Summaries- "An Introduction to Sociolinguistics" - Chapter 14

Chapter 14

Attitudes and Applications

Overt and Covert Prestige:

Overt Prestige	Covert Prestige
The standard variety in a community has overt prestige. It is overtly admired and generally identified as a model of good speech. Speakers who use the standard variety are rated highly on scales of educational and occupational status.	The term covert was introduced to explain the fact that despite their official protestation, people value the vernacular varieties.
It has to do with the variety taught in elocution classes, regardless of the students’ native accents.	It involves two contradictory ideas: how can something have prestige if its value is not recognized? This term has been widely used to refer to positive attitudes towards vernacular and non-standard speech varieties. Labov, after talking to many New Yo0rkers, described the city of New York as a sink of negative prestige. In some schools in Britain, and in New Zealand, children are taught to speak RP in elocution classes, but they would never use it with friends or any casual setting. It expresses solidarity. There is also a large group of people who are surprised when they hear themselves speaking on tape, not using the standard variety.

Jamaican Creole “patois” is an excellent example of a code which survives because it is valued as a marker of solidarity. We can say that it has covert prestige since few black people admit to outsiders that proficiency in patois is greatly admired, especially among young British Blacks. Patois was faced with negative attitudes, and was regarded as babyish, lacking proper grammar, careless and very relaxed. It was seen as a deficient form of English that hampered educational progress.

Overtly negative attitudes towards Patois reflect the depressed social position of the West Indian people in Britain rather than features of the language itself. The West Indians came to work in Britain in the fifties and sixties, but had low status jobs. However, they thought that their children will have a better chance, especially when they receive British education. However, by the eighties, the West Indians still engaged in low status jobs, and their children did even worse than the other immigrants’ kids at school. Teachers blamed the children for their Patois. But there is nothing linguistically inadequate about patois. In fact, patois is a language that has distinctive pronunciation and complex grammar. It has its own literary material.  Therefore, the comments about patois were based on ignorance and prejudice. It is the fact that Patois is being used by West Indian children “low-class” that determines attitudes towards Patois. This was clearly demonstrated in a study to evaluate five children whose speech was heard on a tape. The listeners rated the middle-class speakers as more intelligent than those who belonged tot eh low class. Yet one of the West Indian children spoke twice on the tape, and the listeners mistaken the child for a middle class child only because he used another variety rather than “Barbadian” (West Indies accent). So the same child was evaluated as more intelligent when speaking in the working class accent rather than the West Indies accent “matched guise technique”. It is the associated social status that determines the people evaluation

Attitudes to overtly valued varieties: Standard English and RP

Standard English has an enormous legacy of overt prestige.

It has been regarded as a symbol of British nationhood.

For over a century it has been promoted as the only acceptable variety in all official domains. By comparison, vernacular dialects of English are down-graded. The political and social basis of these attitudes is clearly evident when we remember that the elite consensus until the 18^th century was that English is an inferior language and less eloquent than Greek and Latin. Prestige codes emerge by social consensus and owe nothing to their intrinsic linguistic features.

While there is a general agreement on the inferior status of vernacular dialects, many people are surprised to find that standard accents of English are so highly regarded by those who don’t sue them. This can be seen in reactions to RP in England, where people rate speakers of RP as more intelligent, industrious and self-confident than regional accented speakers, even when the raters are speaking regional dialects. On criteria of communicative effectiveness, social status and general pleasantness, RP is rated on top of other regional accents. People who use RP accents are taken more seriously. Women speaking with RP accents are rated as more competent, less weak, more independent, adventurous and more feminine than non-RP speakers. Even outside Britain, RP is the favorable model in other countries where English is used like Singapore and New Zealand. When other regional accents emerged in New Zealand, the school inspectors’ reports became less admiring and more critical. The New Zealand accent was regarded as corrupt, degraded and hideous, as the inspectors’ had British origins.

However there was a minority of New Zealanders who took a different view of RP, objecting the adoption of refined upper-class vowels.

Attitudes to AAVE:

Critics assume that AAVE use reflects ignorance rather than choice.

