Language and Gender

Women's language and men's language

Sometimes, there are very clear differences between the forms of language typically used by
women and those typically used by men.
For instance, here are a few of the many cases where Japanese men and women traditionally
use different lexical items to express the same meaning (examples from Janet Shibamoto,
The Womanly Woman, in Philips et al., Eds., "Language, gender and sex in comparative
perspective"):

Men's form Women's form Gloss

hara onaka stomach

tukemono okookoo pickles

mizu ohiya water

bentoo obentoo box lunch

kane okane money

hasi ohasi chopsticks

umai oisii delicious

kuu taberu eat

kutabaru/sinu nakanaru die

It is not an accident that all the traditionally "female" nouns have the polite or honorific
prefix /o-/; this is one of many ways in which Japanese female speech has been
characterized as being more polite than male speech. These days, many younger Japanese
women would no longer choose to use the specific female forms.

Terminology: sex vs. gender

The different words traditionally used by Japanese men and women are obviously not
determined directly by their complement of chromosomes, or by the nature of their
reproductive organs, any more than the fact that all of them speak Japanese rather English
is. Such linguistic differences are part of a cultural (re)construction of a biological
difference -- a marking of gender differences that appears to be dying out in Japanese
culture, as the roles and attitudes of men and women change.
The available terminology of ordinary English does not give us any easy way make it clear -
- if we want to -- whether we are talking about biological or cultural differences. In recent
years, many people have imposed this distinction on the terms "sex" and "gender", although
in ordinary usage these terms overlap.
Here are some paired quotes from different recent newspaper stories, in which uses of
"gender" might easily have been replaced by "sex," or vice versa:

The homeless were recorded by gender and whether adult or child, but names were not
taken.
He declined to identify the surgeon , even by sex.
We unconditionally reject [birth control] as a means of gender selection.
In the new paradigm of sex determination that is emerging, the fetus is roughly female
to begin with.
She lifted one leg, saw the gender of the baby, threw the leg down and said the baby was
a boy
The 38-year-old Couric said the sex of the baby hasn't been determined.
Here is another newspaper quote, where gender and sex are used in adjacent sentences in
apparently interchangeable senses:
Faulkner sued The Citadel two years ago for rescinding its acceptance of her after
learning her gender. She did not identify her sex on the school 's enrollment application.
In The American Heritage dictionary, the definition of gender starts with its grammatical
senses, and then references the definition of sex:
[gen-der]
1. Grammar.
1. a. A set of two or more categories, as masculine, feminine, and neuter, into which
words are divided according to sex, animation, psychological associations, or some other
characteristic, and that determine agreement with or the selection of modifiers, referents, or
grammatical forms.
1. b. One category of such a set.
1. c. The classification of a word or grammatical form in such a category.
1. d. The distinguishing form or forms used.
2. Classification of sex.
The definition of sex in the same dictionary starts from the biological question of
reproductive function, but extends to all associated characteristics:
[sex]
1. a. The property or quality by which organisms are classified according to their
reproductive functions.
1. b. Either of two divisions, designated male and female, of this classification.
2. Males or females collectively.
3. The condition or character of being male or female; the physiological, functional, and
psychological differences that distinguish the male and the female.
4. The sexual urge or instinct as it manifests itself in behavior.
5. Sexual intercourse.
6. The genitalia.
The dictionary definitions are consistent with the overlapping usage seen in the newspaper
quotes.
Nevertheless, as indicated earlier, in recent years many people have decided to use this pair
of terms to express the newly-salient distinction between biological and cultural aspects of
reproductive status. Roughly, in this way of talking, sex is genetics and physiology, while
gender is culture and identity. From a recent medical text:
Taken as a noun, sex is a biological determinant, while gender carries psychological and
sociological implications. Hence in biological sciences, sex differences are innate,
chromosomally determined characteristics that distinguish between males and females,
while in psychological and sociological sciences gender differences refer to male or
female traits that result from learning and social roles.
Another quote, from a book entitled Gender Voices:
The opening words of Simone de Beauvoir's historic book The Second Sex capture the
essential characteristic of gender: 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.'
Gender is a socially rather than a biologically constructed attribute -- people are not
born with but rather learn the behaviours and attitudes appropriate to their sex. During
the last decade of research, it has become clear that gender is a very complex category.
Theories are still be developed which try to grapple with the complexity but they share
the idea that gender, unlike sex, is a continuous variable. A person can be more or less
'feminine' and more or less 'masculine.' Furthermore, a man can display 'feminine'
characteristics just as a woman may demonstrate 'masculine' ones.
Although the terminology of sex vs. gender is far from generally accepted or even
understood, the distinction that it expresses is a useful one, and so we will adopt it here.

