Female Grammar گرامر زنانه !؟

Female Grammar

Men's speech and women's speech

We have a stock of `folklore' about other languages, stories that get told and retold frequently. One of them is that in some languages, women speak in ways that different from the way men do - not just that they have distinct conversational styles. Do you think there's some truth in this? Let's look for ways that vocabulary and grammar can be different depending on whether a man or a woman is speaking. We occasionally hear that in Japanese, men and women habitually use two distinct ways of speaking. Look at a few examples (don't try to puzzle out how all this fits together, just note that there are differences running all through the language): • Women use particles and interjections different from the ones men use, such as ma `oh dear' wa, ne. Using na or zo at the ends of sentences sounds masculine. Men often say un for `yes' where women say ee. • The personal pronouns women use in speech are often different from men's pronouns. Women say atashi `I' and anata `you' where men use watakushi or boku `I' and kimi `you', and there are differences in other pronouns as well. • Japanese has a variety of politeness levels depending on who one is speaking to, and women normally speak one level higher up the politeness scale. One way of turning a sentence `honorific' is to add a certain prefix to nouns, which women do much more often than men. Women also add this honorific prefix to verb forms. An even more striking example is Yana, a Native American language spoken in northern California. It has been claimed that it probably carries the men/women speech distinction in grammar farther than any other language does. Nearly every word in the language has two forms, one used by men speaking to men, and the other used by women in speaking to other women or men - and by men speaking to women. In colloquial Spanish as spoken in New York City, the Spanish s is often pronounced like the English h, so that the standard sano, casa sound like `hano, caha '. This is also true in many Spanish-speaking countries, but in New York at least, it turns out that women use this pronunciation far less than men do. The question will arise in your mind "I wonder whether English has something like these vocabulary or grammatical examples that only men or only women say?" Let's think of some examples. In vocabulary, we notice that expressions like goodness, (my) gracious, dear me, bye bye and others are usually thought of as `female' speech. Traditionally profanity was used mainly by males and to some extent this may still be true, though women have been rapidly closing this gender gap too. Frequency counts of use of words and grammatical features have shown unambiguously that men use the `double negative' construction ("I doN'T have NO time") much more than women do. Another example is use of the words so and such as intensifiers (we had SUCH a nice time!) that is, without a following that-clause. A recent Cathy comic strip began with Cathy and her mother greeting each other, and the exchange went You packed so lightly, Cathy! Your house is so spotless, Mom! You're so efficient! You're so organized! So and such are used in this way SO much more commonly by women THAT grammarians often refer to this habit as the `feminine superlative' (you noticed how this sentence illustrates the standard use of so...that by everyone, didn't you?). Women are much more likely than men to speak using a rising `question' intonation on sentences that are not questions: And so I told them(?) and they didn't like it(?) so I left again(?). Men tend to use non-standard pronunciations noticeably more frequently than women do. The famous `New York' pronunciation of this, that as `dis, dat ' is heard much more from men. When you hear someone pronouncing the suffix -ing as -in' (seein', takin'), don't you immediately identify that as `men's language', even `tough-guy talk'? (Actually this `g-dropping' pronunciation is very old, and is not exclusively American. It is heard in all the English-speaking countries). But the other side of this coin is that women tend to much more tuned in to prestige speech than men are. Look at Miniature No. 35 where we showed how in early films, a high-prestige pronunciation dropping r (yahd) was used mainly by female actors. The confidence with which women speakers use prestige pronunciations is illustrated even better when we look at language change. The historical New York pronunciation of far better as fah bettah is rapidly disappearing as speakers more and more approach the standard `r-pronunciation'. But here too, the leaders in this change are women. A sound change that is taking place right now in American English involves pronouncing the oo sound something like `ew ' (the vowel in food, move sounds more and more the vowel in sued, lewd). But although practically all of us do this now to some extent, it is much more conspicuous - and therefore farther advanced - in women's speech. We may well wonder why men and women should have divergent forms of speech that are strikingly different in some languages. A reasonable explanation is that women enter into and maintain social networks that are different from men's, probably because they are also apt to create more stable and less competitive environments. This may provide women with the sense of security that makes innovation possible.

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