|| Language and Gender ||

The Deficit, Dominance and Difference Approach.

Language and communication has been a crucial and vital part of human lifestyle since before we can remember. Not a day goes by when we mindlessly harness our abilities to speak and use them throughout the day, whether we are regaining information, or just making small talk with a new acquaintance, we can all agree that language is all around us, and used by all of us.

However, that does not mean the way we use language is similar, especially when it comes to the gender divide. Many people have studied the differences in male and female language for years, each coming up with new ideas and beliefs, each one contradicting the linguist before them. Though many people agree that male and female language is different, and some still don’t, we still can’t fully set an idea as to why male and female language is different. However; we can narrow it down to three main approaches, commonly known as the “3D’s”. These three approaches are the three main ideas behind language in gender, all of them supporting a different reason as to why our language is different.

The first approach to be introduced was the Deficit approach. The theory came to be in 1975 when Robin Lakoff argued that women used the language terms involved with the deficit approach to reinforce and reflect their passive role in society. Though Lakoff’s research is considered the starting point for this approach, there has been proof that others have had the same ideas from as early as 1922, in Otto Jesperson’s novel Language: Its Nature and Development.

This approach includes a variety of techniques, one of the main ones being women’s use of tag questions. Lakoff argued that women use these tag questions such as “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” to show their uncertainty, and therefore are seeking the correct answer from a male perspective. Other techniques include; Women using more precise colour terms, such as “Magenta” or “Teal” and women using weak expletives, such as “Oh dear” as well as a use of empty adjectives when describing something, for example “The dinner was nice”.

The techniques here show a certain kind of politeness, and passiveness, almost as if the women’s language here is used in a way to remove themselves from any kind of conflict. Lakoff suggested that socialization played an important role in how female language has remained very passive through the years, and that society had constructed the differences between men and women, and that they weren’t totally biologically based.
 

However, Lakoff’s theories have been shunned by some, purely because Lakoff used an incredibly small amount of information to form her ideas upon. As she only used a small sample, we cannot be sure that this information is true for all women. Others have also contradicted Lakoff’s ideas, suggesting different reasons as to why women speak the way they do. 
 

For example, Janet Holmes made a suggestion in 1992 again Lakoff’s theory on tag questions being a sign of uncertainty, and suggests that tag questions may function as a device to help maintain discussion and to be polite. Rather than being mere signs of weakness, she suggests that tag questions were multi-functional.

After Lakoff’s theory was introduced, Zimmerman and West also introduced their ideas on language and gender in 1975. However, what they introduced was one of the most quoted pieces of research when it comes to the Dominance approach. They found that in their (albeit small) set of data, that ninety-six percent of all interruptions in mixed sex conversations were made by men. 

In their further research they found that overlaps of speech occurred twenty two times in same sex pairs, compared to nine in mixed sex pairs, and the average silence in a same sex conversation was only 1.35 seconds, compared to an average silence of 3.21 seconds in mixed conversations.

 

From this data, Zimmerman and West saw this as a sign that women had restricted linguistic freedom, and that this was due to men wanting to impose their dominant status in conversation, hence why men were much more likely to interrupt due to the research Zimmerman and West found.

However, this research could be considered unreliable, also due to the same problem tat Lakoff encountered, with their research data being far too small an amount for their suggestion to be considered totally reliable and not just sweeping statement. People have looked into Zimmerman and West’s research and repeated their experiment on a much larger scale, Geoffrey Beattie being one of them. Beattie claims to have recorded some 10 hours of conversation, involving 557 interruptions, nearly ten times as much as Zimmerman and West’s set of data. Beattie found that women and men interrupted with more or less equal frequency, so men did interrupt more, but only by a small amount.

 

The third and final approach of the 3D’s, is the difference approach. The most alternative of the approaches, the difference approach simply states that men and women are just simply biologically different, and the differences in sub-cultures and how each gender was raised affect their differences in language.

There have been a variety of suggestions for this approach, one of them being Jennifer Coates in 1989, where she suggested that all female talk is essentially used to support each other’s rights as speakers, and to negotiate discussions and keep conversation flowing. Another suggestion was from Jane Pilkington, in 1992, where she suggested that women in same sex conversations are much more collaborative than men are in same sex conversations. She says that women aimed for more positive politeness strategies in conversation, whilst men didn’t. Other linguists have found this aswell, and suggested it could be due to what men and women used conversation for in simpler times. Whilst men used conversation solely to gain information and things that could help with him and his family’s survival, women used their language to keep the family together, hence keeping the children alive. This use of more collaborative language in women could have evolved through time with women, hence their use of politeness strategies today.

Of course, this approach also has some contradictions, just like the others. The contradiction from this comes from Deborah Tannen, who suggests that the media promotes conflict between people, and that it makes us want to watch it. She also suggests that differences in language can be affected by where you were born and raised, and not just your gender. For example, speakers in London and busy cities are far more aggressive in their language than people in country towns and cities, such as Bristol.

She suggests that part of socialisation is demographic, and we cannot blame our differences on just gender, as society has created a lot of these differences, which is similar to what Lakoff says earlier in her deficit approach theory.

Personally, I feel that the difference approach is the theory that explains our differences the best. I feel that although the deficit and dominance approaches both have valid research for their causes, and both approaches have some elements of truth that I agree with, there is just as much evidence against, also with elements I agree with. These contradictions leave me unsure as to what really is the truth behind those approaches.

 
Honestly, I don’t feel we will ever be able to fully explain why there are some differences in language between the genders, as there are always women that speak, or think like men, and men that speak and think like women, and society has created this gender divide that makes it hard for us to accept that there will always be people that do not act the way society expects them to. I think that society is responsible for how our language has evolved, but with women becoming more aggressive and assertive over time, and slowly becoming more powerful, we may see these gender barriers blurring, and then the language differences may change.