Much media use tends to confirm the negative attitudes to AAVE. Given the masculine sound difference between /ask/ and /aks/, and the lack of logic in arguing for a particular pronunciation on the basis of a written form, it is ironic that “ask” has been a focus of comment. This is typical of the kind of comments on AAVE use.

African American newsreaders and movie stars tend to use SAE while sports celebrities and entertainers use AAVE. AAVE is a prime example of a language variety which is called politically hot, constantly labeled and re-labeled. Ex: “Negro Dialect, Substandard Negro Dialect, Ebonics, Black English, Vernacular Black English, African American Vernacular English.  Many African American parents were unconvinced of the benefits of using AAVE. Their letters to the newspapers and other shows expressed fears that AAVE use in schools was a strategy for preventing their children from educational success. On the other hand, other African American people believed in giving the importance to AAVE, and resisting the attempts of the majority to impose SAE on everyone. Adopting SAE seems a betrayal of their home dialect. The issue has become too politicized in order to make a wider verbal repertoire. The Ebonics debate of the 1990s thus re-ran the familiar arguments about the social disadvantages of using AAVE. The argument was: if you use AAVE you won’t get a good job.

The argument implies that children using SAE will get better jobs. This is the fallacy. Because the U.S. employment statistics have proven that ethnicity not language is the primary basis of discrimination. Moreover, African Americans who succeed are often mistaken for service personnel in public places. The problem here is racist attitudes not linguistic deficit or dialect differences.

Attitudes to Vernacular Forms of English:

No one uses 100% vernacular or non-standard forms. When people talk of non-standard English they are referring to the fact that particular linguistic forms occur more often in the speech of one group than another. Changes like substitution of /d/ for /ð/, or omission of verb “be” in sentences like “she not here” are features of vernacular dialects. But the people who use such features also know and use the standard forms. They simply use fewer standard forms than those who come from socio-economic or ethnic groups. The reason of the survival of vernacular forms is attitudinal. Everyone increases their use of standard forms as the context becomes more formal. This means that middle class children are unlikely to use vernacular forms at all when they are asked to read aloud, whereas children from low class may use some vernacular forms. The use of vernacular forms is clearly patterned and systematic not random. Vernacular forms express the friendliness and relaxed attitudes. The reason of condemning the vernacular forms is also attitudinal not linguistic. Children who use vernacular forms are not disadvantaged by inadequate language. They are disadvantaged by negative attitudes towards their speech – attitudes which derive from their lower class association in people’s minds. These attitudes have unhappy educational consequences.

Sociolinguistics and Education

Vernacular dialects and educational disadvantage:   

Many sociolinguists debated over the educational implications/ meanings of speech. The best known example is the part in which sociolinguistics have played in debates over the place of vernacular dialects in school, and the claim that children who use vernacular forms are linguistically deficient or deprived. 

It has been evident that children from the middle class did better in school and had higher marks than those who belonged tot eh working class. In English-speaking communities, successful children tended to use standard forms while the speech of less successful groups had greater frequency of vernacular forms.

Some sociolinguists argued that the vernacular forms like Patois may act as a barrier to communication between children and teachers. Others have interpreted the results for teachers and provided advice and recommendations for classroom practice.

African American mothers argued that the local school was not taking proper account of their children’s linguistic proficiency and educational needs. A number of sociolinguists were called “expert witnesses” to testify that the variety of English used by the children was a dialect that is distinct from SAE with a distinct history and origins in a Creole which developed on American slave plantation. The judge accepted their testimony and ordered the school to take account of the children’s dialect.  The main barrier to these children progress in school was the negative attitudes held by the teachers to the children who spoke AAVE. To solve this situation, the teachers received in-service training which involved helping the teachers to distinguish between the children’s features of speech and reading errors. They also helped the children to switch between AAVE and SAE.

Dialect differences can lead to miscommunication, especially if vernacular dialect users do not hear a great deal of standard dialect. In Ann Arbor, there is little evidence that children who used the vernacular forms have trouble in understanding the English they hear on TV and Radio or from their teachers. Children successfully understand the standard language, and when they are asked to repeat a sentence they translate it to the vernacular equivalents.  Ex:

“Nobody ever sat at any of those desks” would be translated into “nobody never sat on no desses”.

