assumption is that men outrank women, and men are usually found to talk more. In informal contexts where status is not an issue, the commonest finding is not that women talk more than men, it is that the two sexes contribute about equally. Sometimes, there are very clear differences between the forms of language typically used by women and those typically used by men. It is not an accident that all the traditionally «female» nouns have the polite or honorific prefix /
o- /; this is one of many ways in which Japanese female speech has been characterized as being more polite than male speech. These days, many younger Japanese women would no longer choose to use the specific female forms. For instance, here are a few of the many cases where Japanese men and women traditionally use different lexical items to express the same meaning: [Janet Shibamoto, 1998].
Figure 2
Men «s formWomen» s formGloss haraonakastomachtukemonookookoopicklesmizuohiyawaterbentooobentoobox lunchkaneokanemoneyhasiohasichopsticksumaioisiideliciouskuutaberueatkutabaru / sinunakanarudie
Figure 3
Women «s formMen» s formEnglish glosslakawlakawshe is lifting itlakawwitaklakawwitakslet me lift itmolmolshe is peeling iti: pi: pshe is eating ittacilwtacilwsyou are singing a few languages ??show lexical and morphological differences like those exemplified above for Japanese. In some Native American languages, grammatical forms of verbs are inflected differently according to the sex of the speaker. Examples from the Muskogean language Koasati are given below:, explicit and categorical grammatical and or even lexical marking of speaker gender is not the norm. Instead, we usually find differences in the frequency of certain things (words, or pronunciations, or constructions, or intonations, or whatever), especially when the circumstances of utterance are taken into account. This has been explained by Trudgill as follows:
Linguistic gender varieties arise because ... language ... is closely related to social attitudes. Men and women are socially different in that society lays down different social roles for them and expects different behaviour patterns from them. Language simply reflects this social fact .... What is more, it seems that the larger and more inflexible the differences between the social roles of men and women in a particular community, the larger and more rigid the linguistic differences tend to be. ... Our English examples have all consisted of tendencies ... The examples of distinct male and female varieties all come from ... communities where sex roles are much more clearly delineated. Has often been observed that (other things equal) female speech tends to be evaluated as more «correct» or more «prestigious», less slangy, etc. Men are more likely than women to use socially-stigmatized forms (like «ain't» or g-dropping in English). On the other hand, women are usually in the lead in changes in pronunciation, typically producing new pronunciations sooner, more often, and in more extreme ways than men. A number of stylistic differences between female and male speech have been observed or claimed. Women «s speech has been said to be more polite, more redundant, more formal, more clearly pronounced, and more elaborated or complex, while men» s speech is less polite, more elliptical, m...
