Linguistics Discussion 2013 and Beyond discussion

Now I'm not talking necessarily about sexual biology but about the gender. Hence it should really be masculine and feminine speech.

This is the area I'm looking at currently in linguistics. If anyone has any research, books or ideas related to the differences and connections between the use of language in these different groups please share it here!

Jonathan wrote: "Now I'm not talking necessarily about sexual biology but about the gender. Hence it should really be masculine and feminine speech.

This is the area I'm looking at currently in linguistics. If an..."


I find it an interesting topic. My old Linguistics professor dabbles in novel writing, and he told us the story of him taking some of his writing to a friend of his (also a linguist) for proofreading. His friend came back and told him everything was good, except, a woman would never speak that way. My professor was surprised for a moment, then thought about it and realized his friend was right. A woman wouldn't speak that way.

I'll try and find an interesting article I saw once about men and women's speech, and brains.

I've found that to be very interesting too, whenever I read a novel from a woman's perspective that was written by a man I always like to pay attention to see if it is believable. I find it really amusing when it isn't. I would like to know if the differences are actually biological or if the are just socialized into us. I would guess socialized. Men and women have very similar brains and reactions to things, the thing that causes a lot of the differences is usually just socialization. I think it would be so cool to study.

So far some of the main differences detected are that:
on the whole men tend to dominate conversations, men tend to interrupt more and men tend to use less standard forms of language while women tend to use more standard forms and be more passive or polite in language use. There are naturally always exceptions as with any language user. However, the suggestion is that such things occur because socially (and to some sense biologically) the ways we acquire our language is socially acquired. There are multiple theories about it and I think it's best to ascribe a sense that language is acquired naturally through some kind of language device in the brain and through what we see around us to do with language. Therefore it seems that the language differences are in some degree social (women learning their roles are to be more passive according to society) and biological (the degrees to which men and women are naturally aware of different things more and therefore use language accordingly).

By the way Kyle did you give me the moderator nickname? hahaha!

I took a Language and Gender class in college which was very interesting. I know we read You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation by Deborah Tannen which I really enjoyed, so if you haven't already you might want to check it out.

I remember reading an article in one of my classes (I think it was Language and Culture or Language and Society) that surveyed a bunch of greeting cards for new babies to look at how the language used is different depending on the babies sex, showing how early we start to use language in a gendered way. I'm sorry I don't have more data on the actual article, it's been a while.

I can't remember what else we read, but I will soon be retrieving my undergraduate books and notes from storage and I'll see if I hung on to the syllabus of the class to point you toward more reading material.