Motivation and free choice are very important factors in altering speech. Any attempts to alter children speech into standard forms will not succeed if the children are not willing to do it.

Language Deficit:

Sociolinguistics has demonstrated that claims that minority and working class children were linguistically deprived were based on inadequate tests. Sociolinguistics provided evidence that these claims are not true. For example, in order to know children’s extent of vocabulary and grammar. Children were asked to complete a number of tests, in addition to an interview. The tests and interviews were made by an adult from a different social group from the child sometimes, and other times by a person from a different ethnic group.  Middle class children did much better than the working class children who responded monosyllabically. Sociolinguistics pointed out that the reason of change is that the test supervisor, who is an adult using standard forms, has influenced the performance of children in test. Middle class children were comfortable as they are familiar with the middle class speech and the use of standard forms, while the children of the working class felt themselves alienated, regarding the test supervisors as governmental officials or teachers. The questions and the language of the test-interview were also familiar to the middle class children rather than the working class children.

At secondary level, sociolinguistics has explored more specifically the difference of the vocabulary range of working class and middle class children. Through reading secondary school books, the middle class children knew more Greco Latin vocabulary items. Therefore they had an advantage over the other children because Greco Latin words compose around 65% of words learnt by reading secondary school text books. They also had a better chance in succeeding in exams that require these vocabularies.  However, the children whose families do not practice reading have a range of vocabulary that is irrelevant to the secondary school material.

So, the reasons why working class children fail in school are the following:

1-   The middle class criteria (including middle class standard forms of speech, familiarity with vocabulary, and ways of interacting).

2-   Many children who regard schools as middle class institutions rebel against them. Therefore they resort to vernacular forms rather than standard forms. For example, a study made in New York discovered that members of male gangs in school were failing although they possess bright mental capabilities. Also, no one of them had an advanced reading score, and the higher your status in the gang the less standard forms you use and the lower you reading score is. The most basic reason for this case is that they could not identify the school values, and felt themselves as outsiders, and that the school will not recognize their capabilities. 

Glossary:

Overt ظاهر

Covert خفي

Linguistic deficit نقص لغوي

Gang مجموعة أو عصبة

 Monosyllabic ذو مقطع واحد

Alienated يشعر بالغربة

Motivation التحفيز

Enormous legacy موروثات ضخمة ومتعددة

Entertainers مقدمو برامج الترفيه

          Intrinsic linguistic features خصائص لغوية جوهرية

Consensus إجماع على رأي

Inferior status مكانة متدنية

Hamper يعيق

Summaries- "An Introduction to Sociolinguistics" - Chapter 13

Language, Cognition and Culture

Language and Perception: (How can language affect perception and behavior?)

Most sociolinguists believe that language influences our perception of reality. (Explanation of example 2):

This is a text written by a male medical doctor to his students. It talks about a surgery that is done to women. It says that the doctors should explain to the women that it has no side effects, because women wrongly believe that such an operation undermines their sexual urge. 

the most obvious feature to be noticed in such a text is its impersonal and detached tone which is achieved by the use of agentless passive constructions such as “surgery is indicated”, and impersonal nouns like “the doctor, the patient”, and formal devices like nominalization. The opening sentence of the text presents an insulting saying as a common knowledge.

Such a text affects the perception of the students, and influences their behavior towards their women patients.

Verbal hygiene:

·      A term used by Debora Cameron.

·      It describes how people discuss matters of language.

·      It covers a wide range of activities from writing letters of complain over the abuse of language to prescribing what is regarded as acceptable, correct and proper in different contexts. It also covers how language can be used as political weapon. 

·      The discussion of sexist language is a proof that women engaged actively in verbal hygiene that reflected their belief that making a change in language use is worthwhile.

