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The sorts of questions sociolinguists ask about such changes are ‘why do particular changes
spread?’ and ‘how do linguistic changes spread through a community?’ Sociolinguists try to
identify the particular social factors which favour the spread of specific linguistic changes,
and they try to explain how these factors influence the spread of the change. In addressing
these questions, we first look at a linguistic change which involves the spread of a sound
which has prestige in New York, but interestingly has no prestige in London.

In standard English in many parts of England and Wales, [r] pronunciation following vowels
(post-vocalic [r]) in words like star and start has disappeared. Post-vocalic [r] does not
occur in RP nor in the London Cockney dialect. The loss of post-vocalic [r] seems to have
begun in the seventeenth century in the south-east of England, and it is still in progress,
since there are areas, such as the south-west of England, where [r] is still regularly
pronounced. As example 3 suggests, the change seems to be moving slowly westwards.
(Post-vocalic [r] is also pronounced in Scotland and Ireland.)

Accents with post-vocalic [r] are called ‘rhotic’. In large areas of England, rhotic English
accents are regarded as rural and uneducated. In large parts of the USA, on the other hand,
post-vocalic [r] is alive and well and extensively used. Many US accents (though not AAVE)
are rhotic. Under the influence of southern British norms, however, Eastern New England
(e.g. Massachusetts, Connecticut) is generally non-rhotic. But there is also a conflicting
pattern. A survey in the 1960s found that rhoticism was increasing in New York, where it
was regarded as prestigious. Post-vocalic [r] was used by almost all New Yorkers in their
most formal and careful speech, and young people from the upper middle class pronounced
it even in their most casual speech – a sure signal that it was spreading. More recent
research confirms that rhoticism is now well-established as a feature of New York speech,
and there is a suggestion that it may be spreading to other cities such as Boston. It has also
been identified as a feature which is spreading in some varieties of New Zealand English. So,

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for example, Janet hears her grandchildren pronouncing [r] in first and nurse, whereas her
children (their fathers) did not and do not.

So the pronunciation of [r] in English-speaking communities provides a wealth of examples
of the complexity of linguistic variation and language change, as well as the arbitrariness of
the forms which happen to be standard in any community. While [r]-less speech is the
prestigious form which is still spreading in England, in some parts of the USA it is the rhotic
variety which is increasing.

Changes which people are aware of have been described as ‘changes from above’. These are
changes where people are conscious of their social significance as desirable or prestige
features of speech. People evaluate the speech of those who use such features highly. So in a
social dialect survey undertaken by Labov, even New Yorkers who did not use post-vocalic
[r] in conversation recognised it as a prestigious feature in the speech of those who did use
it and evaluated their speech positively. A second meaning of ‘change from above’ refers to
the source of the change. In this sense, ‘above’ refers to the fact that a feature is generally
spreading downwards through the social groups in a speech community. So it appears that
post-vocalic [r] appeared first in the speech of upper-middle-class New Yorkers, and then
gradually filtered down through the different social classes until it reached the speech of
the lowest social class in the community. It is important to keep these two meanings
distinct even thought they often coincide.

Before considering language change, we must distinguish between variation and change, for
not all variation is a sign of, or leads to, change. There is what Labov (2001, 85) calls ‘long-
term stable variation,’ for example, the distribution of the (ng), (th), and (dh) variables
previously discussed and such alternatives as the ask–aks alternation, the latter as old as
the language. Schools sometimes devote considerable time and effort – very often wasted –
in attempts to eradicate nonstandard variants of stable variables.

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9.2 Social status and language change

There is still a great deal of research and discussion about which social groups introduce
linguistic changes. One answer seems to be that a linguistic change may enter a speech
community through any social group, but that different types of change are associated with
different groups.

Members of the group with most social status, for example, tend to introduce changes into a
speech community from neighbouring communities which have greater status and prestige
in their eyes. So upper-class London speech has prestige in the eyes of many people from
outside London. Middleclass people in Norwich who visit London regularly are therefore
likely to introduce prestigious new London pronunciations or ‘in’ words from London to
Norwich. The pronunciation of the vowel in top and dog, for instance, has changed in
Norwich from [ta: p] and [da: g] to RP [top] and [dog]. Middleclass speakers – and especially
women (a point we return to below) – have been among the leaders in this change.
Similarly, French words such as sangfroid and savoir faire have been introduced into
English by educated middle-class people who know some French. And the much-discussed
postvocalic [r] pronunciation in New York was introduced by younger uppermiddle-class
speakers imitating the speech of rhotic communities outside New York which had prestige
for them.

Lower-class speakers are more influential in spreading less conscious linguistic changes.
Lower-class men in particular often adopt speech forms from nearby local workers to
express solidarity, rather than status or prestige. Interestingly, it is not the people at the
bottom of the social heap who tend to innovate in this way, but rather those in the middle of
the pile. The upper working class is how this group has sometimes been described. It may
be that this is the group whose networks have the particular combination of openness
which provides exposure to alternative linguistic forms, together with a level of density
which gives the forms an opportunity to get established. This group has introduced into
Norwich speech, for instance, a change in the pronunciation of the vowel sound in words

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like hell and tell which is used by people from the surrounding countryside. Using the new
pronunciation hell sounds something like [hʌl]. Whether this change will spread upwards
depends on whether it infiltrates the speech of the upper middle class in Norwich before
they are aware of its low status compared to the RP pronunciation of this vowel.

In Australia, the HRT mentioned above has spread among lower socioeconomic groups.
People in lower-paid jobs use this intonation most frequently, and it clearly functions as a
solidarity marker for this group. However, it is regarded by some older higher status
speakers, in particular, as vulgar, and so it may remain within the lower social echelons.
Alternatively, it may spread into the informal speech of young people from the higher social
groups, and gradually spread upwards in this way.

9.3 Gender and language change

Differences in women’s and men’s speech are another source of variation which can result
in linguistic change. Sometimes women are the innovators, leading a linguistic change, and
sometimes men. Women tend to be associated with changes towards both prestige and
vernacular norms, whereas men more often introduce vernacular changes.
In Ucieda, a small village in Spain near the provincial capital of Santander, men have been
forced to look outside the village to find wives. Many of the village women will not marry
the local working dairy farmers because they don’t want to remain in the farming villages.
The prospect of being stuck at home, as their mothers were, with the cows and the children
simply isn’t very attractive. The women’s speech indicates their social aspirations. They use
more of the standard Castilian final [o] pronunciations on words, and fewer of the dialectal
final [u] pronunciations, than the men do. In general, in this village, then, the women’s
speech is closer to the standard or prestige pronunciation of Spanish than is the men’s. The
women have had enough of peasant village life. They have seen different lifestyles and been
exposed to the standard dialect in their jobs as cooks for upper-class families or as
university students. They use more standard forms with people outside the village, and
gradually these forms extend throughout their speech, reflecting not only their social

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contacts but also their values and aspirations. Women in Ucieda are leading change towards
Castilian Spanish and introducing prestige variants into Ucieda speech.

Martha’s Vineyard, by contrast, provides an example of men leading a sound change. As
described above, it was the fishermen who led the change to a more centralised
pronunciation of certain vowels. The change involved the revitalisation of an older, more
conservative pronunciation, which was reinvested with a new meaning in the light of social
changes on the island. It was a change away from the standard to a more vernacular
pronunciation, a pronunciation which expressed the men’s loyalty to an older set of values
which they regarded as threatened by the influx of tourists to their island home.
We find a similar pattern in Norwich in England, as mentioned above. Upper-working-class
men are leading a sound change away from the RP standard pronunciation of words like
hell towards the vernacular norms of the surrounding rural area ([hʌl]). These speech
norms appear to express the working-class men’s loyalty to local values, and the solidarity
of working men as a group. The Norwich women, by contrast, are leading change towards
RP in a different vowel. In Belfast, the same pattern recurs. Women are leading changes
towards the standard, while men are introducing new vernacular variants.
These generalisations account for differences in women’s and men’s roles in relation to
language change in a variety of communities. But there are at least two types of exception to
these patterns. First, women may also introduce vernacular changes into a community, and,
secondly, there are communities where women are not leading linguistic change in any
direction.

The Belfast communities illustrate the first of these points, as well as the complexity of the
processes of change, and the slipperiness of a word like prestige. Contrary to what one
might expect, young Clonard women are introducing into the Clonard speech community
vernacular pronunciations such as [ba:d] for bad, which are associated with the
Ballymacarrett community. Why? A number of factors seem to be involved in accounting for
this apparently unusual pattern. First, it must be noted that prestige is a relative concept. In

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general, middle-class speech has prestige and working-class speech does not. But within the
working-class communities of Belfast, there is another hierarchy based on factors such as
where jobs are available and where they are not. Within these communities, Ballymacarrett
is more prestigious than the Clonard, partly because it has relatively full employment
compared to other areas. So, the Clonard women are introducing into their community a
speech feature which they are imitating from the more prestigious Ballymacarrett
community. Although this is a change towards the vernacular rather than towards the
standard dialect, it is a vernacular form used by an admired group within the Belfast
context.

A second relevant factor accounting for the role of Clonard women in relation to these
vernacular forms is their social networks, a factor discussed in chapter 8. Where women
work in jobs which favour the development of multiplex networks (for example, at jobs
which involve them in interaction with their friends, kin and neighbours), then they are
likely to develop strong solidarity ties with those people. This will be indicated by their
speech patterns. So, when women develop social networks which are close-knit and
multiplex, it seems that they too may introduce changes in the direction of vernacular
norms.

The young women who studied in the Clonard district were employed in a rather poor
central city store in a shopping area serving both Catholic and Protestant communities. In
other words, it was at a kind of community intersection. This is a typical situation for the
introduction of a speech innovation. These women had also developed work and leisure
patterns which resembled those of traditionally male groups. They worked full-time in
workplaces outside the place where they lived, and socialised with workmates after work.
So the introduction of vernacular forms into their community by these young women was
an indicator of who they interacted with through their daily networks and broader range of
contacts through their work (and another example of speech accommodation, which is
discussed in chapter 10). It also indicates the importance of solidarity in favouring and

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consolidating vernacular forms in the speech of any group, male or female, who both work
and play together.

