http://faculty.ed.umuc.edu/~jmatthew/articles/overview.html#1900
TOWARDS AN OVERVIEW OF WORK ON GENDER AND LANGUAGE VARIATION
Clive Grey
Over the five years of teaching courses on gender-linked language variation I have become aware of the need for an up-to-date commentary on work over the last twenty five years. While there are now many handbooks to date, and well over 400 articles are listed in the appended bibliography, it was felt that a short summary of the main trends of the work would be useful for students embarking on a one-term course.
I have tried to be as inclusive as possible, but if there are omissions the reader will forgive the compiler, and perhaps inform him of this. At the start of undertaking the task it was not clear that the work would become a major undertaking. If it induces the user of this overview to a closer reading of the texts then the work will not have been in vain. The paper was first written in 1993, and a revision has been necessary to update the text for the reader in 1996. There is, however, no shortage of references to include. There is still enormous interest in the area of gender and language.
I have attempted to cover all periods, concentrating on work in English, but recognition of work in other languages is made, and specific reference to this is made in a special section towards the end of the overview. I have not incorporated references to gender and language in introductory linguistics textbooks, as it felt that the reader might be familiar with such comments already. Instead, the concentration is on listing of primary texts, texts which will introduce the reader to current lines of research.
Index
# 1. Early statements on gender and language
# 2. Work after 1900
# 3. Work during the 1970's
# 4. The Early 1980's
# 5. Work after 1985
# The 90's and the outlook for the future
I. Early statements on gender and language
It is common to assume that the investigation and identification of differences between men's and women's speech dates only from the 1970s. While the number of books and articles has certainly expanded our knowledge enormously of this once largely unrecognised area of language usage many articles covering gender and its relation to language usage had appeared many years before.
Even in the Tudor period comments about the kind of language that was suitable for young women to aim at is evidenced. Vives (1523) De Institutione Christianae Feminae (On The Instruction of a Christian Woman) has observations on what appropriate was considered then appropriate language for the time. There is little investigation of such advice of the period yet, however, and there is undoubtedly much of interest from a historical point of view about how society viewed women and linguistic behaviour. Similarly, much about attitudes towards women's speech is revealed by Tilley's collection of English proverbs (Tilley 1950), items of which appear in several recent handbooks (Coates 1986, Hughes 1992).
In the eighteenth century Bingham's work The Young Ladies Accidence published in 1785 offers advice of the same kind. Such writing is not uncommon in a period of increasing social movement. For a review of such work see Bornstein (1978) and Ehrenreich & English (no date).
For a general overview of class, gender and politics between 1780 and 1850 see Hall 1985, and Homans 1986 for a discussion of women in nineteenth century fiction.
What is interesting about these early 'handbooks' is the specific reference to women - there are no corresponding publications where men are the audience for a book on 'improving' linguistic behaviour, indeed it is men who usually do the suggesting. Similar advice came from one E. Devis, in 1801, in his Accidence, or first rudiments of English grammar designed for the use of young ladies, and similar work appears in French in the same year (Marechal 1801).
A fairly recent study, Tucker (1967), of vocabulary of the eighteenth century has also attempted to chart the nature of gender differences in writing in the period.
One of the notorious writers of the late eighteenth century (to modern readers) is Philip Stanhope, later known as Lord Chesterfield, whose comments have come down through various quotations in Jennifer Coates' book Women, Men and Language (Coates 1986). They remain, largely, idiosyncratic personal observations, and reflect an overtly masculine bias towards what counts as good usage of the period.
In fact it is very difficult indeed to find women writing for women on matters of language use before the start of the twentieth century. Work that did aim to deal with women's usage remained largely instructional: e.g. Higginson (1881). In the last years of the nineteenth century several articles appeared in the Writer about the need pronoun usage, and a problem which is still contentious in present-day English, the question of whether it is appropriate to use "he" in reference both to individual females, as well as individual males (e.g. "the student should leave his coat at the back of the hall", etc.). (See also Converse (1889), Morgan (1895). By the turn of the century grammatical gender had become a research topic of considerable interest: Wheeler (1899), Frazer (1900) and Knutson (1905).