·      The deliberate adoption of non-sexist forms like “chairperson” often leads to accusations of political correctness. The debate of political correctness has often focused on linguistic terms. For example, the term “crippled” is not acceptable any more to the extent that the Crippled Children Society in New Zealand is now being referred to by its acronyms only. The term was then substituted with disabled, and now to the phrase “person with a disability”. Therefore, linguistic interventions challenge taken-for-granted offensive assumptions. 

·      Maoist China is also an example of the co-option of language as a political purpose. Mao paid attention to language to widen his revolutionary goals. He controlled public communication and the education system. “Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong” was published in 1964, and the quotations dominated everyday life. Quotation and counter quotation became heard in good-bargaining in the markets, and newspapers were also full of extracts from Mao’s works. Mao believed in the role of language in educating people, and shaping their values attitudes. To achieve this goal, powerful groups were established called Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams. Critics suggest that Mao’s quotations provided an ideal method of brain-washing huge populations of illiterate people. They consisted of short formulae which were easy to remember and repeat. They encoded a particular position which was that of the dominant party, and which were reinforced by material used in the educational system, making it difficult to take or express an opposite position. Mao’s revolution was due to his skills as a propagandist as well as his military and political prowess. He also used formulaic language to promote conformist attitudes and thinking. (This approach also suggests that here is a relation between language and thought.)

Vocabulary and cognition: (how the use of certain words affect the behavior of people’s thinking and attitude).  

The relationship between language, thought and reality has fascinated linguists. The linguist whose name was associated with such investigation was Benjamin Lee Whorf. He was an anthropological linguist who worked for a fire insurance company. He investigated the American English as a hobby at the beginning. In processing insurance claims, he noticed that particular words influenced the behavior and perception of people. for example, a person may throw cigarette butts near a gasoline barrel just because he/she finds the label “empty” on it.

Linguistic determinism:     

This term is made by Sapir-Whorf.

It means that people of different cultures think differently because of their language differences. A native speaker of Hopi would perceive reality differently than a native speaker of English because they use different languages.

Linguistic relativity:

A claim that is less strong than linguistic determinism.

It means that language influences thought, perception and at least behavior.

The main problem in assessing Whorf claim is the danger of inescapable circularity. Languages and thoughts of their speakers as well differ. But the only evidence we have for this difference in thought is the fact that the languages used are different. This is why investigating the relationship between thought and language is very challenging, because we want to know how language can influence thinking without taking language as an evidence of thought processes.  Many experiments were devised to test this Whofer-Sapir hypothesis.

If this hypothesis is right, then the colors which are not identified in one’s language shouldn’t be having names. (Why it is wrong?)

·      But this was not the case in Dani, a tribe in New Guinea, where the people used only two color terms corresponding to Dark and Light, but they could distinguish between subtle shades of colors that their language had no names for (pale blue VS turquoise). This means that the hypothesis is wrong.

·      Other experiments suggest that people remember colors which are coded in their language more easily than those which are not.

·      Some languages have linguistic categories which take account of the shape of the object.  E.g.  The form of Navaho verbs is sometimes determined by the shape of the object. Navaho children are therefore faster than the English speaking children in categorizing blocs by shapes, and also ten to group them according to shape, whiled English speaking children group things according to color.

Grammar and Cognition:

Grammatical categories such as tense, aspect, and gender encode aspects of reality differently in different languages.

In studying the Hopi verb system, Whorf found out that Hopi conception of time is different than that of the western culture.

Hopi	European languages
They conceive time as cycles of events and sets of processes rather than units of time. Conjugating Hopi verbs requires an analysis of events in terms of dynamic motion expressed by aspect markers rather than tense markers.	They conceive time as a road with future ahead and past behind.
Hopi was better equipped to deal with processes and vibrations of modern physics. These concepts of physics were coded in the verb morphology of Hopi, and this forced the Hopi to notice the vibratory phenomena.	indo-European languages have tense systems.
Later studies showed that Hopi has tenses and words for time units, most sociolinguists consider Whorf suggestion is an interesting one to indicate how speakers of different languages filter reality.

The areas of experience which are important to cultures tend to be grammaticalised in their languages. Something is grammaticalised when it s functions less and less like an independent item, and more and more in the grammatical system such as an affix or an auxiliary verb.