Finally, the generalisation about women leading change towards the standard dialect
applies only where women play some role in public social life. In Iran, for instance, it has
been found that some Muslim women’s speech does not follow the Western pattern. In
communities where the status of women is relatively fixed, there is little motivation for
them to lead linguistic change. It will not lead them anywhere socially. In such communities,
women do not lead linguistic innovation in any direction.

9.4 Interaction and language change
Interaction and contact between people is crucial in providing the channels for linguistic
change, as previous examples have implied. In this final section we briefly identify more
explicitly the ways in which interaction – or lack of it – has affected the progress of
linguistic changes in a number of communities.

Linguistic change generally progresses most slowly in tightly knit communities which have
little contact with the outside world. There are plenty of examples of places where isolation
has contributed to linguistic conservatism. Scottish Gaelic has survived best in the Western
Isles of Scotland. The far north and East Cape of New Zealand are the places where the
Maori language has survived best. Little mountain villages in Italy, Switzerland and Spain
are places where older dialects of Italian, French and Spanish are preserved. Sardinia is
another example of a relatively isolated area which is renowned for its conservative
linguistic forms compared to other Italian dialects such as Sicilian.

One of the best-known examples of linguistic conservatism is Iceland. Icelandic has altered
relatively little since the thirteenth century, and it has developed very little dialectal
variation. By contrast, during the same period English has changed radically and has been
characterised by gross dialectal variation. What explains this contrast? Iceland is much

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more geographically isolated than England, and so it has been much freer from outside
influences, but this is not a sufficient explanation for the relative lack of variation in the
language. The glaciated middle of the country means that Icelandic communities are
scattered around the coast, and communication between them was very difficult in the past,
especially in winter. This kind of geographical situation normally leads to a great deal of
dialect divergence.

Why has Icelandic remained so stable and so conservative? One answer to this question
seems to be that, although they were geographically separated, the Icelandic communities
had very strong political and cultural ties, and, against all the odds, they therefore
maintained contact with each other. They held regular annual assemblies at which all the
important chiefs gathered. They attached great importance to kinship and friendship links
and so people kept in close contact from generation to generation and over long distances.
They talked to each other a lot. Frequent interaction, as well as positive attitudes to
preserving homogeneity, were crucial factors which prevented the development of
differences in Icelandic. More recently, the Icelandic Language Institute has challenged
Microsoft to translate Windows into Icelandic, expressing belligerent resistance to being
swamped by English computer terminology. Positive views about preserving the language
from change and aggressively protectionist policies clearly continue to prevail.

Is face-to-face interaction crucial for linguistic change? Or is exposure to new forms on the
media sufficient? Linguists are not yet sure about the extent to which the media can
influence people’s speech habits. Some believe that frequent exposure to a pronunciation
on television can bring about change. Others argue that face-to-face interaction is necessary
before change occurs. A popular compromise is the view that the media can soften listeners
up by exposing them to new forms in the speech of admired pop stars or TV personalities.
When people are subsequently exposed to a particular form in the speech of a real person,
they are then more likely to adopt it.

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In Norwich, many young people now say bovver [bovə] instead of bother and togevver
[təgevə] for together. This is a change for them, but these forms have been used in London
for decades. Has this change spread from London through the influence of young people
who spend a lot of time in London? It is a vernacular form which has covert prestige – it
expresses solidarity with a particular sub-culture represented by pop music, for example,
and negative attitudes to the ‘establishment’ – older socially more statusful groups. As
indicated throughout this chapter, many linguists believe that linguistic changes spread
through the social networks of individuals. Particularly important are people like Sam who
acts as a kind of linguistic entrepreneur moving between groups. He serves an important
linking function between two distinct but closely knit social networks. As a link-person, he
also acts as a kind of bridge or channel for the spread of new linguistic forms from one
group to the other. People like Sam act as linguistic innovators within social groups.
Innovators are often marginal rather than core members of the groups adopting an
innovation. So, for an innovation to have a good chance of adoption by the central members
of a group, it will generally need to be transmitted through a number of different links or
bridges. One person is rarely adequate as the only source of a linguistic change. And the
change will also need to have some sort of prestige attached to it – whether overt
(expressing social status) or covert (expressing solidarity).

New forms can gain prestige from the media. TV may have played a part in explaining at
least the speed with which pronunciations like [bovə] have spread. The use of such forms
by admired individuals on TV may have made Norwich people more prepared to adopt
these forms which are well established in London vernacular speech (and as noted earlier
have become established in Multicultural London English). The fact that a form is used in
the vernacular speech of the capital city is probably another factor contributing to its
prestige or attractiveness to the ears of young people in other places. Vernacular London
speech is generally seen as more desirable than the speech of other cities. But it seems
likely that the actual process ofdiffusion or the spread of forms involves marginal young
people like Sam who move between groups in each place.

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The spread of glottal stops in words such as bit and bitter where RP uses [t] seems to have
followed a similar route. This is a change which is spreading very rapidly out of London in
all directions. Here too there is some evidence that the change is spreading by face-to-face
contact rather than via the media. Areas closer to London have adopted this change more
quickly than areas further away. If the media were the main factor influencing change, there
is no reason why glottal stops shouldn’t be heard in Liverpool and Leeds as quickly as in
Oxford, Bristol and Norwich. But this isn’t what has happened. There is evidence that glottal
stops were heard in the speech of young people in cities closer to London before they were
heard in the speech of those further away. (Recognising, of course, that the glottal stop is
also a well-established feature of Scottish English; indeed, Glasgow has been dubbed ‘the
original home of the glottal stop’.) The influence of the media may again explain the speed
of the change, however. The use of London vernacular speech by popular actors and TV
personalities may help promote positive attitudes to the form in advance of its adoption –
but most sociolinguists still think that actual changes in people’s speech require faceto-face
contact with real people.

The topic of language, colonialism and postcolonialism is very broad and takes the linguistic
observer in the West at least as far back as the Greek and Roman empires. It can be
approached from a variety of angles, starting with an examination of the macro-social and
political function of language in colonial, imperial and postcolonial situations, considering
for example the different ways that colonial and imperial powers exerted their hegemony
through language. This might include the overt banning of the use of (an) indigenous
language(s) (as in Stalinist Russia), or more indirect inculcation of colonial or imperial
values and ideologies through education in the colonial language, which features the
programmatic use of cultural icons and economic models.
On the linguistic level, one might examine how language changes when it is separated from
the core and transplanted to new and often both literally and metaphorically distant
physical, social, cultural and political contexts. As well as looking at and for processes and

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significant features of language variation and change, one would need to consider the
impact on an individual(s) and on (a) language(s) of contact with other indigenous or
immigrant dialects and languages, which in turn would engender questions about patterns
of multilingual communication, language choice and identity issues. Here, again, there are
significant differences between colonial contexts where there is one dominant colonial
language affording or requiring direct contact with native speakers of indigenous
languages, and those contexts in which contact with the prestige language is restricted,
possibly leading to the development of (stable) pidgins and creoles, such as those that
developed in the Caribbean and the American South.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century it is accepted that English is a world language
and that part of the reason for its spread is that it has been used as a language by colonizers
for hundreds of years: indeed, since the twelfth century. Given the status and extent of
English across the globe, particularly since the end of World War II, it is also possible to
examine language, colonialism and postcolonialism from the point of view of the
development of the English language, enquiring how external varieties of English (New
Zealand English, Canadian English, South African English, for example) emerged in the
colonial, imperial and Commonwealth eras, and how they have evolved and function in
postcolonial times. This also entails consideration of the ‘new Englishes’ which have
emerged in countries such as Malaysia, where English was never spoken as a native
language by any significant portion of the population but where its use is regarded as
crucial for scientific, economic, political and cultural competitiveness and advancement.
Finally, in providing such a (necessarily brief) overview of language, colonialism and
postcolonialism, one must always take into account that besides English there have been
numerous other important colonial and imperial languages, some of the best documented
being Greek, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese and French in the West, while languages such as
Russian, Japanese and Chinese also have a long and fascinating colonial and imperial
linguistic history (see Comrie 1981; Phillipson 1992).

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9.5 Summary
Language changes because of three major ways, they are interrelated – over time, in
physical space and socially. Language change refers to variation over time and has the
origins of spatial and social variation. The origin of change over time is always the last
variation. Furthermore, the change frequently treats language as a free entity for its
speakers and writers. However, it is not much like that since language itself changes as that
speakers and writers change the way they use the language. Speakers’ innovation is a more
accurate description than language change. As a note, speakers innovate their language (in
the term of usage) occasionally and spontaneously, otherwise, they innovate it in order to
imitate speakers (language use) from other communities. And then, when these innvoations
are used by other speakers in their community and and daily communication and even to
other communities, the language change just happened. In other words, it results a
linguistics change.

9.6 Exercises

Exercises 1

Write down how you would simplify the following sentences

in order to be understood by somebody who speaks very little English. When you

finish, compare your simplification with those of other people. Do you

find shared strategies?

The sentences:

a) I don’t want to eat in your restaurant.

b) Tomorrow I will visit the site of the battle of Hastings.

c) What is the fare for a trip to the airport?

d) Emmanuel’s partner has grown corpulent through the over-consumption of high-fat

items.

e) I like you, but not in a physical sense.

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Exercises 2
This exercise is most efficiently done in small groups of four to six people. Pay attention on
the instructions below:
a) First, your group should discuss what the cultural patterns of surnames are in your

culture; for instance, in some cultures traditionally women take the names of their
husbands and the children are given this name as well; in other cultures, children may
be given family names from both parents.
b) Before collecting data, you should discuss some of the local practices in assignment of
last names. Each group member should collect data on the family names of about ten
people within three generations of a family; because of the nature of the data we are
seeking, they must be people who have children. (You may use your own family if you
choose and have information about enough people.)
c) Note the birth names of people, if these names changed if they married, and what the
family names given to the children were.
d) Also, compile social information about these people: if they are male or female; their
ages; if they married and, if so, at what age; how old they were when they had children;
their occupations; how they identify in terms of socio-economic class; their political
affiliations; their race/ ethnicity; and their nationality.
e) Do you see changes across time in practices concerning family names?
f) Pool the data with others in your group to see if you can identify social factors which
correlate with different naming practices.
g) People are often unaware of the range of ethnic minority groups living in their area.
How could you find out how many minority ethnic groups there are in the area where
you live?

