Do Women And Men Talk Differently?

INTRODUCTION

Do women and men talk differently? In this investigation IT IS PRETENDED first to explain that the language of women and men does differ, and second IT IS EXPECTED to show how it differs; is IT good to mention that we are trying to define and answer the question: Why do women and men speak differently?

There have been a lot of researches and articles that talk about the field we select and one of the aims of this investigation is to provide a simple and coherent explanation and bring together all the many sources we have that talk about the topic we chose. This job is intended for those that are interesting in knowing more about Sociolinguistics but in a more specific way; in this case women and men talk because nowadays there has been more attention to what people do with language and how linguisticS and other social resources can be transformed.

Before startING this investigation it is important to say that gender rather than sex will be the key category under discussion; sex refers to a biological distinction, while gender is the term used to describe socially constructed categories based on sex.

If we want to explore and analyze the ways in which women´s and men´s language differs, it is obviously important that we have some ideas of how women as a group differ from men as a group.

Finally; in this paper we decide to provide you a brief definition about what sociolinguistic is in order you to understand a little bit about the topic we are going to discuss.

1. What is sociolinguistics?

Sociolinguistics is a term including the aspects of linguistics applied toward the connections between language and society, and the way we use it in different social situations. It ranges from the study of the wide variety of dialects across a given region down to the analysis between the way men and women speak to one another. Sociolinguistics often shows us the humorous realities of human speech and how a dialect of a given language can often describe the age, sex, and social class of the speaker; it codes the social function of a language (REFERENCE).

2. Women, Men and Language

Women’s and men’s relative position in society is that sociolinguistics aims not only to describe linguistic variation and the social context in which such variation occurs, but also to demonstrate the interrelationships of language and society.

The structured social variation found in the speech community can be interpreted in more than one way. Women as a social group are clearly different from men. As a minority group they can also be seen as oppressed and marginalized.

There are two main approaches to gender differences in language:

• The dominance approach: Sees women as an oppressed group and interprets linguistic differences in women´s and men´s speech in terms of men´s dominance and women´s subordination.

• The difference approach: Emphasizes the idea that women and men belong to different subcultures.

3. Gender Dichotomized and Decontextualized

Research on the sex differences in language use has proceeded on the assumption that if the variables under study were clearly enough defined and accurately enough measured the difference could be stated as fact and its meaning understood.

When a sex difference is defined in ways that are quite specific and quantificable, its meaning is not socially neutral. Rather, the meaning of a sex difference is the product of social negotiation; it is culturally produced.

The search for essential differences in the speech of women and men sparked by Lakoff’s (YEAR) work proved inconclusive, perpetuated interpretive biases, and failed to generate social critique.

When women and men are engaged in talk, certain interactional features take on characteristic patterns:

• Interruption: in conversations between women and men in public settings, 96 percent of the interruptions were by male speakers. The interruptions effect has been found on a variety of settings and contexts: with college students in mixed-sex discussion groups, males interrupted their conversational partners three times as often as females did.

• Topic control: women introduced more controversial topics, but men were more likely to decide which topics would be picked up and elaborated.

• Talking time: men take more than a “fair share” of talk time in a variety of settings: classrooms from elementary school to university level, university faculty meetings, college students’ discussions of a social issue, and so on.

• Use of silence: silence can be used as a device for controlling interaction. Fishman (1978) noted that women gave many minimal responses expressing interest during their husbands’ speaking

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