Biology/sex/language
Men and women are differentiated biologically in two ways that seem directly relevant to
language. One has to do with the larynx, and the other with the brain.
The larynx

Males and females differ little in stature before puberty, but post-pubescent males are about
8-9% taller. According to a database maintained by NIST, the male children in their sample
averaged about 3% taller at age 2, and less than 1% taller at age 10, whereas males average
about 9% taller at age 18. According to a 1977 publication from the National Center for
Health Statistics, at age 2 the 50th percentiles for males and females are identical; at age 10,
girls are .6% taller (in the 50th percentile), and at age 18, males are about 8% taller.
With respect to the length of the vocal folds (the tissue in the larynx that is responsible for
producing voiced speech), this overall difference between the sexes is magnified by
approximately a factor of four: the vocal folds of post-pubescent males average about 30-
40% longer than those of females of the same age.
As a result of these laryngeal changes, adult human males have significantly lower voices
than females do, out of proportion to their rather small different in average height. Though
the pitch of anyone's speech depends very much on circumstances, under comparable
conditions, (adult) human females voices are likely to show pitches almost double those of
male voices. This difference reflects not only the difference in vocal cord length, but also a
difference in vocal cord mass -- and perhaps some socially-conditioned factors as well. A
graph showing data from various studies is reproduced below (taken from Kent 1994):

Because the larynx also drops lower in the neck in post-pubescent males, the overall male
vocal tract length is about 15% longer on average. This means that resonance frequences
(including the formant frequencies that determine vowel quality) are also about 15% lower
in adult males as compared to females. This is about 175% of the difference expected on the
basis of the average overall size differences (8-9%). This difference also means that adult
males are even more subject to the risk of choking on aspirated food that is a price the
human species pays for adapting its vocal organs to speech.
None of the other species of apes shows a similar sexual dimorphism of the vocal organs,
although overall size differences between the sexes tend to be larger in other apes than in
homo sapiens.
Brain anatomy and physiology

There is only one well-documented difference in neuroanatomy between human males and
females, concerning the corpus callosum, an array of neural fibers that connects the two
hemispheres of the cortex.. According to a series of studies (reviewed in Holloway et al.
1993), the corpus callosum of females is on average larger when adjusted for total brain
size, especially in the posterior portion known as the splenium. Brain size tends to track
body size, and so male brains are on average larger. The average size of the corpus callosum
in adult females is apparently roughly the same as in males, but it is larger in proportion to
total brain size. Some researchers have argued that the differences are not so much in size
but in three-dimensional tissue distribution, with the female splenium more bulbous and
thus more concentrated in the midline, where section areas may be most easily compared.
It is claimed (de Lacoste et al. 1986) that hman sex differences in the corpus callosum
appear by 26 weeks prenatal.
The sexual dimorphism of the corpus callosum is said to contrast with other aspects of brain
anatomy, where average sizes, corrected for overall brain size, show no significant
differences between males and females. The corpus callosum does not appear to be
dimorphic in monkeys and prosimians, while evidence from apes is uncertain.
Such differences suggest that interhemispheric communication may differ between the
sexes. Speech and language tend to be localized on the left, or dominant, side of the brain
("lateralized"), while some other functions such as visuospatial integration and emotional
appreciation of context are lateralized on the opposite side.
Several functional studies have found sex differences in cerebral lateralization for language-
related activities. Perhaps the most striking differences appear in some studies of early
development. A more recent study has found an adult difference in degree of lateralization
of (at least certain kinds of) phonological processing. Finally, there are some suggestive
differences in patterns of disability following stroke. However, it needs to be stressed that in
what is known about neurophysiology, just as for neuroanatomy, there is a great deal of
individual variation, and the overall similarities between the sexes are much greater than the
differences.

Developmental studies of cerebral lateralization

A pair of developmental studies apear to show large and striking differences in lateralization
of language-related functions between male and female infants at three and six months of
age. The information in this section comes from D. W. Shucard et al., Electrophysiological
activity in infancy, in Philips, Steele and Tanz, Eds., Language gender and sex in
comparative perspective, 1987.
The studies used measurements of Auditory Evoked Potentials (AEP). In the AEP
technique, recordings are made from scalp electrodes. The intensity of the recorded signal
depends on the amount of activity in the neural tissues in the brain region near the electrode
location. When a sudden sound, typically a beep-like "tone pip," is heard, there is a
corresponding burst of AEP over a period of a second or so.
In these studies, tone pips were presented in pairs; each tone was a tenth of a second long,
and the tones in each pair were two seconds apart. The tones were presented in three
conditions, called music, verbal and baseline. In the music condition, classical music was
played as a background. In the verbal condition, the background was passages from a
second-grade reader, read by a female voice. In the baseline condition, the background was
a white-noise hiss.
In the studies being discussed, what matters is the difference between the signal recorded on
the right side of the head and the signal recorded on the left side of the head. The figure
below shows the AEP recordings for one presentation of a pair of tones to a 3-month-old
male infant in the "verbal" condition:

You can see that the signals from the left-side electrodes (especially the extrema labelled N2
and P3) are systematically smaller than the signals from the right-side electrodes.
As the graph below indicates, this pattern is quite regular for the male 3-month-olds in all
conditions -- the right-side electrodes show higher activity regardless of the background
condition. For the female three-month-olds, the situation is reversed -- they show higher
activity in the left-side electrodes, regardless of conditions.

When infants are tested at the age of six months, the situation is different. The male six-
month-olds still show the same pattern of greater right-side response regardless of
background condition. The female six-month-olds show no significant lateralization for the
baseline condition, and show the verbal condition with more activity on the left side, while
the music condition shows more activity on the right side. This is the pattern expected for
adult subjects.

Thus the infants at three months show opposite condition-independent lateralization, while
at six months, the female infants seem to have developed the adult pattern, while the males
are still showing the same immature pattern as at three months.
We should mention in passing that other studies have shown that human infants have some
phonetic perception abilities essentially from birth, a matter that we will return to later in the
lecture on child language acquisition.
No one knows what these infant AEP differences mean -- beyond the fact that there are
apparently some real sex differences in developmental lateralization of brain function.
These sex/language differences in 3- and 6-month-old infants are much larger than anything
that can be measured in adults.

Evidence from fMRI studies

A 1995 study by Shaywitz et al., using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),
found that in phonological tasks (rhyme detection),
in males, brain activation is localized to left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) regions; in
females the pattern of activation is very different, engaging more diffuse neural
systems involving both left and right IFG regions.
In other words, (this particular type of) phonological processing was more strongly
lateralized in males than in females. It should be noted that a variety of other language-
related tasks in this (and other) studies did not show sex-linked differences in localization of
activation.

Evidence from aphasia

Evidence for language-related functional differences in neuroanatomy between adult males

and females is offered by a series of studies by Doreen Kimura and colleagues (Kimura
1993, Kumura and Hampson 1994), which show that in patients suffering damage to the left
hemisphere of the brain, more men (48.5%) than women (30%) show signs of aphasia
(impairment in speech or language skills). Looking at the details of correlations between
damage location and type of impairment, Kimura further finds that when the left anterior
portion of the frontal cortex is damaged, somewhat more women than men suffer aphasia.
When the the left posterior portion of the frontal cortex is damaged, more men than women
suffer aphasia.
We will return to questions of this kind in the lecture on Neurology and Pathology of
Language. For the moment, the only thing that matters about Kimura's findings is that they
appear show some differences between men and women in functional localization of
language skills in the brain. However, some other researchers have called the conclusions
into question, since the men and women in the study also differed in typical size of brain
lesions.
Functional differences
No one knows why the sex difference in the human corpus callosum exists, if indeed it has
any function. Nor does anyone really know why human larynx size and position differ
between the sexes.
Evolutionary theorists usually assume that sexual dimorphism arises as a result of within-
species reproductive competition, part of what is known as "sexual selection". This is a
plausible account in the case of larynx size and position -- a deeper voice, sounding like it
comes from a larger person, might have been helpful to paleolithic males in impressing
potential mates or intimidating potential rivals. It is less clear that there is any story of this
kind about the differences in brain anatomy and physiology.
It is tempting to speculate that the brain differences are somehow connected to the
hypothetical division of labor on the Pleistocene plains. Perhaps there was an evolutionary
pressure for greater communicative abilities among women, or better integration of
language functions with other kinds of processing. Alternatively, since some visuospatial
functions are localized in the non-dominant hemisphere, and males tend to perform better
than females on tasks such as visualization of object rotation, greater lateralization of male
brains might have something to do with development of hunting-related skills like long-
distance navigation and projectile aiming. However, recent research shows that females in
fact excel in other spatial skills, involving learning and remembering where things are. At
present, all stories about a functional-evolutionary basis for the language lateralization
differences between the sexes are speculative at best.
A recent news release from the Educational Testing Service reiterates the general finding
that females tend to score somewhat higher than males on language-related tests:
A profile based on nationally representative samples of 12th graders shows that for
many categories of tests (ranging from reading to math to natural science), average
differences in the performance of females and males were very small. Writing and
language use stood out as areas in which females scored higher than males. The largest
difference favoring males was on mechanical/electronic tests.
The study indicated that among all girls and boys nationally, the familiar gap in math
and science is about one-quarter of what it was in 1960. However, differences persist
among very high achieving students. Over the same 30-year period, boys have not
closed the gap in writing.
Such results are widely replicated, from standardized tests in Addison, Vermont, to English
writing skills among Taiwanese business students.
It is important to keep in mind, while considering these issues, that the average differences
in these various skills between men and women are fairly small, and that there is a great
deal of variation among individuals of either sex. To the extent that there are systematic
differences in language usage between men and women, we must apparently look elsewhere
for an explanation than in the anatomy and physiology of their brains.