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Referensi:
Herk, Gerard Van. 2012. What is Sociolinguistics? West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Holmes, Janet & Wilson, Nick. 2017. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (5th edition). New

York: Routledge.
Holmes, Janet. 2013. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (4th Edition). New York: Longman.
Wardaugh, Ronald & Fuller, Janet. 2015. An Introduction to Sociolinguistcs. UK: Willey

Balckwell.

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CHAPTER 10

LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his
language, that goes to his heart.”
(Nelson Mandela)

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INTRODUCTION

There is a tradition of study in linguistic anthropology which addresses the relationship
between language and culture. By ‘culture’ in this context we do not mean ‘high culture,’ that
is, the appreciation of music, literature, the arts, and so on. Rather, we adopt Goodenough’s
well-known definition (1957, 167): ‘a society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to
know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and to do so in
any role that they except for any one of themselves.’ Such knowledge is socially acquired: the
necessary behaviors are learned and do not come from any kind of genetic endowment.
Culture, therefore, is the ‘knowhow’ that a person must possess to get through the task of
daily living; for language use, this is similar to the concept of communicative competence we
introduced above. The key issue addressed here is the nature of the relationship between a
specific language and the culture in which it is used.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Students are able to explain and give example lingual cases in the context of language
and cultur;

2. Students are able to analyze language and culture;
3. Students are able to explain The Whorfian Hypothesis;
4. Students are able to explain the Kinship System,
5. Students are able to explain Taxonomies, Color Terminologies, Prototype Theory, Taboo

and Euphemism.

10.1 The Whorfian hypothesis
The influences of how speakers see the world toward the structure of a language are most
usually related to a linguist namely Sapir and his student, Whorf. Whorf is a linguist who got

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a training for his chemical engineer and vocation for his fire prevention. Otherwise, it can be
traced back to others, for instance Humboldt in the nineteenth century. Currently, Holmes
and Wilson (2017) argue that it is usually referred to as Linguistic Determinism, the
‘Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis, or the Whorfian Hypothesis.
Here, the term used for this discussion is the Whorfian Hypothesis since it seems to owe much
more to Whorf than to anyone else.

Sapir acknowledged the close relationship between language and culture, maintaining that
they were inextricably related so that you could not understand or appreciate the one
without a knowledge of the other. Whorf took up Sapir’s ideas but went much further than
saying that there was merely a ‘predisposition’; in Whorf ’s view the relationship between
language and culture was a deterministic one; the social categories we create and how we
perceive events and actions are constrained by the language we speak. Different speakers
will therefore experience the world differently insofar as the languages they speak differ
structurally. One claim is that if speakers of one language have certain words to describe
things and speakers of another language lack similar words, then speakers of the first
language will find it easier to talk about those things. We can see how this might be the case
if we consider the technical vocabulary, that is, register of any trade, calling, or profession;
for example, physicians talk more easily about medical phenomena than those without
medical training because they have the vocabulary to do so. A stronger claim is that, if one
language makes distinctions that another does not make, then those who use the first
language will more readily perceive the relevant differences in their environment. If you
must classify camels, boats, and automobiles in certain ways, you will perceive camels, boats,
and automobiles differently from someone who is not required to make these
differentiations. If your language classifies certain material objects as long and thin and
others as roundish, you will perceive material objects that way; they will fall quite ‘naturally’
into those classes for you.

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This extension into the area of grammar could be argued to be a further strengthening of
Whorf ’s claim, since classification systems pertaining to shape, substance, gender, number,
time, and so on are both more subtle and more pervasive. Their effect is much stronger on
language users than vocabulary differences alone. The strongest claim of all is that the
grammatical categories available in a particular language not only help the users of that
language to perceive the world in a certain way but also at the same time limit such
perception. They act as blinkers: you perceive only what your language allows you, or
predisposes you, to perceive. Your language controls your worldview. Speakers of different
languages will, therefore, have different worldviews.

Whorf ’s work on Native American languages led him to make his strongest claims. He
contrasted the linguistic structure of Hopi with the kinds of linguistic structure he associated
with languages such as English, French, German, and so on, that is, familiar European
languages. He saw these languages as sharing so many structural features that he named this
whole group of languages Standard Average European (SAE). According to Whorf, Hopi and
SAE differ widely in their structural characteristics. For example, Hopi
Grammatical categories provide a ‘process’ orientation toward the world, whereas the
categories in SAE give SAE speakers a fixed orientation toward time and space so that they
not only ‘objectify’ reality in certain ways but even distinguish between things that must be
counted, for example, trees, hills, waves, and sparks, and those that need not be counted, for
example, water, fire, and courage. In SAE, events occur, have occurred, or will occur, in a
definite time, that is, present, past, or future; to speakers of Hopi, what is important is
whether an event can be warranted to have occurred, or to be occurring, or to be expected to
occur. Whorf believed that these differences lead speakers of Hopi and SAE to view the world
differently. The Hopi see the world as essentially an ongoing set of processes; objects and
events are not discrete and countable; and time is not apportioned into fixed segments so
that certain things recur, for example, minutes, mornings, and days. In contrast, speakers of
SAE regard nearly everything in their world as discrete, measurable, countable, and
recurrent; time and space do not flow into each other; sparks, flames, and waves are things

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like pens and pencils; mornings recur in twenty-four-hour cycles; and past, present, and
future are every bit as real as gender differences. The different languages have different
obligatory grammatical categories so that every time a speaker of Hopi or SAE says
something, he or she must make certain observations about how the world is structured
because of the structure of the language each speaks. (We should note that Malotki (1983)
has pointed out that some of Whorf ’s claims about the grammatical structure of Hopi are
either dubious or incorrect, for example, Hopi, like SAE, does have verbs that are inflected for
tense.)

10.2 Kinship systems

One interesting way in which people use language in daily living is to refer to various kinds
of kin. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is a considerable literature on kinship
terminology, describing how people in various parts of the world refer to relatives by blood
(or descent) and marriage. Kinship systems are a universal feature of languages, because
kinship is so important in social organization. Some systems are much richer than others, but
all make use of such factors as gender, age, generation, blood, and marriage in their
organization. One of the attractions that kinship systems have for investigators is that these
factors are fairly readily ascertainable. You can therefore relate them with considerable
confidence to the actual words that people use to describe a particular kin relationship.

There may be certain difficulties, of course. You can ask a particular person what he or she
calls others who have known relationships to that person, for example, that person’s father
(Fa), or mother’s brother (MoBr), or mother’s sister’s husband (MoSiHu), in an attempt to
show how individuals employ various terms, but without trying to specify anything
concerning the semantic composition of those terms: for example, in English, both your
father’s father (FaFa) and your mother’s father (MoFa) are called grandfather, but that term
includes another term, father. You will find, too, in English that your brother’s wife’s father
(BrWiFa) cannot be referred to directly; brother’s wife’s father (or sister-in-law’s father) is a
circumlocution rather than the kind of term that is of interest in kinship terminology.

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This kind of approach sometimes runs into serious difficulties. It is often virtually impossible
to devise an exhaustive account of a particular system. You may also be unable to account for
the many instances you may find of terms which are very obviously kinship terms but are
used with people who are very obviously not kin by any of the criteria usually employed, e.g.,
the Vietnamese use of terms equivalent to English sister, brother, uncle, and aunt in various
social relationships. Such an approach also misses the fact that certain terms recur to mark
different relationships; for example, English uncle is used to designate FaBr, MoBr, FaSiHu,
and MoSiHu, and also non-kin relationships, as when children are sometimes taught to use it
for close friends of their parents. A rather different approach to kinship terminology is
therefore often employed.

In this latter approach, an investigator seeks to explain why sometimes different
relationships are described by the same term, e.g., why Spanish tío is equivalent to both
English uncle and either father’s or mother’s male cousin, and why similar relationships are
described by different terms. Burling (1970, pp. 21–7) describes the kinship system of the
Njamal, a tribe of Australian aborigines, in this way.

To understand why the Njamal use the terms they do, you must know that every Njamal
belongs to one of two ‘moieties,’ that of his (or her) father; the mother belongs to the other
moiety. Marriage must be with someone from the other moiety so that husbands and wives
and fathers and mothers represent different moiety membership. This fact, and the need also
to indicate the generation, and sometimes the sex, of the reference or ego (i.e., the person
from whom the relationship is expressed), and occasionally the other’s age relative to the ego
(i.e., as being younger or older), provide the keys to understanding the Njamal system.

One consequence is that a young Njamal man calls by the same name, njuba, his mother’s
brother’s daughter (MoBrDa) and his father’s sister’s daughter (FaSiDa), which are both
English cousin. But he uses turda for his father’s brother’s daughter (FaBrDa) and his

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mother’s sister’s daughter (MoSiDa) when both are older than he is. He calls any such
daughters who are younger than he is maraga. All of these are cousins in English. He may
marry a njuba, since a cross-cousin is of the opposite moiety, but he cannot marry a turda or
a maraga, a parallel cousin of the same moiety. Moiety membership is the overriding
consideration in the classification system, being stronger than sex. For example, a term like
maili is marked as ‘male,’ e.g., FaFa, FaMoHu, or FaMoBrWiBr when used to refer to someone
in an ascending generation and in the same moiety. In a descending generation, however,
maili is also used to designate membership in the same moiety, but in this case it can be
applied to both males and females, to DaDaHu, BrSoDa, and DaSoWiSi.

