GendeR

Yesicha Ryona

A1B011041

GendeR
Differences Possible

Explanations
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GendeR
Gender is also something we cannot avoid; it is part of the way in which societies are ordered around us, with each society doing that ordering differently. As Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2003, p. 50) say: The force of gender categories in society makes it impossible for us to move through our lives in a nongendered way and impossible not to behave in a way that brings out gendered behavior in others. Gender is a key component of identity.

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Differences
That there are differences between men and women is hardly a

matter of dispute.
Females have two X chromosomes whereas males have an X and a Y; this is a key genetic difference and no geneticist regards that difference as unimportant. On average, females have more fat and less muscle than males, are not as strong, and weigh less. The female voice usually has different characteristics from the male voice, and often females and males exhibit different ranges of verbal skills.
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Differences
In the linguistic literature perhaps the most famous example of gender differentiation is found in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies among the Carib Indians. Male and female Caribs have been reported to speak different

languages, the result of a long-ago conquest in which a group of

invading Caribspeaking men killed the local Arawak-speaking men and mated with the Arawak Women. There are differences in gendered speech, some undoubtedly real but others almost certainly imaginary. Any differences that do exist surely also must interact with other factors, e.g., social class, race, culture, discourse type, group membership, etc.
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Differences
Phonological differences between the speech of men and women have been noted in a variety of languages.

In Gros Ventre, an Amerindian language of the northeast United

States, women have palatalized velar stops where men have palatalized dental stops, e.g., female kjatsa bread and male

djatsa.
When a female speaker of Gros Ventre quotes a male, she attributes female pronunciations to him, and when a male quotes a female, he attributes male pronunciations to her.

Moreover, any use of female pronunciations by males is likely to be

regarded as a sign of effeminacy.
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Possible Explanations
When we turn to matters having to do with how men and women use language in a wider sense, that is, in social interaction and to achieve certain ends, we nd clues to possible explanations for the differences we encounter. One analysis of how women are presented in a set of cartoons produced some interesting ndings (Kramer, 1974). The cartoons were taken from thirteen issues of The New Yorker magazine published between February 17 and May 12, 1973. The analysis showed that, when both genders were represented in the cartoon, men spoke twice as much as women. In the cartoons men and women also spoke on different topics, with men holding forth on such topics as business, politics, legal matters, taxes, and sports, and women on social life, books, food and drink, lifes troubles, and lifestyle.
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Possible Explanations
In conversations involving both men and women many researchers agree that men speak more than women do. One also found that when men talked to men, the content categories of such talk focused on competition and teasing, sports, aggression, and doing things. On the other hand, when women talked to women, the equivalent categories were the self, feelings, afliation with others, home, and family. When the two genders interacted, men tended to take the initiative in conversation, but there seemed to be a desire to achieve some kind of accommodation so far as topics were concerned: the men spoke less aggressively and competitively and the women reduced their amount of talk about home and family. A thorough review of the literature by James and Drakich (1993) showed inconsistency in the ndings when fty-six studies of talk either within or between genders were examined.
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Possible Explanations
My own view is that mens and womens speech differ because boys and girls are brought up differently and men and women often ll different roles in society. Moreover, most men and women know this and behave accordingly. If such is the case, we might expect changes that make a language less sexist to result from child-rearing practices and role differentiations which are less sexist. Men and women alike would benet from the greater freedom of choice that would result. However, it may be utopian to believe that language use will ever become neutral. Humans use everything around them and language is just a thing in that sense to create differences among themselves. Speech may well be gendered but there actually may be no easy solution to that problem.
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