Traditional Approaches

Hi, I'm Lucy Jones,

and I'm an associate professor in social

linguistics at the University of Nottingham.

Uh, my research is in the area of language, gender and sexuality in particular,

looking at identity construction in LGBT plus youth.

And I'm going to be talking today about that in some more detail.

In the first part of this lecture,

I'm going to be introducing you to some

of the traditional approaches to language and gender.

So language and gender as an area of study

emerged around the time of second wave feminism. So this is around the 19 seventies.

The 19 eighties

and the people who began work in language

and gender were feminists who were also linguists.

A key person in the field at that time is called Dale Spender.

Now Dale Spender was a academic and a feminist,

and she argued that the English language is literally man made.

So, for example, we have certain rules about the way that we use language,

so we tend to say men and women, boys and girls.

And also in the past, it was very,

very usual for people to use what's called the generic he.

So that's using the pronoun he to refer to any gender at all.

So, for example, you might see

in a textbook or a handbook. If a student's got a problem, he should see his tutor.

But that could refer to female students as well.

So she argued that the reason that language was man made was because, literally,

it was men who'd written the rules about what the English language should look like.

So the grammarians who wrote the grammar books,

the people who wrote the dictionaries, they were all middle class white men,

and she argued that the language came to reflect their view on the world.

Another example of feminist linguist is Robin Lakoff.

She has been extremely influential.

Her work in the 19 seventies really looked at what she called women's language,

and her argument was that there's a certain way

of using language that women are socialised into.

So women are taught to be more polite, to be more formal, more quiet,

not to use things like swear words not to interrupt to use euphemisms, for example.

And she argued that this language reflected women's place in society.

So the way that women are socialist into

using language reflects their subordinate position in society.

This was actually based on her own experiences on

anecdotal evidence rather than research with real people.

So rather than doing interviews, for example,

but it really kick started the field of language and gender

research at this time,

then was focused on trying to find linguistic

evidence for social differences between men and women.

As I say,

a lot of the research that Lakoff did was actually based on her own observations.

But a lot of linguists then followed this

into the eighties by doing research with groups of

people recording people speaking and trying to see if

they could find evidence of this women's language.

Um, this research typically falls into two camps.

The difference and the dominance approach.

And actually,

because Robin lock offs work was seen

to represent women's languages being somehow deficient,

it's often called the three DS, So deficit, dominance and difference.

The dominance approach ultimately argues that the reason that we

see differences between how women speak and how men speak,

and this apparent women's language is actually to do with

how much power women have for men having society,

and an important study here was done by Obama and Atkins.

They looked at language used in courtrooms, and they found that witnesses,

irrespective of their gender.

If you're a person who witnessed a crime and you have

to come into court to tell people about what you've seen,

you feel quite nervous.

You're in quite a powerless position.

You're in rather an overwhelming environment.

You're likely to use features of language such as hesitancy and in directness,

things that show maybe that you're quite nervous, Obara Atkins said.

Well, that could be a man using that language,

so it's not correct to call it women's language.

It's actually more accurate to call it powerless language.

And the reason that women seem to use these features more

than men is actually because women have less power in society.

Zimmerman and West also did some important research looking interruptions,

finding that men tend to interrupt each other

and men tend to interrupt women

much more than the other way around.

And they argued that that reflects the fact that

men are used to being dominant in society.

The other approach is the difference approach,

and this is the idea that the reason that these differences

exist is because women and men are socialist into different subcultures.

Almost

some important research here comes from Marjorie Harness Goodwin,

who looked at Children playing.

She found that whereas boys tend to try and

be quite hierarchical and they compete for the floor,

they say, Do this, do that and they direct people through their language.

Girls tend to be much more facilitated. Five, they say. Shall we do this?

Let's do that So they're not competing for the floor.

They're trying to create friendships and relationships.

Similarly,

Tannin did some research that suggested that women learn to

use language to create rapport so friendships and relationships,

whereas men use language, which she called report style.

So Rapport versus report reports being more direct.

So, really,

what we've got here is two different explanations

for why women and men use language differently.

But we have to be quite critical of, actually,

are all women and all men necessarily the same.

Do all women use women's language, even if we say it's to do with power?

Actually, is it really the case that no women have power?

Actually, in the 19 eighties, when this research was taking place

in this country, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister.

So it's clearly not the case that women don't have power,

and not all men do have power.

So

this kind of research was quite homogenising,

which means that it kind of assumed that all women were the same

and all men were the same.

And the research also was typically done with the kind

of women and men that the researchers had access to.

Academics like me are certainly at that time

they were typically white.

They were typically middle class, typically heterosexual,

and they're the kind of people they had access to. So doing some research and saying

this group of women use this language and then saying

That's women's language that ignores all of the other intersecting factors,

like sexuality like class like grace and so on.

So it's a bit oversimplified to try and identify

women's language and men's language in this way.

Around the 19 nineties, things started to change,

and that's what we're gonna be talking about in Part two