10.3 Taxonomies

The above discussion of kinship terminology shows how basic are certain systems of
classification in language and society. Language itself has its own classes of units: vowels and
consonants; nouns and verbs; statements and questions; and so on. People also use language
to classify and categorize various aspects of the world in which they live, but they do not
always classify things the way scientists do; they often develop systems which we call folk
taxonomies rather than scientific classifications. A folk taxonomy is a way of classifying a
certain part of reality so that it makes some kind of sense to those who have to deal with it.
Typically, such taxonomies involve matters like naturally occurring flora and
fauna in the environment, but they may also involve other matters too (see Berlin, 1992).
One of the best-known studies of a folk taxonomy is Frake’s account (1961) of the terms that
the Subanun of Mindanao in the southern Philippines use to describe disease. There is a
considerable amount of disease among the Subanun and they discuss it at length, particularly
diseases of the skin. Effective treatment of any disease depends on proper diagnosis, but that
itself depends on recognizing the symptoms for what they are. Much effort, therefore, goes
into discussing symptoms. As Frake says (pp. 130–1):

The ‘real’ world of disease presents a continuum of symptomatic variation which
does not always fit neatly into conceptual pigeonholes. Consequently the diagnosis
of a particular condition may evoke considerable debate: one reason a patient

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normally solicits diagnostic advice from a variety of people. But the debate does
not concern the definition of a diagnostic category, for that is clear and well known;
it concerns the exemplariness of a particular set of symptoms to the definition.

The Subanun have a variety of categories available to them when they discuss a particular set
of symptoms. These categories allow them to discuss those symptoms at various levels of
generality. For example, nuka can refer to skin disease in general but it can also mean
‘eruption.’ A nuka may be further distinguished as a beldut ‘sore’ rather than a me ºabag
‘inflammation’ or buni ‘ringworm,’ and then the particular beldut can be further
distinguished as a telemaw ‘distal ulcer’ or even a telemaw glai ‘shallow distal ulcer.’ What
we have is a hierarchy of terms with a term like nuka at the top and telemaw glai at the
bottom. For example, in this case a telemaw glai contrasts with a telemaw bilgun ‘deep distal
ulcer.’ As Frake says (p. 131):

Conceptually the disease world, like the plant world, exhaustively divides into a set of
mutually exclusive categories. Ideally, every illness either fits into one category or is
describable as a conjunction of several categories. Subanun may debate, or not know, the
placement of a particular case, but to their minds that reflects a deficiency in their
individual knowledge, not a deficiency in the classificatory system. As long as he accepts it
as part of his habitat and not ‘foreign,’ a Subanun, when confronted with an illness, a plant,
or an animal, may say he does not know the name. He will never say there is no name.

Diagnosis is the process of finding the appropriate name for a set of symptoms. Once that
name is found, treatment can follow. However, we can see that the success of that treatment
depends critically not only on its therapeutic value but on the validity of the system of
classification for diseases: that last system is a ‘folk’ one, not a scientific one.

Analyses into taxonomies and components are useful in that they help us to organize data in
ways that appear to indicate how speakers use their languages to organize the world around
them. The analyses show how systematic much of that behavior is and do so in a rather
surprising way. A folk taxonomy of disease is something that develops with little or no
conscious attention. That it can be shown to have a complex hierarchical structure is
therefore a rather surprising finding. That the Palaung pronoun system is also as ‘neat’ as it

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is in the way it makes use of its various components is also intriguing. Evidently, language
and culture are related very closely, and much of the relationship remains hidden from view
to most of us. Only rarely do we get glimpses of it, and even then, we may not know quite
what to make of our discoveries.

10.4 Color terminology
Our world is a world of color but the amount of color varies from place to place and time to
time. A January flight from Acapulco, Mexico, to Toronto, Canada, takes one from a sun-
drenched array of colors to a gray drabness. Except to those blinded to it, color is all around
but it is not everywhere treated in the same way. The terms people use to describe color give
us another means of exploring the relationships between different languages and cultures.
The color spectrum is a physical continuum showing no breaks at all. Yet we parcel it out in
bits and pieces and assign names to the various component parts: green, blue, yellow, red,
and so on. We also find that we sometimes cannot directly translate color words from one
language to another without introducing subtle changes in meaning, e.g., English brown and
French brun. An interesting issue is how colors are referred to in different languages. Are
color terms arbitrary, or is there a general pattern? If there is a pattern, what are its
characteristics and why might it exist? Berlin and Kay (1969) tried to answer questions such
as these, drawing on data from a wide variety of languages.

All languages make use of basic color terms. A basic color term must be a single word, e.g.,
blue or yellow, not some combination of words, e.g., light blue or pale yellow. Nor must it be
the obvious sub-division of some higher-order term, as both crimson and scarlet are of red.
It must have quite general use; i.e., it must not be applied only to a very narrow range of
objects, as, for example, blond is applied in English almost exclusively to the color of hair and
wood. Also, the term must not be highly restricted in the sense that it is used by only
a specific sub-set of speakers, such as interior decorators or fashion writers.

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According to Berlin and Kay, an analysis of the basic color terms found in a wide variety of
languages reveals certain very interesting patterns. If a language has only two terms, they are
for equivalents to black and white (or dark and light). If a third is added, it is red. The fourth
and fifth terms will be yellow and green, but the order may be reversed. The sixth and seventh
terms are blue and brown. Finally, as in English, come terms like gray, pink, orange, and
purple, but not in any particular order. In this view there are only eleven basic color terms
(although Russian is acknowledged to have twelve since it has two in the blue region: sinij
‘dark blue’ and goluboj ‘light blue’). All other terms for colors are combinations like grayish-
brown, variations like scarlet, modifications like fire-engine red, and finally the kinds of
designations favored by paint and cosmetic manufacturers.

An attempt has been made to relate the extent of color terminology in specific languages with
the level of cultural and technical complexity of the societies in which these languages are
spoken. There is some reason to believe that communities that show little technological
development employ the fewest color terms; e.g., the Jalé of New Guinea have words
corresponding to dark and light alone. On the other hand, technologically advanced societies
have terms corresponding to all eleven mentioned above. Societies in intermediate stages
have intermediate numbers: for example, the Tiv of Nigeria have three terms; the Garo of
Assam and the Hanunóo of the Philippines have four; and the Burmese have seven.

10.5 Prototype theory

osch (1976) has proposed an alternative to the view that concepts are composed from sets
of features which necessarily and sufficiently define instances of a concept. Rosch proposes
that concepts are best viewed as prototypes: a ‘bird’ is not best defined by reference to a set
of features that refer to such matters as wings, warm-bloodedness, and egg-laying
characteristics, but rather by reference to typical instances, so that a ‘prototypical bird’ is
something more like a robin than it is like a toucan, penguin, ostrich, or even eagle. This is
the theory of prototypes. As we saw in the preceding section, individuals do have ideas of
typical instances of colors, and these ideas are remarkably similar among various cultural

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groups. Such similarity in views, however, is found not only in reference to birds and colors.
A variety of experiments has shown that people do in fact classify quite consistently objects
of various kinds according to what they regard as being typical instances; for example, (1)
furniture, so that, whereas a chair is a typical item of furniture, an ashtray is not; (2) fruit, so
that, whereas apples and plums are typical, coconuts and olives are not; and (3) clothing, so
that, whereas coats and trousers are typical items, things like bracelets and purses are not
(Clark and Clark, 1977, p. 464). The remarkably uniform behavior that people exhibit in such
tasks cannot be accounted for by a theory which says that concepts are formed from sets of
defining features. Such a theory fails to explain why some instances are consistently held to
be more typical or central than others when all exhibit the same set of defining features.
Hudson (1996, pp. 75–8) believes that prototype theory has much to offer sociolinguists. He
believes it leads to an easier account of how people learn to use language, particularly
linguistic concepts, from the kinds of instances they come across. He says (p. 77) that: a
prototype-based concept can be learned on the basis of a very small number of instances –
perhaps a single one – and without any kind of formal definition, whereas a feature-based
definition would be very much harder to learn since a much larger number of cases, plus a
number of non-cases, would be needed before the learner could work out which features
were necessary and which were not. Moreover, such a view allows for a more flexible
approach to understanding how people actually use language. In that usage certain concepts
are necessarily ‘fuzzy,’ as the theory predicts they will be, but that very fuzziness allows
speakers to use language creatively. According to Hudson, prototype theory may even be
applied to the social situations in which speech occurs. He suggests that, when we hear a new
linguistic item, we associate with it who typically seems to use it and what, apparently, is the
typical occasion of its use. Again, we need very few instances – even possibly just a single one
– to be able to do this. Of course, if the particular instance is atypical and we fail to recognize
this fact, we could be in for some discomfort at a later time when we treat it as typical.
Prototype theory, then, offers us a possible way of looking not only at how concepts may be
formed, i.e., at the cognitive dimensions of linguistic behavior, but also at how we achieve our
social competence in the use of language. We judge circumstances as being typically this or

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typically that, and we place people in the same way. One person appears to be a ‘typical’
teacher, jock, burnout, teenager, or American, etc., while another does not. We then attempt
to use language appropriate to the other as we perceive him or her and to the situation we
are in. As we will see in chapter 12, there is considerable merit to such an approach to
attempting to understand how conversations, for example, proceed.

10.6 Taboo and Euphemism

In one sense this chapter has been about ‘meaning,’ specifically about how cultural meanings
are expressed in language. But language is used to avoid saying certain things as well as to
express them. Certain things are not said, not because they cannot be, but because ‘people
don’t talk about those things’; or, if those things are talked about, they are talked about in
very roundabout ways. In the first case we have instances of linguistic taboo; in the second
we have the employment of euphemisms so as to avoid mentioning certain matters directly.