Linguistic categories and culture    

Language provides a means of encoding a community’s knowledge, believes, values. (culture). It was believed that the primitive languages are simple in grammar, but this is not true.

Dyirbal, an Australian aboriginal language is a very grammatically complex language. The culture of this region goes back to thousands of years. Every noun belongs to one of four classes. Particular types of experience establish associations which determine the class membership of some items. The system can be summarized to the following categories, which are unlike the western tradition.

·      (Human) males, some animals.

·      (Human) females, birds, water, fire, fighting

·      Non flesh food.

·      Everything else.

Even at the lexico-semantic level aboriginal languages challenge western preconceptions about primitive languages. In Kunwinjku, there are more terms to distinguish the kangaroos and wallabies than English. This is because the fact that kangaroos are a very important factor in the environment of the aboriginal people.

Tahitians don’t make a distinction between sadness and sickness. Both words can indicate the same meaning. However, western medical practice regards depression as an illness, and expresses it with terms that may sound odd to the non-European speaker such as he is feeling blue, in low spirits, and so on.

In Maori:

-       the word “mate” covers a wide range of meaning that begins with sick and reaches to dead.

-       Maori kinship terminology is also different as it distinguishes between siblings in different ways.

-       In Maori culture relative age is very important. Even the status of the tribe “iwi” which you belong to will be identified in “teina” and “tuakana” terms relatives to other tribes.

-       The importance of the extended family as an important social unit is also reflected in the kinship system. Kinship labels reflect the mutual rights and obligations of different members of the family towards each other. In rural areas of New Zealand, Maori children grow up in close contact with their grandparents, aunties and uncles. They use the same term for the mother and the mother’s sister “whaea” and they use the same term for the father and the father’s brothers “papa”. The same pattern holds for terms used to refer to the child’s siblings and cousins. In these cases, gender and relative age are semantically marked, but degree of kinship is not lexically distinguished. So the lexical labels identify those with similar social rights and obligations in relation to the speaker. Clearly, linguistic terminology reflects cultural relationships.

Discourse Patterns and Culture

The intertwining of language, culture and perception is evident when we examine research on patterns of interaction too. Cultural differences between the majority and the minority cultures can lead to serious consequences as a research by Diana Eades clarifies when comparing aboriginal and non-aboriginal Australians. When both groups use the same language culturally different patterns of interaction can be a source of misunderstanding. Aboriginal societies in Australia place a great importance on indirectness: it is important to avoid being intrusive. This is done by giving people interact- ional privacy which is a crucial mechanism in a society where there is frequently little physical privacy. In discourse, this socio-cultural norm is reflected in a number of ways:

1-   If you want info from an aboriginal person regarding factual information like location, time, and how people are related, you must use a statement with a rising intonation like: “you were at the store?”

2-   To have substantial information, less direct statements are used to gather the info. Direct questions are not used, and they are likely to be responded with “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember”. The information seeker volunteers some of his/her knowledge on the topic and then waits patiently for the other speaker to answer. Ex: “I heard there was a big argument at the store”.

3-   In aboriginal societies some kinds of information are not freely shared, and silence is much more acceptable as a component of interaction.

Since Non aboriginal norms dominate the Australian society, aboriginal people are often disadvantaged and misunderstood or misinterpreted as evasive or as evidence of guilt.

Cultures described as “positive politeness” or “solidarity oriented cultures” value involvement with others, while negative politeness cultures emphasize respect and minimize intrusion. On such a basis, aboriginal society seems a negative politeness culture. In fact however, aboriginal society is characterized by high international involvement, on-going serial, open-ended conversations, and places great value on group activities which build solidarity.   The analysis of interaction patterns in aboriginal communities raises questions about the adequacy of the simple negative/positive politeness framework.

Research on aboriginal communities suggests that a feature such as preference of indirect ways of conveying information reflects a distinctive perception of socio-cultural relationships. Aboriginal interactions give personal relationships priority over information-oriented goals. They prioritize the affective over the referential dimension. Indirectness is an obligatory aspect of respect, and long non-intrusive silences are tolerated.