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II. Work after 1900
So by 1900 publications tend to fall into two categories: instructional advice for women wishing to improve their spoken and written English, and the rise and development of sex-specification in the language, of which pronoun usage is one aspect.
But by far the most significant publication of the period on gender and language variation for many is E C Stanton's Woman's Bible, described later as the original feminist version of the text, published in 1891, in America. And fifteen years later it is in America that work on women's language begins to take off, with James' article in Harper's Bazaar entitled "The speech of American women", (James 1906), and Stopes' article on the problematic usage (for many) word "man" (Stopes 1908).
Often lost in the discussion of feminist inquiry into language is Gauchat's remarkable study of a Swiss village community (Gauchat 1905), possibly the first truly sociolinguistic study of its kind, where male and female usage is clearly divergent. It remains unique for its time, a period of classical dialectology when variation was assumed to obey rigid laws and only men spoke true dialect. William Labov deserves credit for reasserting its significance in his Sociolinguistic Patterns of 1972.
Chamberlain (1912) represented a new direction, one of investigating gender differences in language across different cultures, and it is from this study that we derive early information about so-called sex-exclusive differences, situations where men speak (supposedly) an entirely different language from women. The classic cases are Gros Ventre, (Flannery 1946), Chukchi, Yana (Sapir 1961) and the case of the Carib Indians. Most of these cases can be interpreted as the result of peculiar social conditions, with the case of the Caribs partly explained by annihilation of all the males of the tribe by a neighbouring tribe. They remain rare cases. Most work on gender and language variation now deals with sex-preferential linguistic usage, that is where men tend to speak in one way, women another, although even this is often contentious.
The work of the distinguished Danish linguist Otto Jespersen on women's use of language has come under fire in much recent literature. His writing, "The Woman", a chapter in his book Language (1922) and his chapter "Sex and Gender" in his second book The Philosophy of Grammar (1924) to an audience in the 1990s now reads entirely farcical. It is easy to criticise such early work for what it is, but little else was written in the 1920s in Europe, and perhaps even at the time many people who read this would have reacted negatively to it.
In America the journal American Speech becomes significant for its publication of many articles on gender-linked variation. Svartengren (1927) deals with feminine gender, taken up again in 1954, and Meredith (1930) takes up the cause with a discussion of possible words such as "doctress" and "authoress". (See the front cover of Dennis Baron's Grammar and Gender also.
The use of "she" to refer to countries and boats attracted Svartengren's attention in another article in 1928, something which many feminists have objected to a great deal in recent years. (The use of "she" to refer to motor cars - "She's a good runner" - seems typically male). Discussion of sexist use of pronouns resumes in Hall (1951) and Langenfelt (1951).
English does possess an impersonal pronoun - "one" but its usage has always been significantly different from the French usage of "on" (Trager 1931). In Britain it typifies aristocratic speech, where in 'ordinary' speech "you" is selected: "one doesn't see this very often" / "you don't see that ..." Work on pronouns has continued with calls for new words for women to use: e.g. Archer (1975).
Both Dike (1937) and Withington (1937) also deal with sex specification in the language: the use of "-ess", an issue returned to in Burchfield's column in the Sunday Times quite recently, and the more general question, taken up particularly in the early sixties, of the connotative difference between a "lady" and a "woman", (see Ackerman (1962), Hancock (1963) and Moe (1963)). See Lakoff (1973) on this concern also.
J M Steadman published two articles in the journal American Speech, the first in 1935 on linguistic taboo, and the second, entitled "Affected and effeminate words" in 1938. Also in American Speech is Maurer's study of prostitutes' and criminal argots (Maurer 1939).