Taboo is the prohibition or avoidance in any society of behavior believed to be harmful to its
members in that it would cause them anxiety, embarrassment, or shame. It is an extremely
strong politeness constraint. Consequently, so far as language is concerned, certain things are
not to be said or certain objects can be referred to only in certain circumstances, for example,
only by certain people, or through deliberate circumlocutions, i.e., euphemistically. Of course,
there are always those who are prepared to break the taboos in an attempt to show their own
freedom from such social constraints or to expose the taboos as irrational and unjustified, as
in certain movements for ‘free speech.’ Tabooed subjects can vary widely: sex; death;
excretion; bodily functions; religious matters; and politics. Tabooed objects that must be
avoided or used carefully can include your mother-in-law, certain game animals, and use of
your left hand (the origin of sinister). Crowley (1992, pp. 155–6) describes how in the Kabana
language of Papua New Guinea people typically have personal names that also refer to
everyday objects. However, there is also a strong restriction against saying the names of one’s
in-laws. What happens, therefore, when you want to refer to the actual thing that your in-law
is named after even though you are not using the word as a personal name? For such cases

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the language has a set of special words which are either words in the Kabana language itself
(but with different meanings) or words copied from neighboring languages with the same
meanings. For example, the Kabana word for a particular kind of fish is urae, so if your in-law
is called Urae this fish must be referred to as moi, the Kabana word for ‘taro’. The Kabana
word for ‘crocodile’ is puaea but you cannot use this word if your in-law is called Puaea and
you must refer to the crocodile as bagale, a borrowing from a neighboring language. English
also has its taboos, and most people who speak English know what these are and observe the
‘rules.’ When someone breaks the rules, that rupture may arouse considerable comment,
although not perhaps quite as much today as formerly, as when Shaw’s use of bloody in
Pygmalion or the use of damn in the movie Gone with the Wind aroused widespread public
comment. Standards and norms change. Linguistic taboos are also violated on occasion to
draw attention to oneself, or to show contempt, or to be aggressive or provocative, or to mock
authority – or, according to Freud, on occasion as a form of verbal seduction, e.g., ‘talking
dirty.’ The penalty for breaking a linguistic taboo can be severe, for blasphemy and obscenity
are still crimes in many jurisdictions, but it is hardly likely to cost you your life, as the
violation of certain non-linguistic taboos, e.g., incest taboos, might in certain places in the
world. Haas (1951) has pointed out that certain language taboos seem to arise from bilingual
situations. She cites the examples of the Creeks of Oklahoma, whose avoidance of the Creek
words fákki ‘soil,’ apíswa ‘meat,’ and apíssi ‘fat’ increased as they used more and more
English. A similar avoidance can sometimes be noticed among Thai students learning English
in English-speaking countries. They avoid Thai words like fag ‘sheath’ and phrig ‘(chili)
pepper’ in the presence of anglophones because of the phonetic resemblance of these words
to certain taboo English words. Thai speakers also often find it difficult to say the English
words yet and key because they sound very much like the Thai words jed, a vulgar word for
‘to have intercourse,’ and khîi ‘excrement.’ In certain circumstances, personal names may
even be changed as a speaker of one language finds that his or her name causes
embarrassment in a different linguistic framework, e.g., the Vietnamese name Phuc in an
anglophone group. The late twentieth century may have seen a considerable change in regard
to linguistic taboo – in the English-speaking world at least – as certain social constraints have

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loosened. However, that decline may have been more than matched by the marked increase
in the use of euphemistic language, the ‘dressing up’ in language of certain areas in life to
make them more presentable, more polite, and more palatable to public taste. Euphemistic
words and expressions allow us to talk about unpleasant things and disguise or neutralize
the unpleasantness, e.g., the subjects of sickness, death and dying, unemployment, and
criminality. They also allow us to give labels to unpleasant tasks and jobs in an attempt to
make them sound almost attractive. Euphemism is endemic in our society: the glorification
of the commonplace and the elevation of the trivial. We are constantly renaming things and
repackaging them to make them sound ‘better’; we must remember that Orwell’s version of
the future relied heavily on characterizing the inhabitants of that future world as having
fallen victim to its euphemisms, its renaming of reality to fit a new order of society. It is even
possible to argue that ‘politically correct’ language is euphemism in a new guise. In a series
of publications Nadel (particularly 1954) has described how the Nupe of West Africa must be
among the most prudish people in the world, distinguishing sharply between expressions
that are suitable for polite conversation and those that are not. They constantly resort to
circumlocutions and euphemisms in order to avoid direct mention of matters pertaining to
parts of the body, bodily functions, sex, and so on. At the same time, however, they show an
intense fascination with language and are prepared to discuss various linguistic complexities
at length. It seems that they are quite aware of what they are doing when they use
circumlocutions and euphemisms. As Nadel says (p. 57), ‘When they employ metaphors or
otherwise manipulate expressions, they are always fully aware of the semantic implications.’
Apparently, the Nupe have developed indirect ways of referring to tabooed matters, ways
they can employ on those occasions when it is possible to free themselves from normal
constraints, e.g., in certain kinds of story-telling or on specific festive occasions.

Taboo and euphemism affect us all. We may not be as deeply conscious of the effects as are
the Nupe, but affect us they do. We all probably have a few things we refuse to talk about and
still others we do not talk about directly. We may have some words we know but never – or
hardly ever – use because they are too emotional for either us or others. While we may find

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‘some thoughts too deep for words’ – something hard to prove – others we definitely take
care not to express at all even though we know the words, or else we express ourselves on
them very indirectly. Each social group is different from every other in how it constrains
linguistic behavior in this way, but constrain it in some such way it certainly does. Perhaps
one linguistic universal is that no social group uses language quite uninhibitedly. If so, it
would be intriguing to hypothesize why this is the case. What useful function does such
inhibition serve?

The exact nature of the relationship between language and culture has fascinated, and
continues to fascinate, people from a wide variety of backgrounds. That there should be some
kind of relationship between the sounds, words, and syntax of a language and the ways in
which speakers of that language experience the world and behave in it seems so obvious as
to be a truism. It would appear that the only problem is deciding the nature of the relationship
and finding suitable ways to demonstrate it. But, as we will see, what is ‘obvious’ need not
necessarily be ‘true’: the sun does not rotate around the earth, nor is
The earth at the center of the universe! When we do try to specify any such relationship,
we run into problems that are no less formidable than those just mentioned: we may be
misled by the ‘obvious.’ In this chapter we will look at various ways in which language and
culture have been said to be related. As we will see, some of the resulting claims are
unprovable, others are intriguing, but only one or two are potentially of great interest.

A few words are necessary concerning what I mean by ‘culture.’ I do not intend to use the
term culture in the sense of ‘high culture,’ i.e., the appreciation of music, literature, the arts,
and so on. Rather, I intend to use it in the sense of whatever a person must know in order to
function in a particular society. This is the same sense as in Goodenough’s well-known
definition (1957, p. 167): ‘a society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or
believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and to do so in any role
that they accept for any one of themselves.’ That knowledge is socially acquired: the
necessary behaviors are learned and do not come from any kind of genetic endowment.

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Culture, therefore, is the ‘know-how’ that a person must possess to get through the task of
daily living; only for a few does it require a knowledge of some, or much, music, literature,
and the arts.

10.7 Summary
Language and culture are related to each other. There should be some kind of relationship
between the sounds, words, and syntax of a language and the ways in which speakers of that
language experience the world and behave in it seems as obvious as to be a truism. It would
appear that the only problem is deciding the nature of the relationship and finding suitable
ways to demonstrate it.

Culture is related to the ‘know-how’ that a person must possess to get through the task of
daily living. Then, one aspect of the daily living is language in the term of communication.
Another thing is that language usage reveals a particular meaning in certain context of
situation and culture. It means different context brings about different meaning.

10.8 Exercises
Exercise 1
All of the following expressions can be said to be euphemistic: pest control officer; building
engineer; comfort station; socially deviant behavior; seasonal adjustment in employment;
culturally deprived children. Try to explain why such expressions arise.
a) Do they have any useful social function to perform?
b) Do you know any other similar expressions?
c) Do taboo and euphemism serve any socially useful purpose? Or are they just ‘relics of the

Dark Ages’?
d) Is there a useful distinction to be made between ‘euphemistic’ language and ‘politically

correct’ language?

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Exercise 2

If you speak more than one language or dialect, are there certain words or phrases, which
you feel you cannot translate into Standard English? What are these words or phrases – are
they simply words for things, which are not part of the cultures of the English-speaking
world, or concepts or idioms not found in English? What does the view of particular words
as ‘untranslatable’ indicate about the connection between language and worldview?

Discussion
1. Look at the English kinship system, particularly your own version of it, and consider the

various relationships covered by terms such as great grandfather, uncle, niece, cousin,
step-sister, half-brother, second cousin once removed, and father-in-law. Where are
distinctions made to do with such factors as gender, generation, blood, and marriage?
Where are such distinctions not made? Is godson part of the system?
2. Terms such as uncle, father, mother, sister, brother, son, and cousin are sometimes used
outside the English kinship system. Describe these uses and try to account for them.
3. Family structures are changing: in many parts of the world the extended family is
becoming less and less important as the nuclear family grows in importance; divorce
results in one-parent families; remarriage results in mixed families. What are some of the
consequences for kinship terminology? For example, whereas you can have an ex-wife,
can you have an ex-father-inlaw? Are two people who live together necessarily husband
and wife? If not, what are they? In a remarriage do his children, her children, and their
children learn to distinguish whose cousins, uncles, and so on are whose?
4. If a language uses a term equivalent to English mother to cover MoSi, MoBrDa, and
MoBrSiDa, and a term equivalent to English sister to cover FaBrDa, FaFaSi, and FaSi, what
hypotheses might you be tempted to make concerning differences between the family
structure of speakers of such a language and your own family structure?

Referensi:

Holmes, Janet & Wilson, Nick. 2017. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (5th edition). New
York: Routledge.

Holmes, Janet. 2013. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (4th Edition). New York: Longman.

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Wardaugh, Ronald & Fuller, Janet. 2015. An Introduction to Sociolinguistcs. UK: Willey
Balckwell.