It seems that preferred discourse patterns and linguistic usages may reflect and even influence a particular view of society reality and socio-cultural relationships.

Language, social class and cognition

Basil Bernstein was interested in the fact that there are possible cognitive implications where groups use different varieties of the same language. Bernstein was concerned with the British students who belong to the working class who were not progressing in school. But rather than deducing that school teachers preferred student who used more standard varieties, the researchers began to examine the features of the working class students’ speech, and they mistakenly assumed that the kind of language they used in the interviews represent their actual linguistic competence, where they used short monosyllabic responses, the thing that made the researchers think that their linguistic resources are restricted.

Bernstein also suggested that a restricted code would constrain the cognitive ability of the working class students, and argued that the language they used have affected their perception and thinking abilities. There is no evidence to support this claim but unfortunately it had great appeal in accounting for the failure of low class students in school, and placed the blame on the children rather than on the teachers.

Benefits of Bernstein’s hypothesis: It made the sociolinguists examine Whorf’s claims of the relationship between language, thought and society more thoroughly, leading to a more detailed study of vernacular varieties and a very clear recognition that dialect differences were comparatively superficial aspects of language which could not lead to thinking differences.

His research however was simplified and mis-interpreted, as the linguistic variation like choosing from the pronouns (me-i) in “between you and i/me” or marking explicitly the past tense in sentences can not be taken as evidence of linguistic or cognitive deficit in speakers.        

Glossary:

Cognition الإدراك العقلي

Perception الإدراك الحسي

Verbal hygiene علم الصحة الكلامي

Linguistic determinism الحتمية اللغوية

Linguistic relativity النسبية اللغوية

Discourse patterns أنماط الخطاب

Deficit عجز ونقص 

"An Introduction to Sociolinguistics" by Janet Holmes

Chapter 12

Gender, Politeness and Stereotypes

Women’s language and confidence

Robin Lakoff, an American linguist, believed that women language expressed uncertainty and lack of confidence. She also shifted the focus of research from gender differences to syntax, semantics and style, suggesting that women’s subordinate social status is reflected in the language they are using.

She therefore suggested that women’s speech is characterized by the following features:

   Lexical fillers or hedges: “you know”, “sort of”, “well”.

   Tag questions

   Rising intonation on declaratives “it’s really good?”

   Empty adjectives (meaning: using the adjective alone like wonderful, pretty, and cute).

   Precise color terms “aquamarine”

   Intensifiers

   Hypercorrect grammar

   Super-polite forms like indirect requests or euphemisms

   Swear words avoidance

   Emphatic stress “it was a WONDERFUL show”.

 

The research

Lakoff features were researched by linguists, but such researches lacked linguistic expertise. An evidence of this is the following:

1.    A study regarded a statement like “will you open the door, please?” as an imperative construction in the form of question, the thing which confuses form and function.

2.    Another study made a distinction between fillers and hedges, regarding “sort of” as a hedge, and “well” as pause fillers like “um, eh, ah”.  

3.    Some studies could not identify the fundamental function of these features presented by Lakoff, which is “expressing lack of confidence”. The list of Lakoff was not arbitrary but rather unified. All the features express uncertainty or tentativeness. But researches ignored this function and listed any forms that produced difference between men and women.

(How this list is coherent?) The internal cohesion of lakoff features can be illustrated by dividing them into two groups:

a- Features that serve as hedging devices: signal lack of confidence

b- Features that serve as boosting devices: reflect the speaker’s anticipation that the addressee may remain unconvinced.

So Lakoff suggested that women use hedging devices to express uncertainty and use intensifying devices to persuade their addressee. They use boosters because they believe that they will not be heard or paid attention. Therefore, hedges and boosters are coherent because both express uncertainty and lack of confidence. 

 

The results

The research results were often contradictory.

1- In some studies women were sometimes found as using more tags than men, while in other studies men used more tags than women.

2-Some studies found that there were no gender differences in using hedges, while other studies found that women used hedges three times more than men do.

3- Most studies claimed that women used more boosters, but some studies did not.

