An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

3.3 Different language?
We have referred above to social class differences in language (use). Similar differ -
ences have been reported with regard to gender differences whereby men’s and
women’s speech differ. ‘At one extreme,’ comments Holmes (1991), ‘the sexes use
different languages, as reported for longhouse groups in the Amazon Basin, where
language differences assist in maintaining exogamic divisions … At the other, sex
differences involve fine phonetic discriminations and relative frequencies of occur -
rence, rather than absolute differences in women’s and men’s usage’ (Holmes 1991:
207).
She notes that in societies where there is clear societal sex-role differentiation
there are likely to be sex-exclusive linguistic differences, while in societies ‘where sex
roles overlap, it is more common to find sex-preferential differences’ (ibid).
3.4 Use of standard
Many sociolinguists have reported the use by women of more standard (as opposed
to vernacular) variants than men (e.g. in English the standard ‘ing’ as opposed to the
vernacular ‘in’ as in talk
ing
/talk
in
). Indeed Trudgill (1983: 162) refers to this finding
as ‘the single most consistent finding to emerge from sociolinguistics over the past
twenty years’. Explanations as to why this is so vary from women’s social status being
more dependent on appearance, to the vernacular having more masculine conno -
tations. Both the explanations and the findings themselves have been challenged by
feminist sociolinguists (Milroy 1987) and various other proposals put forward, such
as the importance of social networks, of solidarity among women (and presumably
men) and of variants (such as glottalisation) used predominantly to signal gender
affiliation. What all these findings indicate is that sex (or gender) does indeed operate
as a major trigger of social dialect choice. It is not necessary, it seems, to seek expla -
nations in terms of power or even solidarity: what the findings reveal is that both men
and women find ways of marking themselves as men and women in the ways that
they use language. Furthermore, they continue to do so and therefore if the other sex
catches up, as it were, by taking on the standard forms or the high rise tone or the
fronting, then they move on to some other distinguishing marker of difference.
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3.5 Politeness
Other markers of difference that linguists have researched include politeness features,
which appear to be sex-exclusive in languages such as Japanese but possibly sex-
preferential in English; conversational interaction where the finding that men are
more combative and women more supportive tends to find approval; cross-cultural
differences and attitudes to women’s talk. Attitudes are, it is claimed, manipulable:
the study of attitudes in social psychology and elsewhere tends to be at the meeting-
point between the more theoretical and the more applied. So it is here. An interest
in language attitudes is one that linguists and applied linguists share. For linguists
an interest in language attitudes can offer explanations for the type of female lead in
language change to which we have referred. For the applied linguist the same interest
can be used to explain success/failure in language learning.