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CHAPTER 11

LANGUAGE AND GENDER

“Our language is the reflection of ourselves. A language is an exact reflection of the character and
growth of its speakers.”
(Cesar Chaves)

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INTRODUCTION

This chapter brings about a discussion of the relation between language and gender. This matter rises
questions, such as ‘Do men speak differently from women?’; ‘is male language is more rude than
female?’; ‘do women speak more grammatically than men?’ and ‘do women speak more polite than
men?’ These questions can appear in all speech communities. Wardaugh and Fuller (2015) argue that
the linguistics features can take a crucial role to contrast women’s language with men’s in all speech
communities. In addition, the linguistic behaviour of women and men differs in other ways. It is
claimed women are more linguistically polite than men, for instance, and that women and men
emphasise different speech functions. In the first section of this chapter, the focus will be on evidence
that women and men from the same speech community may use different linguistic forms.

First a brief comment on the meaning of the terms sex and gender in sociolinguistics. I have used the
term gender rather than sex because sex has come to refer to categories distinguished by biological
characteristics, while gender is more appropriate for distinguishing people on the basis of their socio-
cultural behaviour, including speech. The discussion of gender in this chapter focuses largely on
contrasts between empirically observed features of women’s and men’s speech. The concept of
gender allows, however, for describing masculine and feminine behaviours in terms of scales or
continua rather than absolute categories. So, we can also think of the features associated with women
and men’s speech as linguistic resources for constructing ourselves as relatively feminine or relatively
masculine.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Students are able to explain the correlation of language and gender
2. Students are able to explain women’s language and confidence
3. Students are able to explain Language Variety of ‘Gay’
4. Students are able to explain the influence of the interviewer and the context

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5. Students are able to explain gender-preferential speech features: social dialect research
6. Students are able to explain Linguistic Relativism
7. Students are able to explain the correlation of language and gender
8. Students are able to analyze the correlation of language and gender in the context of

communication
9. Students are able to differentiate linguistic characteristics of male and female.

11. 1 Women’s language and confidence

Gender differences in language are also seen as performed, reinforcing our sense of both
gender and gendered language through performances and the feedback they receive.
Scholars continue to debate how large the linguistic differences between genders are, and
whether they reflect gendered differences in access to power or differences in the culture of
talk. Recent work looks at people on the margins of mainstream gender assumptions and
performances to clarify how those assumptions and performances work (Herk, 2012).

There are a few ways to use sociolinguistic research to say something interesting about
dominant gender ideologies. One way is simply to look at aspects of society that have
previously been taken as so natural that they’re ignored (and many researchers would argue
that these aspects of society actually get most of their power from being ignored, or from
getting vanilla labels like common sense or ordinary). This is the approach taken by the work
on heterosexual masculinity by Cameron and Kiesling, described above. (It’s also a tactic
successfully used by observational comedians – by discussing and pulling apart something
apparently ordinary, they lead us to see how strange or artificial it really is.)

Cameron and Kulick (2003) suggest that language and sexuality research is actually fairly
constrained. The research literature doesn’t interpret “sexuality” broadly: “It does not refer
to fantasies, fears, repressions or desires. It means ‘sexual identity’ … the focus is on how
language is employed by speakers to signal their identity as homosexuals” (p. 78). Of all the

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ways of being sexual, only homosexuality has a long history of being described as having
specifically linguistic correlates, even as research on gay speech has moved through different
stages – from pathologizing (“gayness as illness”) to anti-pathologizing “gayness as not
illness”) to community-based (“the gay speech community”) to performance-based (“doing
being gay”). Within those restrictions, though, recent work on gay and lesbian language use
has helped illuminate a whole range of gender and identity questions for sociolinguists, while
also revealing ways that smaller-scale, more ethnographic workcan help us understand
what’s going on. For example, Podesva (2004) showed the complex identity work that people
can do with a single linguistic feature, in this case the use of fully released word-final [t]
(which makes the [t] in a word like get very noticeable). Podesva showedhow Heath, a gay
male medical student, takes the feature (which generally seems to index articulateness) and
increases it, using more and longer

This pattern is typical for many grammatical features. In many speech communities, when
women use more of a linguistic form than men, it is generally the standard form – the overtly
prestigious form – that women favour. When men use a form more often than women, it is
usually a vernacular form, one which is not admired overtly by the society as a whole, and
which is not cited as the ‘correct’ form. This pattern has been found in Western speech
communities all over the world. It was described in 1983 by Peter Trudgill, the sociolinguist
who collected the Norwich data, as ‘the single most consistent finding to emerge from
sociolinguistic studies over the past 20 years.

While some social dialectologists suggested that Western women were status conscious, and
that this explained their use of standard speech forms, Robin Lakoff, an American linguist,
suggested almost the opposite. She argued that women were using language which
reinforced their subordinate status; they were ‘colluding in their own subordination’ by the
way they spoke. Social dialect research focuses on differences between women’s and men’s
speech in the areas of pronunciation (such as [in] vs [iŋ]) and morphology (such as past tense
forms), with some attention to syntactic constructions (such as multiple negation). Robin
Lakoff shifted the focus of research on gender differences to syntax, semantics and style. She

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suggested that women’s subordinate social status in US society is indicated by the language
women use, as well as by the language used about them. She identified a number of linguistic
features which she claimed were used more often by women than by men, and which in her
opinion expressed uncertainty and lack of confidence.

Features of ‘women’s language’
Lakoff suggested that women’s speech was characterised by linguistic features such as the
following.1 [̷ indicates rising intonation]. Lexical hedges or fillers, e.g. you know, sort of, well,
you see. Tag questions, e.g. She’s very nice, isn’t she? Rising intonation on declaratives, also
called HRT and uptalk, see chapter 9, e.g. It’s really go̷ od . ‘Empty’ adjectives, e.g. divine,
charming, cute. Precise colour terms, e.g. magenta, aquamarine. Intensifiers such as just and
so, e.g. I like him so much. ‘Hypercorrect’ grammar, e.g. consistent use of standard verb forms.
‘Superpolite’ forms, e.g. indirect requests, euphemisms. Avoidance of strong swear words,
e.g. fudge, my goodness. Emphatic stress, e.g. It was a BRILLIANT performance. Many of these
features are illustrated in the list of sentences in exercise 1. Lakoff’s claims were based on
her own intuitions and observations, but they sparked off a spate of research because they
appeared to be so specific and easy to investigate. Much of this initial research was
methodologically unsatisfactory. Speech was recorded in laboratory conditions with
assigned topics, and sometimes rather artificial constraints (such as a screen between the
speakers). Most of the subjects were university students. Consequently, it was difficult to
generalise from the results to natural informal speech in the community as a whole. In
addition, the linguistic analysis of the data was often rather unsophisticated.

This quotation illustrates the kind of statement which betrayed lack of linguistic expertise
among these early investigators of Lakoff’s claims about women’s speech. No linguist would
describe ‘will you please close the door?’ as an imperative construction, and the expression
‘imperative construction in question form’ confuses form and function. (It is an interrogative
construction expressing directive function.) Yet this was not untypical. Many of the
categorisation systems devised by non-linguists to measure features of ‘women’s language’
seem rather odd or arbitrary to linguists. Another study, for instance, made a distinction

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between ‘fillers’ and ‘hedges’, with sort of classified as a hedge, while well and you see were
described as ‘meaningless particles’ and assigned to the same category as ‘pause fillers’ such
as uh, um and ah. But this is a complicated area where form alone is never an adequate guide
for classification, and function and meaning need careful analysis. As well as lacking linguistic
expertise, many researchers also missed Lakoff’s fundamental point. She had identified a
number of linguistic features which were unified by their function of expressing lack of
confidence. Her list was not an arbitrary conglomeration of forms. It was unified by the fact
that the forms identified were means of expressing uncertainty or tentativeness. Other
researchers, however, ignored this functional coherence, and simply listed any forms that
produced a statistical difference between women and men, without providing any
satisfactory explanation for why these differences might have arisen. One study, for example,
analysed short sections from formal speeches by American female and male college students
and found they differed on a range of features including the number of prepositional phrases,
such as at the back (women used more) and progressive verb forms, such as was walking
(men used more). Without a theoretical framework, it is difficult to know how to interpret
such apparently arbitrary differences. Nor did Lakoff claim her list was comprehensive. But
because they ignored the underlying functional coherence which unified Lakoff’s list of
features, many researchers treated it as definitive. The internal coherence of the features
Lakoff identified can be illustrated by dividing them into two groups. Firstly, there are
linguistic devices which may be used for hedging or reducing the force of an utterance.
Secondly, there are features which may boost or intensify a proposition’s force. Researchers
who recognised this functional unifying factor included in their analysis any form which had
a hedging or boosting effect on an assertion. Those who didn’t tended to stick to Lakoff’s list
as if it had been handed down like Moses’ tablets.

Lakoff argued that both kinds of modifiers were evidence of an unconfident speaker. Hedging
devices explicitly signal lack of confidence, while boosting devices express the speaker’s
anticipation that the addressee may remain Lawyer: Witness C: unconvinced and therefore
supply extra reassurance. So, she suggested, women use hedging devices to express

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uncertainty, and they use intensifying devices to persuade their addressee to take them
seriously. Women boost the force of their utterances because they think that otherwise they
will not be heard or paid attention to. Thus, according to Lakoff, both hedges and boosters
express women’s lack of confidence. It is not surprising, given the range of methods used to
collect and analyse the data, that the research results were often contradictory. In some
studies, women were reported as using more tag questions than men, for instance, while in
others men used more than women. Some researchers reported that women used up to three
times as many hedges as men, while others noted no gender differences. Most, but not all,
claimed women used more boosters or intensifiers than men. One pair of researchers
recorded the speech of witnesses in a law court and found that male witnesses used more
‘women’s language’ features than women witnesses with more expertise in court or higher
occupational status.

11.2 Gender and Social Class

The linguistic features which differ in the speech of women and men in Western communities
are usually features which also distinguish the speech of people from different social classes.
So how does gender interact with social class? Does the speech of women in one social class
resemble that of women from different classes, or does it more closely resemble the speech
of the men from their own social class? The answer to this question is quite complicated, and
is different for different linguistic features. There are, however, some general patterns which
can be identified.

