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Gender, (◉ Speak in italics - use tone to emphasise, Features of Women’s…
Gender
In this approach, male language is seen as the ‘norm’ and
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This was the view of the earliest researchers into gender,
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◉ In 1922 the Danish linguist published ‘Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin’ which included a chapter titled ‘The Woman’
◉ Argued that ‘women much more often than men break off without finishing their sentences, because they start talking without having thought out what they are going to say.’
◉ Also argued that women’s language could simply be typified as ‘lively chatter’ since their roles consisted of:
‘The care of the children, cooking, brewing, baking, sewing, washing etc. things that for the most part demand no deep thought’. (Jespersen 1922)
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● Labov concluded that women of all social classes were more likely to use the higher status post-vocalic ‘r’ phoneme than men.
● He also found that women often use ‘hypercorrection’ - the over application of a perceived grammatical rule eg. saying ‘between you and I’ instead of ‘between you and me’ - in order to gain what he called ‘overt prestige’.
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● Women used the standard form more frequently in formal situations (despite using non-standard forms in casual speech) to signal or gain social status.
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◉ Made it clear that she was looking at a very specific group of women - American, white, middle class and educated - but her findings were misinterpreted as relating to all women.
◉ Labelled women’s spoken language in a way that implied an almost complete dissimilarity from men’s language, and characterised it as having ‘linguistic features that highlight women’s uncertainty and powerlessness’
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Because of its lower pitch, some people suggest that women are assuming it as a means of being taken more seriously in the workplace (perhaps because it sounds more typically masculine?) and therefore part of their professional identity.
In a contrary view, others believe that it gives young women a kind of stereotyped identity as slightly immature and lacking in intelligence.
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Uptalk
Uptalk, also known as high rising terminal, or high rising intonation is a feature of some variants of English where declaratives end with a rising pitch/intonation similar to that typically found in yes-or-no interrogatives.