frequently talk about recreational and
    Women like to talk about social issues such as    work-related activities.
child abuse and women’s rights                                    A men who is too polite is “ effeminate ”.
        (according to Kipers )
     A woman who uses less polite forms is
cosidered “ rough ”.

 

 

 

    In most speech communities, age is a major dimension for social categorization. Three kinds of markers associated with age should be distinguished:
a)      Those which yield information about the speaker
b)      Those which yield informatin about the receiver
c)      Those which yield information about the role-relatinships between the two which are influenced by their relative age.

 

 

 

    Male speaker’s tendency to use forms that are generally considered “ correct ” less frequently than women speakers do the sociolinguistic gender pattern.

 

    The gender pattern does not involve all the socially sensitive linguistic features. A commonly reported version of the gender pattern shows females speakers avoiding socially disfavored linguistic features only in informal styles, there is no substantial difference in the use of socially disfavored forms based on the speaker’s sex.

 

    In some traditional communities, fewer women learn higher-status national and regional languages than men because they receive less formal education and have fewer opportunities to be in situations where the higher-status languages are needed.

 

    The social position of women in our society has traditionally been less secure than that of men.

 

    Men in our society have traditionally been rated socially by what they do ( occupation ) and women continue to suffer discrimination against them in many occupations.

 

 

    It is quite generally found that the forms used most by higher-status speakers in a community tend to be used the most by all speakers in more careful styles of speech at least in the more developed variables. In english, for example, the pronunciation  -ing for the suffix in “ going ” would be more frequent for high-status speakers, and –in  relatively more frequent for lower-status speakers.

 

    There are ways of speaking which men use to emphasize their masculinity and other forms women use to symbolize femininity.

 

    Lakoff described six categories of language use that are sharply differentiated by the sex of the speaker:
a)      lexical distinctions such as color terms,

b)      strong versus weak expletives,

c)      women’s versus neutral adjectives

d)      tag questions

e)      questions intonation with statement syntax

f)        strenght of directive speech acts