4- A study recorded speech of male and females in court, has found that a male witness used a language that is full of features presented by Lakeoff. Therefore the study labeled such features as “powerless forms” which are related to speech of powerless in general rather than women. 

5- Some studies also found out that although women really used more boosters than men, they were not expressing uncertainty or lack of confidence.

Lakoff linguistic features as politeness devices

a-    Tags are may function as a facilitative politeness device, providing the addressee with an easy entrée into a conversation. This is used by teachers fro example to facilitate the participation of a student, or by party hosts to give a topic to the addressee to talk about. For example, a host addressing one of the guests, saying “he has just came from Europe, haven’t you?” will allow this guest to talk about his journey to Europe.

b-   A tag may also soften a directive or a criticism. For example, a mother addressing her child after he had emptied all the shopping items on the floor saying “that was a daft thing to do, wasn’t it?” will soften her criticism of him, and will consider his feeling.

c-   A tag may function as confrontation and coercive devices. In such cases, a tag is regarded as a booster not a hedge.

Based on Holmes (1984), a distribution of tag use between men and women, Women are found to focus more than men on the polite function of tags, while men are found to be focusing more than women on tags for uncertainty. 

Analyses which take account of the function of the features of women speech often reveal women as more facilitative conversationalists rather than uncertain and unconfident. By using more standard forms, these women could be seen as responding positively to their addresses by accommodating to their speech. Women’s greater use of politeness devices can be another aspect of their consideration to the addressee. Also, many of the features which characterize women language are positive politeness devices expressing solidarity.

Politeness in other cultures:

1- A study of a Mayan community in Mexico, the women used more politeness forms than men, which resembles the western norms. Men were using few politeness forms with each other, so the men talk was plain and unmodified. In all other contexts everyone used politeness devices. In this community, men’s talk could be seen as the unusual variety rather than women’s talk.

2- In Malagasy, men not women who modify and qualify their utterances, and who generally use indirect language. Men are considered as the more polite speakers in this community, which is in contrast with western norms. But this is due to social roles of men and women in that community.

3- A study of Samoan personal narratives has found that status was more important than gender in accounting for the use of positive politeness devices. Statusful women with a Samoan title used fewer politeness forms than young untitled men.  On the other hand, titled Samoan men used the highest frequency of negative politeness forms expressing social distance.     

*The next section shows how context, interaction, status and the meaning conveyed is relevant to the comparison between men and women use of politeness devices. 

1-   Interaction

There are many features of interaction which differentiate the talk of women and men:

Interruptions: in same gender interactions in a context of a coffee bar, interruptions are distributed equally between speakers. In cross-gender interactions, all interruptions are from males. In other contexts, it is found that men interrupt others more than women do, and that parents interrupt children, and daughters are interrupted the most.  A study of pre-schoolers found out that some boys start practicing this strategy for dominating the talk at a very early age.

Feedback: women provide more encouraging feedback (hmm, mm, aha) to their conversational patterns. A study in New Zealand has examined the positive feedback distribution in casual contexts, and found out that women gave four times as much of positive feedback to their addressees than men do.

One researcher also found out that women students were more likely than men to develop the ideas of a previous speaker rather than challenge them.

In general, women are found to be cooperative conversationalists, while men are found as more competitive and less supportive.

Why?

2- Gossip

Gossip describes the kind of relaxed in-group talk that goes on between people in informal contexts. In western societies, it is considered as a characteristic of women’s interaction whose function is to affirm solidarity and maintain the social relationships between the women involved.  It focuses on personal experiences and personal relationships, non personal problems and feelings, and may include the criticism of others. In gossip sessions, they provide sympathetic responses focusing on the affective rather than the referential content.

As for men, a study of men working in a bakery has found that the topics discussed tend to focus on things and activities rather than feelings. The men gossip includes linguistic features like long pauses, responses challenged the previous speaker. The men criticized each other constantly, and change the topic abruptly. Their talks contrasted completely with the cooperative, supportive and agreeing and coherent one of women. 

However, there is a variation in the western communities too. Not all men and women behave the same way in western communities. For example, in Malagasy, women’s speech is more direct than that of men. Women take a more confrontational role, and handle bargaining in the market place.  Women not men deal with family disagreements and arguments.

