LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Gender Differences in the Use of Linguistic Forms in the Speech of Men and Women: A Comparative Study of Persian and English

Azadeh Nemati, Ph.D. Candidate
Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.

Abstract

This research was intended to determine whether men and women were different with respect to the use of intensifiers, hedges and tag questions in English and Persian. To conduct the study, R. Lakoff's (1975) ideas concerning linguistic differences between males and females were taken into account.

In order to gather the most natural-like data, 6 English and 8 Persian film-scripts with a family and social theme were randomly selected from amongst all the scenarios available in two libraries of University of Shiraz. In all, 9280 utterances were studied.

The data were then divided into four major groups: (1) cross gender, same culture, (2) same gender, cross culture; (3) cross gender, cross culture; and (4) cross culture data. The results of the 21 Chi-squares computed showed no significant difference between the groups on the use of intensifiers, hedged and tag questions. The findings of the study did not confirm Lakoff's opinion regarding gender-bound language at least in the three areas and the corpus inspected in this research.

1. Introduction

From childhood, males and females are different in many ways, both physiologically and psychologically. Eisenmen (1997) claims that women, in comparison to men, have a better memory. Men are quite accurate in maintaining a sense of direction but women are not. This is consistent with the claim that men tend to do better than women on visual-spatial tests and in mathematics.

There also exist social differences between men and women. Two of the most significant theories on social differences between males and females are "difference theory" and "dominance theory".

According to "difference theory," men and women, even those within the same group, live in different or separate cultural worlds and, as a result, they promote different ways of speaking (Uchida: 1992). This theory is sometimes called "two-culture theory". In simple terms, although men and women live in the same environment they establish different relations with the society as if each belongs to a different environment and culture, the result of which is consequently reflected in the language of both genders as in other aspects of their lives. So in this theory, cross-gender communication is to be taken as cross-cultural or bi-cultural communication.

In "dominance theory," men and women are believed to inhabit a cultural and linguistic world, where power and status are unequally distributed. In this theory, also called power-based theory, the focus is on male dominance and gender division.

1.1 Gender-bound Language

Although men and women, from a given social class, belong to the same speech community, they may use different linguistic forms. The linguistic forms used by women and men contrast to some extent in all speech communities. For example, Holmes (1993) mentions the Amazon Indians' language as an extreme example, where the language used by a child's mother is different from that used by her father and each tribe is distinguished by a different language. In this community, males and females speak different languages.

Less dramatic are communities where men and women speak the same language, but some distinct linguistic features occur in the speech of women and men. These differences range from pronunciation or morphology to vocabulary. Holmes (1993) refers to Japanese, where men and women use different words with the same meaning distinctively. For example, in this language when a woman wants to say 'water', she uses the word 'ohiya' whereas a man uses the word 'miza.'

Furthermore, women tend to use the standard language more than men do. Climate (1997) believes that females generally use speech to develop and maintain relationships. They use language to achieve intimacy. Tannen (1990) states that women speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy, while men speak and hear a language of status and independence. Tannen (ibid) also states that such a communication resembles cross-cultural communication where the style of communication is different. According to Kaplan and Farrell (1994) and Leet-Peregrini (1980) messages (emails) produced by women are short and their participation is driven by their desire to keep the communication going rather than the desire to achieve consensus.

2. A Brief Review of Works on Gender-Bound Language

The investigation and identification of differences between men's and women's speech date back across time. Until 1944, no specific piece of writing on gender differences in language appeared. As stated by Grey (1998), it was in 1970s that comparison between female cooperativeness and male competitiveness in linguistic behavior began. Mulac, et al (2001) concentrated on the term 'gender as culture' and ran an empirical study on linguistic differences between men and women. Swallowe (2003) reviewed the literature on differences between men and women in the use of media for interpersonal communication, etc.

From among these researchers, Lakoff (1975) proposed theories on the existence of women's language. Her book 'Language and Woman's Place' has served as a basis for much research on the subject. She mentions ten features for women's language. As cited in Holmes (1993: 314), these ten features are as follows:

1. Lexical hedges or fillers, e.g. you know, sort of, …
2. Tag questions, e.g. she is very nice, isn't she?
3. Rising intonation on declaratives, e.g. it's really good.
4. Empty adjectives, e.g. divine, charming, cute.
5. Precise color terms, e.g. magenta, aquamarine.
6. Intensifiers such as just and so.
7. Hypercorrect grammar, e.g. consistent use of standard verb forms.
8. Super polite forms, e.g. indirect requests, euphemisms.
9. Avoidance of strong swear words, e.g. fudge, my goodness.
10. Emphatic stress, e.g. it was a BRILLIANT performance.

Lakoff's hypotheses have both pros and cons. Men's language as put by Lakoff is assertive, adult, and direct, while women's language is immature, hyper-formal or hyper-polite and non-assertive. But such statements have their own pros. Michaelson and Poll (2001), for example, emphasized on the dynamic nature of speech of men and women by stating that 'rule of politeness' governing face-to-face conversations seems to be less binding when there is no physical presence. They also state that it is this bodily presence of conversational dyads that lead to a weakening of gender roles. While analyzing the electronic mails of a number of men and women, Bunz and Campbell (2002) stated that social categories such as age, gender, etc. do not influence politeness accommodation in email. Canary and Hause (1993) as cited in Mulac (1998) have argued that meaningful differences in the communication strategies of men and women have not been found with any degree of consistency.

Despite such and many other similar observations, Lakoff believes that the use of tag questions by women is the sign of uncertainty. Dubois and Crouch (1975) launched a critique on Lakoff's claims, especially on tag questions. They examined the use of tag questions within the context of a professional meeting and concluded that at least in that context males used tag questions more than females did. Their conclusion was that Lakoff's hypothesis might be biased in favor of highly stereotyping beliefs or folk linguistics.

Dubois and Crouch (1975) questioned Lakoff's findings as Lakoff had used introspective methods in her study. They argued that her conclusions were made on uncontrolled and unverifiable observation of others and were based on highly skewed and non-random sample of people.

To examine Lakoff's hypothesis, the researchers selected three grammatical categories, from the above list, namely tag questions, hedges and intensifiers as the basis of analysis. The following research question was the basis for this study. Do women use intensifiers, tag questions and hedges more than men do in English and Persian? This research question gave way to three null hypotheses as follows:

1. There is no significant difference between the groups under study on the use of hedges.
2. There is no significant difference between the groups under study on the use of intensifiers.
3. There is no significant difference between the groups under study on the use of tag questions.

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