The first specific piece of writing on gender differences in language this century did not appear until 1944, P H Furfey's "Men's and Women's language", published in the Catholic Sociological Review.
Very little work specifically on gender and language variation in Europe appeared in the 40s, but observations of gender-linked variation is recorded in the dialect atlas of western Flanders (Pee 1946). Dialectologists' views about women as informants, at least in British studies, are well-known (See Petyt 1980).
The writer D L Sayers writes about language usage in a book entitled Unpopular Opinions published in 1947, and again in 1969.
Meredith (1955) takes up the stereotype of the office secretary and her speech, and the search for a sex-neutral pronoun continues in the popular press with Titcomb (1955).
More subtle, sinister effects of the way in which language influences perceptions of character are taken up in Strodtbeck & Mann (1956).
III. Work during the 1970's
Roszak & Roszak's book Masculine/Feminine, published in 1969, signals the start of a period of more intense speculation about gender differences in language. Morgan's edited collection Sisterhood is powerful 1970 and her article "Know your enemy: a sampling of sexist quotes" of the same year, Troth's article "How can a woman MAN the barricades", also 1970, and Hole & Levine's article "The Politics of Language" of 1971 also testify to the emerging feminist critique of language usage. Other books include Firestone (1971) The Dialectic of Sex, and Gornick & Moran's Women in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (1971).
Other articles of the period in the same vein are Komisar (1971), Pierce (1971), Strainchamps (1972) "Our sexist language", Gary (1972), Howard (1972) "Watch your language, men". While many would point up the need to 'desex' the language, e.g. Miller & Swift (1972), others begin to signal resistance to this kind of change in English: Kanfer (1972).
From a more sober critical linguistic point of view there is Key's discussion of male/female differences (Key 1972), Warshay (1972) and Trudgill's early article (Trudgill 1972), where the notion of covert prestige linguistic change and gender-linked variation are investigated.
Trudgill's major study of sociolinguistic variation in Norwich (Trudgill 1974) charted the way for further research in Britain of gender-linked variation in language. Conklin's paper (Conklin 1973) also deals with dialectal variation and gender, as does Swacker (1975). With Cheshire's study (Cheshire 1978) of present tense verbs in Reading English among school children we see a return to sociolinguistics at a microlevel of investigation. Its findings remain of great significance for our understanding of social processes and genderised linguistic variation twenty years later, and the crucial exploitation of vernacular culture index as a reflection of language usage make it significant reading for anyone interested in urban dialect in Britain.
Ervin-Tripp's paper "What do women sociolinguists want" calls for urgent attention to be paid to sociolinguistic variation of the kind identified by Cheshire and Trudgill. Too much work in the past has failed to address women's language, and when it has it has tended to consider it not in its own terms, but in comparison to men's language.
Language acquisition and gender variation are relatively recent themes in the linguistic literature: Clarke-Stewart (1973) has been followed by Sears & Feldman (1973) (teacher-pupil interaction) and the work of Stacey et al (1974) on sexism in American education generally. There are other interesting research areas: Sexton's article (1970) "How the American boy is feminised", for example. Thompson (1975) looks at early sex role development and the influence on language, while West & Zimmermann (1977) look at parental interaction with children and how mother's talking varies according to child.
Dictionary makers have fallen victim to feminist criticism of being sexist: Graham (1973), Green (1973), Lennert & Wolfson (1973), Schulz (1973). The Feminist Writers Workshop (1973) published a so-called Intelligent woman's guide to dirty words. (See also Todasco 1973). Of relevance here is Tiedt's article (Tiedt 1973) on the problems facing an editor given heightened awareness of sexism in language use - see Fasold (1990) also.
Comparison begins to be drawn between female cooperativeness and male competitiveness in linguistic behaviour, now a major focus of attention in the nineties, in Hirschmann (1974) and Conklin (1974). Cultural differences in what researchers came to term 'communicative competence', between the sexes, was suggested by work such as Keenan (1974).
