Language and Gender

Linking the linguistic to the social - Communities of practice

• Participants develop ways of doing things together
• They develop practices: common knowledge and beliefs, ways of relating to each other, way of talking within communities of practice linguistic may spread within and among speech communities
• People participate in society through participating in a range of communities of practice

Linking the linguistic to the social - Face

• Def.: the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others he has taken during a particular contact
• Everyday conversational exchanges are crucial in constructing gender identities as well as gender ideologies and relations
• Face can be “lost” and “saved”
• Link to gender order: desire to avoid face-threating situations or acts

Linking the linguistic to the social - Linguistic resources

• Language = highly structured system of signs
• Gender embedded in these signs:
• Primary: gender can be content of a sign
• Secondary: associated meaning
• The way someone talks: tone and pitch of voice, patterns of intonation, choice of vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammatical patterns

Linking the linguistic to the social - Phonology

• Phoneme /s/
• In North America generally pronounced with tip of tongue at the alveolar ridge behind the upper teeth
• A pronunciation against the edge of the front teeth (slight lisp) is stereotypically associated with women or gays

Linking the linguistic to the social - Gender in grammar (1)

• Some languages force the speaker to specify gender
• e.g. English: third person pronoun
• Grammatical gender: when a language has noun classes that are relevant for certain kinds of agreement patterns
• In many Indo-European languages grammatical gender has complex connections to social gender
• BUT: no perfect correspondence