mple as that. It is not enough to study male patterns of linguistic interaction, adopt them and succeed where others have failed. Some women have done so: Margaret Thatcher lowered her pitch, spoke more slowly and reduced the variability of her intonation patterns. One has also to contend with society «s expectations of women as ladies who speak politely and the fact that lower pitch is associated with greater credibility. (Studies have shown that the lower the news reader »s voice, the more people are inclined to believe the news!).
Language in academe
Let us turn to the role of language in an academic institution of which Lakoff gives some fascinating examples in Talking Power. Lakoff considers the university a hierarchical institution par excellence, where vertical divisions are rigorously maintained, starting with the lecturer «s dominance over a class of undergraduates, going on to the staff meeting where she considers that amount of talk is directly proportional to status. On the surface, it appears the rules are the same for women and men: from the students » perspective, whoever is on the podium has the floor whether male or female. It is only when you look at the administration of universities that the rules are different. [Lakoff R, 1975]. Lakoff describes her experience of committee meetings as follows: «Here I was at one of the world» s greatest universities, (The University of California at Berkeley) in the company of distinguished colleagues, and after listening to the latter for two hours or so, could not recall a single thing of substance that had been said. Wo rse, it would sometimes occur to me that my respected confr? Res (almost always men) were spending hours on a point that could be summarised and concluded in a sentence or two. I would attempt to provide that sentence. But once I had spoken, the discourse w ould close over me like the ocean enveloping a pebble. It was as if I had not spoken - in fact, did not exist. What did it mean? After a while I figured it out. My colleagues were playing by men «s rules: what was important was to gain turf, control territory. That goal was achieved by spreading words around. [Lakoff R, 1975]. Puts her finger on one of the dilemmas facing women: how to deal with the expectation that it is men not women who will occupy the floor. However eloquent or convincing a woman is, it is difficult for her to gain and maintain the floor in a public fora, (of which the university committee meeting is a prime example) because of the expectation that public fora are men »s, not women's domains. The public / private divide still operates: the more public the forum, the less women are likely to speak. So it is not just a question of women acquiring new speech strategies in order to succeed, it is also a question of overcoming the expectation of less talk - or even silence. A university is no different in this respect than any other institution based on hierarchy. We are indeed a long way from the societal stereotype of the loquacious woman.
There is considerable divergence between conventional stereotypes and the reality of women's speech. Since linguistic behavior is not rigidly divided along sex lines, it is easy to discount differences as non-existent or unimportant. Linguistic research in the last twenty years has done nothing if not prove that variation does exist and that wom...