Increasingly combative some writers wished to portray women's speech as just as significant as males: Kramarae 1974, the first of many articles, is entitled "Women's speech: separate but unequal?", and in the same year Robin Lakoff, another highly influential writer at the time, produced the first of several papers, entitled "You are what you say". Korda's full length study of 1975 Male chauvinism: how it works in the home is also important.
Dale Spender has stated that English vocabulary has been designed to construct a sexist male supremacy (Man Made Language, Spender 1980). The important point that is often lost is that such notions crucially depend on whether language constructs a reality, or whether the words people use or have at their disposal are irrelevant to thought processes. Most feminist discussion about language crucially depends on the notion that language, the words that people use, create an imbalance in the kinds of things that men and women wish to express. English is a man's language. Historically, men were the only writers to be recognised, men wrote dictionaries, men declared what was good and bad literature and so on.
Much recent work continues to question however whether the link between language and thought is so clear cut. Khosroshahi (1989) is an important contribution to recent discussion, involving experimentation. While Whorf, the main exponent of the view never specifically dealt with gender and variation, his ideas are still central to much feminist writing. It still remains difficult to show one way or the other. See Mathiot ed. (1982) for further discussion of the problem. Ardener (1975) and Baker & Elliston eds. (1975) deal specifically with the philosophical approaches underpinning much of the research of the mid seventies.
The psychological literature began to address such questions: Bem (1975) discusses sex role adaptability, and there are obvious questions raised for linguists. Weitz (1977) Sex roles: biological, psychological and social foundations is also important reading, as is Edelsky (1976) on people's ability to recognise gender from linguistic cues.
Tag questions, one of the features identified by Robin Lakoff as being more likely to be heard from women are first dealt with in detail in Dubois & Crouch (1975) and they have aroused much controversy since.
Several major textbooks begin to appear in the mid seventies, which popularised the discussion and opened it up to linguists generally. As an undergraduate doing single honours linguistics between 1974 and 1978 it is interesting to reflect that no-one thought to put gender and language on the syllabus. Ten years later and a whole shelf would not accommodate the relevant literature.
The main texts are Key (1975) (Male/female language), Lakoff (1975) Language and women's place, (with extracts printed in Lakoff (1981)), McConnell-Ginet (1975) Our father tongue, and Thorne & Henley eds. (1975) Language and sex: difference and dominance. Note the word 'dominant' - it becomes more frequent in later writing as gender-linked variation comes to be seen as part of a more general problem of dominance in language usage.
Other important work of the period is Dubois and Crouch's edited volume The Sociology of Languages of American Women (1976), Nilsen et al eds. 1977 Sexism and language. Burturff & Epstein eds. (1978) Women's language and style), followed by Eakins and Eakins' Sex Differences in Human Communication the same year.
The stereotypes of women's speaking continued to attract the wrath of some: Kramer (1975), Schulz (1975), and Siegler & Siegler (1976), and Horton 1976 returns to the need for a sex-neutral vocabulary in an age of equal opportunities for women. The theme is continued in Blaubergs 1978, Haas 1979 and McConnell-Ginet 1979 "Address forms in sexual politics", and Vetterling- Braggin's "Assertive Power" of the same year, and Wasserstrom (1979).
Crosby & Nyquist launch a severe attack on Lakoff's observations of women's language in their article "The female register" of 1977, and much of Dale Spender's work seems to follow in its wake - her comment that some linguists have been more than helpful in the enterprise of showing how women are less competent linguistically is surely a less than veiled reference to some of the statements of Lakoff (1975). Valian's book Linguistics and Feminism (Valian 1981) also questions the way in which work on gender-linked language variation was going at the time.
At an institutional level government agencies begin to take note of the need to accommodate sensitivities about sexist usage. In 1975 the US Department of Labour produced a publication entitled Job title revisions to eliminate sex- and age- referent language from the dictionary of professional titles. But changing usage is more than a matter of publication of manuals. While outlawing practice in writing, legislating for the spoken word is, as people subject to racial harassment are aware, is something else. Woolf (1979) addresses some of these issues.
