UNIVERSITI MALAYSIA SABAH

SCHOOL OF EDUCATION AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

COURSE:
TE2053
THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF LANGUAGE

LECTURER:
PN. NIK ZAITUN NIK MOHAMED

MIDTERM:
‘DISCUSS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND
GENDER USE’

STUDENT:
MARCONIE BELLA BIN LADZIM
YT2006-6772
Discuss The Relationship Between Language And Gender Use.

Nowadays, we can see the general growth of feminist work in many academic
fields. It is hardly surprising that the relationship between language and
gender has attracted considerable attention in recent years. In an attempt to
go beyond "folklinguistic" assumptions about how men and women use
language (the assumption that women are "talkative", for example), studies
have focused on anything from different syntactical, phonological or lexical
uses of language to aspects of conversation analysis, such as topic
nomination and control, interruptions and other interactional features. While
some research has focused only on the description of differences, other work
has sought to show how linguistic differences both reflect and reproduce
social difference. Accordingly, Coates (1988) suggests that research on
language and gender can be divided into studies that focus on dominance
and those that focus on difference.
In many of the world’s languages, all the nouns are divided into two or
more classes which require different grammatical forms on the noun and/or
on certain other words grammatically linked with the noun or nouns in
particular sentences. German, for example, has three gender classes, which
require different forms for associated determiners and adjectives. Thus, ‘the
table’ is der Tisch, ‘the pen’ is die Feder, and ‘the book’ is das Buch, where
der, die, and das are all different forms of ‘the’; ‘an old table’ is ein alter Tisch
‘an old pen’ is eine alte Feder, and ‘an old book’ is ein altes Buch.
A gender language must have at least two gender classes, but it may
have more-eight, ten, or possibly even more. In some gender languages, we
can often guess from the form of a noun which gender it belongs to; in
others, we can often guess from its meaning which gender it belongs to; in
very many languages, however, we cannot guess, because gender
assignment is arbitrary. In German, for example, a noun which denotes a
male or a female usually (not always) goes into the der gender or the die
gender, respectively, and nouns with certain endings usually go into a
predictable gender. After that, though, the gender of the remaining nouns is
impossible to guess. In Navaho, nouns denoting humans usually go into one
gender, nouns denoting round things into a second gender, nouns denoting
long stiff things into a third gender, and so on, but not all nouns can have
their gender guessed in this way.
It is important to realize that grammatical gender need have nothing to
do with sex. In German (and other European languages), there is a noticeable
(but imperfect) correlation between sex and gender assignment; however,
most nouns denote things that have no sex, and yet they must still be
assigned to a gender. In many other gender languages, sex plays no part at
all in gender assignment. English, it is worth pointing out, has no gender. We
have a few sex-marked pronouns like he and she, and a few sex-marked
nouns like duke and duchess but we have no grammatical gender.
Sociolinguists (and others) often use the term gender in a very different way,
meaning roughly ‘a person’s biological sex, especially from the point of view
of the associated social role’. This usage must be carefully distinguished from
the strictly grammatical sense of the term. A young lady in Germany belongs
to the female gender (in this second sense), but the noun Fräulein ‘young
lady’ is grammatically neuter.
So I assume that, the relationship between language and gender use is
based on empirical data of men’s and women’s speech. It should be operated
with a complex understanding of power and gender relationships, so that
women's silence, for example, can be seen both as a site of oppression and
as a site of possible resistance. We need, or should I say must looks
specifically at the contexts of language use, rather than assuming broad
gendered differences. It involves more work by men on language and gender,
since attempts to understand male uses of language in terms of difference
have been few, thus running the danger of constructing men's speech as the
‘norm’ and women's speech as ‘different’. It also aims not only to describe
and explain but also to change language and social relationships.
References

1. Coates, J. and D. Cameron (Eds.) (1988) Women in Their Speech

Communities. Harlow: Longman.
2. J. Gumperz (Ed.), Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge
U.P.
3. B. Thorne & N. Henley (Eds.) Language and Sex: Difference and
Dominance. Rowley, Mass: Newbury House.
4. Rockhill, Kathleen, 1987, Gender, Language, and the Politics of
Literacy. British Journal of Sociology of Education 8:153-167.
5. Hamlet, Janet, 1986, Function of “You Know” in Women’s and Men’s
speech, Language in Society 5:1-22.