In every social class where surveys have been undertaken, men use more vernacular forms
than women, for instance in social dialect interviews in Norwich, men used more of the
vernacular [in] form at the end of words like speaking and walking than women. And this
pattern was quite consistent across fi ve distinct social groups. (Group 1 represents the
highest social group.) Notice, too, that in the lowest and the highest social groups the
women’s speech is closer to that of the men in the same group than to that of women in other
groups. In these groups, class membership seems to be more important than gender identity.

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But this is not so true of women in group 2. Their score (of 3 per cent) for vernacular forms
is closer to that of women in group 1 than it is to that of men from their own group. This may
indicate they identify more strongly with women from the next social group than with men
from their own social group. Possible reasons for this are discussed below.

Across all social groups in Western societies, women generally use more standard
grammatical forms than men and so, correspondingly, men use more vernacular forms than
women. In Detroit, for instance, multiple negation (e.g. I don’t know nothing about it ), a
vernacular feature of speech, is more frequent in men’s speech than in women’s. This is true
in every social group, but the difference is most dramatic in the second highest (the lower
middle class) where the men’s multiple negation score is 32 per cent compared to only 1 per
cent for women. Even in the lowest social group, however, men use a third more instances of
multiple negation than women (90 vs 59 per cent). This pattern is typical for many
grammatical features. In many speech communities, when women use more of a linguistic
form than men, it is generally the standard form – the overtly prestigious form – that women
favour. When men use a form more often than women, it is usually a vernacular form, one
which is not admired overtly by the society as a whole, and which is not cited as the ‘correct’
form. This pattern has been found in Western speech communities all over the world. It was
described in 1983 by Peter Trudgill, the sociolinguist who collected the Norwich data, as ‘the
single most consistent fi nding to emerge from sociolinguistic studies over the past 20 years’.
This widespread pattern is also evident from a very young age. It was fi rst identifi ed over
thirty years ago in a study of American children’s speech in a semi-rural New England village,
where it was found that the boys used more [in] and the girls more [ih] forms. Later studies
in Boston and Detroit identifi ed the same pattern. Boys used more vernacular forms such as
consonant cluster simplifi cation: e.g. las’ [las] and tol’ [toul], rather than standard last [last]
and told [tould]. Boys pronounced th [e] in words like the and then as [d] more often than
girls did. In Edinburgh, differences of this sort were observed in the pronunciation of girls
and boys as young as 6 years old. The pattern is clear, consistent and widespread and it is
evident from a very early age.

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When this pattern first emerged, social dialectologists asked: ‘why do women use more
standard forms than men?’ At least four different (though not mutually exclusive)
explanations were suggested. The fi rst appeals to social class and its related status for an
explanation, the second refers to women’s role in society, the third to women’s status as a
subordinate group, and the fourth to the function of speech in expressing gender identity,
and especially masculinity.

The social status explanation

Some linguists have suggested that women use more standard speech forms than men
because they are more status-conscious than men. The claim is that women are more aware
of the fact that the way they speak signals their social class background or social status in the
community. Standard speech forms are generally associated with high social status, and so,
according to this explanation, women use more standard speech forms as a way of claiming
such status. It has been suggested that this is especially true for women who do not have paid
employment, since they cannot use their occupations as a basis for signalling social status.
The fact that women interviewed in New York and in Norwich reported that they used more
standard forms than they actually did has also been used to support this explanation. Women
generally lack status in the society, and so, it is suggested, some try to acquire it by using
standard speech forms, and by reporting that they use even more of these forms than they
actually do. Though it sounds superfi cially plausible, there is at least some indirect evidence
which throws doubt on this as the main explanation for gender differences in social dialect
data. It is suggested that women who are not in paid employment are most likely to claim
high social status by using more standard forms. This implies that women in the paid
workforce should use fewer standard forms than women working in the home. But the little
evidence that we have in fact suggests that just the opposite may be true. An American study
compared the speech of women in service occupations, working in garages and hotels, for
instance, with the speech of women working in the home. Those in paid employment used
more standard forms than those working in the home. In the course of their jobs, the fi rst

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group of women were interacting with people who used more standard forms, and this
interaction had its effect on their own usage. By contrast, the women who stayed home
interacted mainly with each other, and this reinforced their preference for vernacular forms.
Exactly the same pattern was found in an Irish working-class community. The younger
women in Ballymacarrett, a suburb of Belfast, found work outside the community, and used
a much higher percentage of linguistic features associated with high status groups than the
older women who were working at home. This evidence throws some doubt, then, on
suggestions that women without paid employment are more likely to use standard forms
than those with jobs, and so indirectly questions the social status explanation for women’s
speech patterns. A variation on this explanation suggests that standard or prestige forms
represent linguistic capital which people can use to increase their value or marketability in
some contexts. This has the advantage of accounting for the higher proportion of such forms
in the speech of those in the white collar professional workforce, especially when they are
interacting with people they want to impress. Where women have few other sources of
prestige, language may become especially signifi cant as a social resource for constructing a
professional identity. But if you work in a soap factory or a shoe factory, or on a building site,
the forms that your companions value are more likely to be vernacular forms, so your
linguistic capital will take a different form.

Woman’s role as guardian of society’s values

A second explanation for the fact that women use more standard forms than men points to
the way society tends to expect ‘better’ behaviour from women than from men. Little boys
are generally allowed more freedom than little girls. Misbehaviour from boys is tolerated
where girls are more quickly corrected. Similarly, rule-breaking of any kind by women is
frowned on more severely than rule-breaking by men. Women are designated the role of
modelling correct behaviour in the community. Predictably then, following this argument,
society expects women to speak more correctly and standardly than men, especially when
they are serving as models for children’s speech. This explanation of why women use more
standard forms than men may be relevant in some social groups, but it is certainly not true

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for all. Interactions between a mother and her child are likely to be very relaxed and informal,
and it is in relaxed informal contexts that vernacular forms occur most often in everyone’s
speech. Standard forms are typically associated with more formal and less personal
interactions. It seems odd to explain women’s greater use of more standard speech forms
(collected in formal tape-recorded interviews) by referring to a woman’s role as a speech
model in her very intimate and mainly unobserved interactions with her child.

How are women categorised?

There are alternative ways of accounting for at least some of the social dialect evidence that
women’s and men’s speech differs. Consider, for example, the data on which these
generalisations have been made. In assigning women to a particular social class, researchers
in early social dialect studies often used the woman’s husband’s occupation as their major
criterion. Not all women marry men from the same social class, however. It is perfectly
possible for a woman to be better educated than the man she marries, or even to have a more
prestigious job than him, as illustrated in example 10 . In such cases, women’s use of more
standard forms would require no explanation at all. They would simply be using appropriate
forms which accurately refl ected their social background. When women are classifi ed by
their husband’s social group, miscategorisation is one plausible explanation of their speech
behaviour.

11.3 Language Variety of ‘Gay’

Another way is to define something by looking at its edges, at people and practices that don’t
match the dominant model. For gender, a good example of that approach is recent research
on language and sexuality. Cameron and Kulick (2003) suggest that language and sexuality
research is actually fairly constrained. The research literature doesn’t interpret “sexuality”
broadly: “It does not refer to fantasies, fears, repressions or desires. It means ‘sexual identity’
… the focus is on how language is employed by speakers to signal their identity as
homosexuals” (p. 78). Of all the ways of being sexual, only homosexuality has a long history
of being described as having specifically linguistic correlates, even as research on gay speech

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has moved through different stages – from pathologizing (“gayness as illness”) to anti-
pathologizing (“gayness as not illness”) to community-based (“the gay speech community”)
to performance-based (“doing being gay”).

Within those restrictions, though, recent work on gay and lesbian language use has helped
illuminate a whole range of gender and identity questions for sociolinguists, while also
revealing ways that smaller-scale, more ethnographic work can help us understand what’s
going on. For example, Podesva (2004) showed the complex identity work that people can do
with a single linguistic feature, in this case the use of fully released word-final [t] (which
makes the [t] in a word like get very noticeable). Podesva showed how Heath, a gay male
medical student, takes the feature (which generally seems to index articulateness) and
increases it, using more and longer released [t] with friends when performing a diva-type
identity. Podesva argues that Heath has taken the articulate connotations of the form and
ramped them up into something like prissy, which works for his diva thing. In other words,
exaggerating the linguistic feature exaggerates the sociolinguistic meaning. A major way in
which research on gender performance helps us to understand what’s going on elsewhere
(and vice versa) is to consider some of the different ways in which people actively perform
gender (and here I mean perform quite literally). Hall (1995) looked at the language use of
telephone sex line workers in California. These “fantasy makers” were skilled at using
language alone to portray themselves as their (straight male) clients wanted them to be, to
construct heterosexual femininity through the kind of “women’s language” features that
Lakoff described. It was crucial to the phone workers’ success that callers believed they were
actually talking to (say) a young straight female of whichever ethnicity they wanted, even
though the actual worker might not be young, or straight, or of the same ethnicity, or, in one
case, even female. (For a nice discussion of heterosexual male investment in the authenticity
of the female sexual experience, and how it relates to our linguistic construction of manhood,
see Cameron and Kulick’s (2003: 15–18) discussion of Meg Ryan’s faked-orgasm-in-
therestaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally.) This kind of performance, where the goal is to
be accepted as authentic (or, more accurately, to have your audience not even think about

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your authenticity, or the possibility that you’re performing), is sometimes called passing,
using a term borrowed from the African American community.