Returning to differences in communicative competence (Hymes' term) interruption patterns across the sexes begin to be investigated in Zimmermann & West's important article of 1975. E Aries' article of the same year links well with this, concentrating on other interaction patterns. Esposito (1979) concentrates on sex differences in children's conversation.
Garnica & King in their book (1979) Language, Children and Society and G Wells's article "Variation in child language" in Lee's volume Language Development (Lee 1979) deal with this also. Entitled "Interactional shitwork" P M Fishman's article (Fishman 1977) has been the source of much inspiration for later work on how women appear to oil the wheels of conversation in the face of male reticence or lack of interest in more 'female' topics, carried forward into her second article "Interaction: the work women do" (Fishman 1979).
Expletives, supposedly more common in the speech of men than women, are investigated in Beiley & Time (1976) and Staley (1978).
A group of papers can be grouped together as women sociolinguists begin to explore further the linguistic situation of women in the home: Fishman's "What do couples talk about when they're alone" (Fishman 1978), and Humphrey (1978) "Women, taboo and the suppression of attention". Increasingly we see attention turned to women talking among themselves, rather than talking to men: Jenkins & Kramer (1978) being the first of several papers in this direction.
Gal (1978) is important for its investigation of gender-linked language use as it crucially relates to bilingual situations, and specifically the situation of ethnic Hungarian men and women living in Austria. Gal's article "Peasant men can't get wives" was followed the following year by her book Language Shift: Social Determinants of Language Change (Gal 1979). The work has been followed up by fascinating recent work by Lippi Green work on Austrian village communication patterns (Lippi-Green 1989).
Work on women's studies continues unabated in many textbooks of the late 70s: Jenkins & Kramer (1978) and Kessler & McKenna (1978).
Work in Britain continued with Romaine's work on postvocalic /r/ in the speech of Scottish schoolchildren (Romaine (1978) and Reid (1978).
In America the use of "man" continues to attract attention: Stanley & Robbins (1978) and Martyna (1978), while so-called sexist grammar is the subject of Stanley (1978). Discussion of neutral pronouns makes a return in Timm (1978). Turner (1977) discusses the need for sex-neutral pronouns also in religious writing.
Increasingly social psychological literature takes in gender and language variation: Tajfel ed. (1978) is an important work of the period, as is Williams and Giles (1978) and Breakwell (1979). John Edwards' paper of 1979 on social class and identification of sex of children's speech is also important.
Criticism of the heading of the research being undertaken in gender and language studies is voiced in Brouwer et al (1979). A Dutch linguist, Brouwer has edited more recent volumes on the woman's speech in the Netherlands (Brouwer & De Haan eds. 1986)
An ethnomethodological approach is offered in Kessler & McKenna (1978).
Intonation and gender receive attention in Edelsky (1979), and further work by Local on Tyneside (Local 1974) shows subtle gender-linked patterns in British speech. There is also the recent work into the history of the language that shed light on the kind of gender system that has developed in English over the centuries. Historical linguists have investigated early changes in the gender system of English. Stanley & Robbins (1978) deal with the pronoun "she" in Middle English, but beyond this we know very little about women's usage of the language in this period. Charles Jones' full-length text Grammatical Gender in English 950-1250 (Jones 1987) is important reading also for information on the period.
IV. The early 1980's
The 1980s proved as important a period for gender and language variation studies as the 1970s. Rather than group items by date, because of the large amount of relevant literature in the period the work is sectioned as follows:
A. Major Textbooks
B. Work on the politics of researching women's language, and research methodology
C. Research into sexism in the language
D. Research into sexism in society as it relates to language use
E. Research into interaction and communicative competence
F. Relevant work in Sociolinguistics and Variation Studies
G. Relevant work in Social Psychology and Psycholinguistics
H. Research into gender and language acquisition
I. Research into gender and language in the school
J. Research into women and writing
Major Textbooks
Two major textbooks in English appeared during the period: Kramarae (1981) Women and men speaking: frameworks for analysis. Thorne et al (1983) Language, gender and society is also an important text. For German readers there is the important text Gewalt durch Sprache, (1984), (roughly "Domination through Language"), by Troemel-Ploetz who also writes in English.
