Chapter 7:

Gender and Age

Prepared by:Siti Ameera Athirah Binti Abdullah D20110147731Dina Shazwani Binti Mahayuddin D20110147718

Ainul Hayati Binti Ariffin D20111047748Sarah Binti Mohd Shamsudin D20111047732

Do women and men speak

differently??

Do children speakdifferently from

adults?

Gender-exclusive speech

differences: non- Western

communities

-Women and men do not speak in exactly the same way as each other in community.

- For example: in the Amazon Indians, the language used by a child’s mother is different

from her father’s language because men marry outside their own tribe and each tribe

is distinguished by different language

-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.- Usually there are small differences in

pronunciation or word- shape (morphology).-Example: in Motana there are pronunciation

differences in the Gros Ventre American Indian tribe

-For example, women say [kja’tsa] for bread, but men say [dȝa’tsa]

-In some language likes Japanese, there are a lot of differences between the vocabulary

items used by women and men- The differences are more a matter of degrees of formality or politeness than

gender- The “men’s” forms are restricted to casual

contexts and considered macho or coarse, while the “women’s” forms are used by

everyone in public contexts.

- If a community is very hierarchical, for instance, and within each level of the

hierarchy men are more powerful than women, then linguistic differences between the speech of women and men may be just

one dimension of more extensive differences reflecting the social hierarchy as a whole.

- Example: Bengali society; a wife cannot called her husband by using his name. A wife should address by using the term ‘nokkhotro’

Gender- preferential speech features:

Social dialect research

- In western communities, women and men do not use completely different forms.

- They use different quantities of frequencies of the same forms

- For example, women use more “–ing” pronunciations and fewer “–in”

pronunciations than men in the words like swimming and typing

Gender and social class

-The linguistic features which differ in the speech of women and men in Western

communities are usually features which also distinguish the speech of people from

different social class.

- In every social class men use more vernacular forms than women.

- In the lowest and highest social groups, the women speech is closer to the man in the same group than to the women in other

groups.

- Across all social groups, women use more standard forms than men

Explanations of women’s linguistic

behaviour

1) The social status explanation

-Women use more standard speech forms than men because they are more status-

conscious than men

- Women are more aware of the fact that the way they speak signals their social background

or social status in the community

2) Women’s role as guardian of society’s value

-Women use more standard forms than men points to the way society tends to expect

“better” behavior from women than men.

-Women are designated the role of modeling correct behavior in the community.

3) Subordinate groups must be polite

-a third explanation which has been proposed for women’s use of more standard forms is that people who are subordinate must be

polite.

4) Vernacular forms express machismo

-men prefer vernacular forms because they carry macho connotations of masculinity and

toughness.

- Standard forms tend to be associated with female and femininity.

Some alternativeexplanations

1)How are women

categorised?

-‘women continue to be one of the mysteries of the universe’ - Shuy (1969)

- Researchers often used the woman’s husband’s occupation as a major criterion to differ their speech functions but the fact that

not all women marry man from the same social class has lead to the miscategorisation.

-Women tend to use standard forms possibly because of the standard form is an

appropriate form which reflected their social background accurately.

2) The influence of

the interviewer and

the context

- Interviewer can also give a big effect to the context.

- Women tend to be more cooperative conversationalist than men.

- Men tend to be less responsive to the speech of each others, and to their

conversational needs.

- This can be a reason why the interview context was differs between women and

men.- Men will be more comfortable then women

in such circumstances as male solidarity would reduce the formality of the context

which might account for their greater use of vernacular forms.

- Women’s greater use of standard speech forms may be a reflection on their sensitivity

to contextual factors which reflected the social distance of interaction with a stranger.

Most of the interviewers who collected the social data discussed were male.

This proves that the forms differs in women’s and men’s speech to the relationship between the people concerned in the

context in which they are operating. Women characterize as status-conscious individuals

who use more standard speech forms to ensure they are perceived as socially

statusful.

Age- graded features

of speech

- Research has proved that speech can differs the age of a speaker.

- It can be divided into two aspects:

1) Voice pitch

2) Vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar

1)Voice pitch

- Male voices generally sound lower in pitch than women’s.

- Adult voices also sound deeper than children’s.

- However, this can be overlap between women and men as there will always be

some women whose natural speaking pitch is deeper than the men in a

community. - For the social and cultural factors, it is

more masculine for men to speak with a lower-pitched voice.

- So, this is one of the reason why young boys often develop this masculine feature

by using vernacular forms.

2) Vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar

- The frequency of swear words was minimize as people move into adulthood.

- Slang can also act as one of the aspect

which reflect persons’ age.

- Current slang of young people may sounds odd to the older person.

- It signals the membership of a particular group according to their speech.

Age and social

dialect data

- For the social dialect cases suggest that they are high in childhood and

adolescence.

- and then steadily reduce as people approach middle age

- and once again increases in old age characterized by vernacular forms.

Age grading and

language change

- Age and speech patterns are important to notice how easy it is too confuse patterns of language change with speech patterns which vary with different age groups.