The construction of Gender

Approaching gender identity as a construction is useful because:

1- It accounts for the cases where women adapt to masculine contexts, and men to feminine contexts.(How)Women in police force construct a masculine identity by wearing bulky sweaters, not smiling and talking roughly, while men in cloths markets or beauty salons are constructing a feminine identity by avoiding swear words, and encouraging the customer to talk. They also tend to gossip.

2- Narratives of personal experience allow one to construct social and gender identities. (How) A woman who encounters a personal story to one of her women friends would construct a gendered identity. The example no. 20 and 21 illustrates that the woman expressed the identity of a “loving mother” or a “dutiful daughter”. The discourse style would be full of hedges and pragmatic particles like “you know”, “you see”, as well as feminine adjectives as “cute” or “little”. In other context, the same woman, working as a senior manager, would construct a more contestive identity in her work place by challenging everything she disagrees with. She therefore constructs a less-conformist gender identity. The discourse style in this case will include less hedges and pragmatic particles. The characters talked about in the woman’s story would be also given gendered identities. For example, the woman’s daughter was given the identity of a sweet little girl. Therefore, narratives are a means of expressing gender identities, and every phonological, lexical and syntactic selection conveys social information. This is why women are against sexist languages.

Sexist language

Sexist language is one example of the way a culture conveys its values from one group to another and from one generation to the next. It encodes stereotyped attitudes to women and men.

In principle, the study of sexist language is concerned with the way language expresses both women and men. 

In practice, research in this area has concentrated on the ways in which language conveyed negative attitudes on women.

 

There are a number of ways that suggest English as discriminating against women due to the derogatory forms related to women which are more than those related to men, and due to the English metaphors that describe women negatively more than those related to men.

- Negative animal imagery related to women like “bitch”, “cow” in comparison to “wolf” which is related to men. “Birds” indicate feathery brains, and “chick” and “kitty” which indicate powerlessness.

- Food imagery: Women are also described in food imagery which is insulting.

- Male forms are regarded as the unmarked form (the base). Many words reflect women as deviant or subordinate group. For example, the English morphology generally takes the male form as the base, and adds a suffix to the end of the word to signal femininity: lion-lioness, usher-usherette, author- authoress.  The adding of the female suffix is seen as conveying the message that women are deviant or abnormal.

- Generic structures also support the claim that English marginalizes women. For example, the use of “Man” as generic forms supports the claim that English renders women as invisible. It is no longer accepted by English speakers because this meaning has indicated masculine meaning. It is also confusing, because when we say “man loves to hunt” we don’t know if the sentence means man in masculine sense or the generic sense. The word man is also associated with male images even when it is used generically. For example, a study instructed college students to select pictures that express political man, industrial man, social man, and most of the pictures were men pictures.

Generic “he” also raises the same questions. Grammarians used to deal with such a problem first by proposing many pronouns that are “genre-neutral”. Bisexual pronouns like per, ou, hiser were proposed since the eighteenth century.      

Writers and journalists are now avoiding the use of generic “he” and “man”. An American study of magazines found a dramatic drop in the use of generic forms.

Some writers use “he” and “she” in alternative chapters or in alternate paragraphs.

Singular “they” is used in many writing of old authors like Bernard show and Shakespeare.

However, in the nineteenth century the parliament passed a resolution by which in all acts the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females.

Glossary:

Pragmatic particles: ألفاظ تستخدم أثناء الكلام وتدل على المعرفة القريبة بين المتحدثين

Ex: the phrase “You know” implies an attempt to maintain an already close relationship with the person being addressed, to simulate shared views – or to establish such a relationship.

Sexist language: لغة تمييزية بين الرجال والنساء

Gender-neutral محايد الجنس  

Imagery الصور البلاغية

Intensifying devices أدوات تشديدية

Hedges ألفاظ تقال للحيطة “في حالة عدم التأكد"

Boosters ألفاظ تقال للتأكيد على الكلام

To pass a resolution يصدر قرار

To account for يعلل