Not specifically dedicated to gender and language Beattie's (1983) Open University textbook Talk: an analysis of speech and non-verbal behaviour in conversation is very relevant, as is the British researcher Martin Atkinson's Our masters' voice: the language and body language of politics (Atkinson 1983). Also relevant is K C Phillipps (1984) Language and Class in Victorian England. Other titles of relevance include Maurer ed. (1981) Language of the underworld.
Many articles were published during the period about precisely what women should be doing when they investigate language. Martyna (1981) tries to suggest that research should get beyond questions to do sex-neutral pronouns, and on to wider concerns. Kramarae (1980) "Perceptions and politics in language and sex research" is a significant contribution to the debate, while Warren (1980) specifically questions the approach adopted in Lakoff (1975). Ketchum (1981) is a more general article of interest "Moral redescription and political self- deception". Kuykendall (1981) "Feminist linguistics in philosophy", Stenner (1981) "A note on logical truth and non-sexist semantics", and Taylor (1981) "Reference and truth : the case of sexist and racist utterances", engage in more philosophical concerns. Roberts (1981) - Doing feminist research is another important theoretical work, as is Oakley (1981) "Interviewing women: a contradiction in terms" which specifically examines the nature of interviewing.
Many articles continue to expose the sexist nature of English: Silveira (1980) "Generic masculine words and thinking" attempts to investigate the way in which the male is treated as the norm, or unmarked term in English classification systems Beardsley's article "Degenderisation" (Beardsley 1981) calls again for sex-neutral vocabulary to be introduced into speech as does Duran (1981) "Gender-neutral terms". A whole series of articles investigate the use of "Ms.": Levin (1981), Purdey (1981) and Soble (1981), as does Baron (1984). Korsmeyer (1981) looks at the generic uses of masculine terminology, while Moulton (1981a) looks at the myth of the neutral man & Moulton (1981b) sex and reference in more general terms.
Discussion continues in McConnell-Ginet's "Prototypes, pronouns and persons" (McConnell-Ginet 1982). Steinmetz (1982) "On language: the desexing of English" continues the debate. McKay (1983) carries on the debate about pronouns. Sklar 1983 'revisits' sexist grammar (sic), while Sorrels (1983) offers solutions to problems of awkwardness in expression arising from sensitivities about sexist language. M Stone's article in the Women's page of the Guardian newspaper in April 1983 (Stone 1983) bears the problematic (?) title "Learning to say it in cup of tea language". Bebout (1984) reports cases of asymmetries in male-female word pairs. Both J Cheshire and J Coates have articles entitled "Language and Sexism" published in 1984.
Many articles are devoted to identifying what goes on in the street between males and females, and specifically abuse of females. Gardner (1980) investigates street remarks made by males to females, followed by many articles in the next year, e.g. Bernard & Schlaffer (1981) "The man in the street: Why he harasses", Baker (1981) "Pricks and Chicks" seems to be another expose of the ritual insults of the streets, points followed up by Grim (1981), Ross (1981) "How words hurt", and Shute (1981) "Sexist language and sexism". Vetterling- Braggin's three articles of 1981, (1981a, 1981b, 1981c) all deal with sexist and racist language and its moral significance.
West & Zimmerman (1983) could be usefully grouped here also, as well as under communicative competence since it deals with interruption patterns between strangers.
E. Aspects of Interaction and Communicative Competence
In this section can be grouped work on patterns of politeness, interruption and taboo. Elgin (1980) bears the intriguing title The gentle art of verbal self- d...
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