Techniques and Approaches of Male and Female Speech

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Recommended: gender and language relationship

The aim of this assignment is to evaluate and discuss the different techniques and approaches that are applied to both male and female speech. It will do this by critically analysing studies conducted by different linguists and theorists into language and gender issues.
There have always appeared to be differences in the way that men and women speak. The research into language and gender considers how language impacts upon how society informs and interprets gender. ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ describe sex differentiations whereas ‘Feminine’ and ‘Masculine’ can be attached to either of those differentiations to describe gender. (Mellor, 2010) It can be argued that when a male is speaking to another male it is very dissimilar to the way they would address a female. This could also be said for the way females interact with other females and then with someone from the opposite sex. The linguist Otto Jespersen, in 1922 published Language: It’s Nature, Development and Origin and suggested that ‘there is danger of language becoming vague and insipid if we are to content ourselves with women’s expressions.’ (Class notes, 2013) This quote, in today’s society would be seen as sexist and a way in which to belittle women. It implies that female speech isn’t as varied and that it isn’t as valued as male speech. In Jespersen’s work, male language is viewed as normative and the language of others, for example women, is seen as deficient. Jespersen privileges men’s use of vocabulary as having more vigour and vividness. He poses that a male’s use of sentence structure is complex while a female’s use of language is joined together on a string of ‘ands’ and similar words. (Mellor, 2010) A weakness of Jespersen’s work is that he uses quotations from literat...

... middle of paper ...

... with males will boast about their skills and social status, when it comes to the depth of conversations and what men and women talk about, findings have been very different

Works Cited

Class notes. (2013) City of Wolverhampton College. Wolverhampton.
Holmes, J (2008). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. 3rd ed. Essex: Pearson Education Limited.
Kunsmann, P. (1998). Gender, Status and Power in Discourse Behavior of Men and Women. Available: [Online] http://www.linguistik-online.de/1_00/KUNSMANN.HTM. Last accessed 24 November 2013.
Lakoff, R (2004). Language and Woman's Place. Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc.
Mellor, B. (2010). Deficit, Dominance, Difference and Discursive: the changing approaches to language and gender. Available: [Online] http://atp.uclan.ac.uk/buddypress/diffusion/?p=736. Last accessed 23 November 2013.

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