11.4 The influence of the interviewer and the context
In many social dialect studies, the interviewers are middle-class, well-educated academics. When
people wish to be cooperative they tend to accommodate to the speech of the person they are talking
to. In other words, their speech becomes more like that of their addressee (as illustrated more fully
in chapter 10 ). At least in some contexts, such as formal interviews, women tend to be more
cooperative conversationalists than men, as discussed in chapter 12 . Hence one factor accounting for
women’s use of more standard forms in social dialect interviews may be their greater accommodation
to the middle-class speech of their interviewers. There is clear evidence of speech accommodation,
for instance, in Swahili data collected in Mombasa, a town in Kenya. The women interviewed shifted
much more dramatically than the men did from more to less standard forms when they were speaking
to a friend rather than a stranger. By contrast, men in such formal contexts seem to be less responsive
to the speech of others, and to their conversational needs. In fact, it seems perfectly possible that
working-class men might react against the speech of a middle-class academic from the university, and
so in their interviews they may have diverged in their speech forms, using more vernacular forms
precisely to distinguish themselves from the interviewer. An Australian study demonstrated that this
was exactly how adolescent boys reacted in an interview with a stranger. The differences between
women’s and men’s speech behaviour would then be explicable in terms of their different responses
to the interviewer collecting the data.

Many of the interviewers who collected the social dialect data discussed in the previous sections were
male. The interview context was therefore different for men and women. Women were being
interviewed by a male stranger, a highly educated member of the dominant group in the society. Men
were being interviewed by a member of their own gender. In such circumstances, it is likely that the
interview context would be considerably more comfortable for men than for women, especially for
middle-class men. Male solidarity would reduce the formality of the context. This too might account
for men’s greater use of vernacular forms. In one of the earliest social dialect surveys, the male
interviewers asked different questions of women and men in order to elicit a casual style of speech in
which vernacular forms were more likely to occur.

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The women were asked about childhood games and skipping rhymes, while the men were asked
about fi ghts, terms for girls and, in some cases, terms for a girl’s sexual organs. As one pair of
commentators note, ‘With the best will in the world, it seems unlikely that a discussion of skipping
rhymes could induce the rapport of two men talking about smutty words.’ The fact that men used
more vernacular forms than women in these interviews does not then seem so surprising. It can be
accounted for by the fact that the interview context was different for women and men. Women’s
greater use of standard speech forms may then be an indication of their sensitivity to contextual
factors. Standard speech forms are used in more formal contexts. They refl ect social distance. They
are used in contexts where people operate primarily in terms of social status and role. When people
do not know each other well, they tend to speak in ways that refl ect their social roles (e.g. customer–
shopkeeper, teacher–pupil, interviewer–interviewee) rather than relating as individuals. Standard
speech forms are appropriate to such transactional roles. Where women use more standard speech
forms than men in social dialect interviews, this may be due to the fact that they experienced the
interview as a relatively formal interaction with a stranger. This explanation accounts for the
difference in women’s and men’s speech forms by referring to the relationship between the people
concerned in the context in which they are operating. It provides a thought-provoking alternative to
explanations which characterise women as status-conscious individuals who use more standard
speech forms to ensure they are perceived as socially statusful.

11.5 Gender-preferential speech features: social dialect research

Not surprisingly, in Western urban communities where women’s and men’s social roles overlap, the
speech forms they use also overlap. In other words, women and men do not use completely different
forms. They use different quantities or frequencies of the same forms. In all the English-speaking
cities where speech data has been collected, for instance, women use more -ing[ih] pronunciations
and fewer - in’ [in] pronunciations than men in words like swimming and typing . In Montreal, the
French used by women and men is distinguished by the frequencies with which they pronounce [l] in
phrases such as il y a and il fait . Both women and men delete [l], but men do so more often than
women. In Sydney, some women and men pronounce the initial sound in thing as [f ], but the men
use this pronunciation more than the women. Both the social and the linguistic patterns in these
communities are gender-preferential (rather than gender-exclusive). Though both women and men
use particular forms, one gender shows a greater preference for them than the other.

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In all these examples, women tend to use more of the standard forms than men do, while men use
more of the vernacular forms than women do. In Australia, interviews with people in Sydney revealed
gender-differentiated patterns of [h]-dropping.

As an area, language and gender has been characterised by interdisciplinarity, with valuable
contributions from anthropology, various forms of discourse analysis, education, literary theory,
media studies, social psychology, sociology, women’s studies and lesbian and gay studies as well as
sociolinguistics more narrowly defi ned. Many, or more probably most, contributors to the fi eld have
been feminists, and there has been an emphasis both on the development of theory and on more
practical concerns. Language and gender is a topic that is of interest in its own right; it is also
Important because of what it can add to our understanding of language and how it works, and to the
sociolinguistic study of language.

Increasingly, researchers on language and gender are emphasising how important it is to understand
gender in relation to sexuality (see Cameron and Kulick 2003, and also Chapter 10). The importance
of this is suggested very strongly by the data provided in Table 4.1. As Cameron and Kulick point out,
class and race are also important in defining how we understand sexuality and gender. From even
this small amount of data it is possible to see how attitudes to women, and the general eroticisation
of women, are part of a complex set of links and attitudes to other groups that are candidates as the
objects of White, middleclass heterosexual male desires.
In an interesting study, that foreshadows the more recent move linking attitudes to gender and
sexuality, the sociolinguist Elizabeth Gordon (1997) found that listeners were highly likely to
categorise a young woman with a broad, non-standard accent as (among other things) highly likely
to be ‘sleeping around’. By contrast, listeners did not categorise a young woman using a more refined,
middle-class accent as so likely to be promiscuous. Gordon traces this association between lower-
class varieties of English and sexual promiscuity back into the Victorian era (when something like
modern class distinctions started to emerge due to the urbanisation and industrialisation of society).
In later chapters we will see that there is a large body of data showing that different ways of speaking
correlate with the social class and sex of the speaker. Gordon suggests that the different attitudes
people have to women’s use of broad or cultivated accents may play a role in determining the nature
of some of these generalisations.

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11.6 Linguistic Relativism
When people differentiate between groups, they almost inevitably make qualitative
judgements about the basis of the differentiation. Comparisons between the members of a
speaker’s ingroup and members of outgroups tend to be made in such a way that they ensure
a positive self-image. It stands to reason, therefore, that where one group holds more social
power, the members of that group will be in a position to assert the validity of the way they
perceive themselves and others, and they will try to assert the moral or aesthetic superiority
of their ingroup.

This is one way of understanding what’s going on with sexist or racist language. In turn, it
provides a useful basis for understanding why people find racist or sexist language
objectionable. Obviously it is not the words themselves that are objectionable. As virtually
every introductory linguistics class tries to stress, words are simply arbitrary signs that
communities of speakers use to denote something (that is, to pick out and identify a thing or
event in the world). Hence, what people find objectionable about sexist or racist language is
not the linguistic process of denotation, it is the underlying social and cultural assumptions
about the way the world is and how it should be organised.

The term linguistic relativism can be used to refer to the hypothesis that the way we talk
about others, and the words we use, does more than simply denote entities or events in the
world. Linguistic relativism instead proposes that the way we perceive the world plays a part
in how language is structured. Linguistic relativism is sometimes called the Sapir–Whorf
hypothesis. Both Sapir and Whorf worked on Native American languages, and Whorf is
famously associated with asserting that because the Native American language Hopi does not
make the same tense and aspect distinctions that English does, Hopi speakers must perceive
the world and the passage of time differently from the way English speakers do.

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There is some evidence to support this mutually constitutive model, some of which is
particularly relevant to our discussion of sexist language. A number of experimental studies
have been done with adults and children showing that the name of a professional occupation
is explicitly marked as male or female – people find it hard to think of them being filled by
someone of the opposite sex. So, it is much harder for people to think of a fireman as being a
woman (small children will often simply reject this as impossible), whereas a firefighter can
be imagined as a woman or a man. Similarly, research asking people to find images
illustrating topics such as ‘Urban man’ versus ‘Urban life’ found that university students were
much more likely to produce images that included only men in the first case, and images that
either included women and men (or consisted of cityscapes) in the latter case. Opposition to
sexist, racist, or heterosexist language (by which we mean the unquestioning assumption that
one sex, or one race, or one sexual orientation is better than another) very often starts from
the weak Whorfian position that language, thought and the world are interrelated. For
example, people who actively promote language change by providing guidelines for how to
avoid sexist language base their arguments on the assumption that if people choose their
words more carefully this will in turn affect the way they think about the relationships
between women and men. Advocates of non-sexist (non-racist, etc.) language policies hope
that this process will destabilise the assumptions that people make about whether or not the
group distinctions they are drawing are natural or just. Similarly, arguments against
providing guidelines for language use may dispute the details of this model. Instead of
assuming that there is mutual influence between all three domains, counter-arguments
contend that the direction of influence is asymmetric, and that language itself does not and
cannot influence the way people think or the way they perceive the world. Notice that this
seems to be based on a somewhat stronger and more deterministic position than the weaker,
relativistic position outlined in the previous paragraph.

However, since a strong deterministic position clearly misrepresents the relationship
between language and perception, this line of reasoning concludes that changing the
language will make no difference. It is necessary to change the way people think first rather

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than trying to change the way people talk through language policies and publishing
guidelines to avoid sexist or racist language. Under this model, once the way people think has
changed, language change will follow.

11.7 Summary
Gender differences in language are often just one aspect of more pervasive linguistic
differences in the society reflecting social status or power differences. If a community is very
hierarchical, for instance, and within each level of the hierarchy men are more powerful than
women, then linguistic differences between the speech of women and men may be just one
dimension of more extensive differences reflecting the social hierarchy as a whole.

In the same way that gender is seen as something that is performed, rather than inherent,
gender differences in language are alsoseen as performed, reinforcing our sense of both
gender and gendered language through performances and the feedback they receive.
Scholars continue to debate how large the linguistic differences between genders are, and
whether they reflect gendered differences in access to power or differences in the culture
of talk. Recent work looks at people on the margins of mainstream gender assumptions and
performances to clarify how those assumptions and performances work.

11.8 Exercises

Exercises 1
Here’s a list of English terms that highlight the female-ness of the things that they refer to.
(a) chick flick
(b) chick lit
(c) women’s magazine
(d) drag queen
(e) diva
(f) girl band 211
(g) party girl
(h) girlfriend
(i) girly girl
(j) girl

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