Culture/gender/language
When we look at the linguistic behavior of men and women across languages, cultures and
circumstances, we will find many specific differences.
Quite a few languages show lexical and morphological differences like those exemplified
above for Japanese. In some Native American languages, grammatical forms of verbs are
inflected differently according to the sex of the speaker. Examples from the Muskogean
language Koasati are given below:

Women's form Men's form English gloss

lakaw lakaws he is lifting it

lakawwitak lakawwitaks let me lift it

mol mols he is peeling it

i:p i:ps he is eating it

tacilw tacilws you are singing

However, explicit and categorical grammatical and or even lexical marking of speaker
gender is not the norm. Instead, we usually find differences in the frequency of certain
things (words, or pronunciations, or constructions, or intonations, or whatever), especially
when the circumstances of utterance are taken into account. This has been explained by
Trudgill as follows:
Linguistic sex varieties arise because ... language ... is closely related to social attitudes.
Men and women are socially different in that society lays down different social roles for
them and expects different behaviour patterns from them. Language simply reflects this
social fact.... What is more, it seems that the larger and more inflexible the differences
between the social roles of men and women in a particular community, the larger and
more rigid the linguistic differences tend to be. ... Our English examples have all
consisted of tendencies ... The examples of distinct male and female varieties all come
from ... communities where sex roles are much more clearly delineated.
It has often been observed that (other things equal) female speech tends to be evaluated as
more "correct" or more "prestigious", less slangy, etc. Men are more likely than women to
use socially-stigmatized forms (like "ain't" or g-dropping in English). On the other hand,
women are usually in the lead in changes in pronunciation, typically producing new
pronunciations sooner, more often, and in more extreme ways than men.
A number of stylistic differences between female and male speech have been observed or
claimed. Women's speech has been said to be more polite, more redundant, more formal,
more clearly pronounced, and more elaborated or complex, while men's speech is less
polite, more elliptical, more informal, less clearly pronounced, and simpler.
In terms of conversational patterns, it has been observed or claimed that women use more
verbal "support indicators" (like mm-hmm) than men do; that men interrupt women more
than than they interrupt other men, and more than women interrupt either men or other
women; that women express uncertainty and hesitancy more than men; and that (at least in
single-sex interactions) males are more likely to give direct orders than females are.
For nearly all of these issues of stylistic and conversational differences, there are some
contradictory findings, and it seems that one must look closely at the nature of the
circumstances in order to predict how men and women will behave verbally.
Nevertheless, it is clear that in many circumstances, women and men tend to use language
differently.
Within the domain of culture, two broad classes of explanations for such gender effects
have been offered: difference theories and dominance theories.
According to difference theories (sometimes called two-culture theories), men and women
inhabit different cultural (and therefore linguistic) worlds. To quote from the preface to
Deborah Tannen's 1990 popularization You just don't understand, "boys and girls grow up in
what are essentially different cultures, so talk between women and men is cross-cultural
communication."
According to dominance theories, men and women inhabit the same cultural and linguistic
world, in which power and status are distributed unequally, and are expressed by linguistic
as well as other cultural markers. In principle, women and men have access to the same set
of linguistic and conversational devices, and use them for the same purposes. Apparent
differences in usage reflect differences in status and in goals.
The general consensus is that both sorts of explanations are appropriate to some degree, but
the discussion is sometimes acrimonious and political. For instance, Tannen has been
criticized by some feminist writers as a "deeply reactionary" "apologist for men", who
"repeatedly excuses their insensitivities in her examples and justifies their outright rudeness
as merely being part of their need for independence." Those who criticize Tannen in this
way argue that the behavior of the men in her examples reflects a desire for domination
rather rather than a different set of cultural norms.

What about the other genders?