Background on Gender Linguistics

Chapter One: Background on gender linguistics

1.1. The origins of gender linguistics

Before moving to the issue of gender politeness and conversational strategies, it is vital to focus on the roots of gender linguistics and present the stages of the development of this field up to contemporary situation.

The gender research has moved from a quantitative to a qualitative approach, along with a better understanding of the linguistic and social facts. Gender differentiation in speech was first observed and analyzed in morphological, phonological and syntactic aspects, based on the assumption that differences in speech are reflections of differences in social status Trudgill (1974: 94). The next, qualitative stage of gender research focused on discourse analytical aspects, and put up different theories to account for gender-related differences.

1.1.1. The roots of interest in the field

The origins of interest in language and gender trace to the beginning of the twentieth century. At that time anthropologists described different languages of men and women living in societies removed from western cultures thought of as linguistically androgynous. They based their description on the earlier reports of travelers and missionaries. The cross-cultural reports were later reviewed by Jespersen (1922) in his influential Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin, where he speculated about men’s and women’s preferences concerning language use. Touching the issues of traditional sex stereotypes, Jespersen speculated about women’s preference for sophisticated, euphemistic language and men’s greater use of slang. What is noticeable, the little that was written about sex differences in language identified it as a source of some amusement or a curiosity rather than a serious study (Thorne et al. 1975: 6). Systematic interest in language as a social phenomenon was brought in the 1960s when sociolinguistics emerged as an interdisciplinary field. The growing...