How Gender Influences Language Use in Sociolinguistics

Key Definitions and Background

Sociolinguistics is the study of language with respect to social, class, regional, gender, and occupational factors. Gender refers to the condition of being female or male and is most commonly used in relation to cultural and social differences. Gender equality describes a condition in which opportunities and rights are not affected by a person's gender. To speak means to express or convey feelings or information through speech.

Within the study of discourse analysis, the comparative study of how women and men use language has been a topic of interest for quite some time. However, to date no coherent framework for gender differences in language and its use has been established empirically, despite relatively extensive theorizing. One reason for this lack of framework lies in the absence of consensus about how language — whether written or spoken — can best be analyzed.

Research into the existence and nature of gender differences in language has attracted considerable recent attention. Differences in how women and men use language, whether spoken or written, have generated substantial interest. The popularity of this topic stems, at least in part, from the awareness that language is a fundamental phenomenon of our socialization and can thus provide insight into the different ways women and men engage with the world.

An increasingly common consensus in research findings indicates that males tend to use language as a means of conveying information more than females do. The use of verbal interactions in a more purely social manner — where conversation itself is the end goal — is more common for females (Newman et al., 2008). Simultaneously, some researchers have proposed that no meaningful distinction exists between the speech patterns of females and males. This disagreement may arise in part from the absence of an agreed-upon metric of analysis that is commonly accepted for empirical studies of language.

In addition to body language and tone, text-based differences in language use have also been documented. Numerous studies have examined textual samples and used them to make broader generalizations about language differences between men and women. Newman et al. (2008) explored gender differences in language use from a broad database of both spoken and written language using computerized textual analysis, seeking to provide empirical resolution to the issue of gender differences in language. Their findings suggest that men use language that can best be characterized as influence-oriented, while women tend toward more emotional and relational expression. Men use language to exert influence, while women are often presumed to occupy lesser roles in society, with power and influence residing more strongly with men (Newman et al., 2008).

Gender Differences in Language Use

Because extensive reviews of the empirical literature on female and male differences already exist, this paper presents only a brief overview of gender differences in the use of language. One hypothesis concerning gendered differences in speech suggests that the semantic goals of women and men differ at the outset — at the point of actual sentence construction. For example, women were more likely to use questions such as "Is anyone hungry?" reflecting an intent to reach consensus. In contrast, men were more likely to use directives such as "Let's go out for pizza," urging action in a manner that implied a leadership role and assumed cooperation.

It has also been observed that younger male individuals are generally more likely to offer opinions than are women of the same approximate age. One study examining schoolchildren in the 4th, 8th, and 12th grades across a population of 96 children found support for this pattern. In contrast, men tend to be more concise in both verbal and written communication than women, generally speaking.

Males also tend to take more conversational "turns" and generally use more words in their speech (Newman et al., 2008). Generalizations about the speech patterns of females and males do not hold across all media; that is, written expression by women and men may differ from their conversational expression. When email communications were evaluated, both women and men were broadly similar in their expression, ranging from jokes and joking insults to compliments, opinions, questions, and apologies.

One study compared 50 male and 36 female managers in a role-play exercise involving professional criticism. In this study, women used more directives and men asked more questions, and were significantly more negative in their speech. This is contradictory to the results of previous studies, although women did tend to use longer sentences than men, while men tended toward a higher level of verbosity. Newman et al. (2008) suggest that differences across studies may arise from the contextual setting, which would affect both the direction and the overall size of observed gender differences.

Another approach to examining gender differences in language has been to look at word usage. Men tend to make more reference to location, use more swearing, use more articles, and employ longer or more complex vocabulary. In contrast, women tend to use more phrases expressing tentativeness — words such as but, could, and perhaps. Women also use more conjunctions, more intensive adverbs, and more modal auxiliary verbs, each of which renders speech less rigid or directly affirmative, and more tentative.

Word Choice, Emotion, and Function Words

While there is a clear-cut stereotype conveying the idea that women are more emotional than men, the actual usage of emotion words may not confirm this. Referents to emotion are generally assumed — and have been reported — to be more typical of women (Newman et al., 2008). Men, on the other hand, are generally reported to use language to exert influence (Newman et al., 2008).

However, when managers performed a role-play of an event requiring criticism, the reverse was observed. Newman et al. (2008) suggest that the proposed gender difference lies not in the use of emotion per se, but rather in the type of emotion: men refer more to negative emotions such as anger, whereas women refer more to positive emotions. This suggestion does, of course, align with common gender stereotypes.

The psychology of women and men may also be explored through the use of function words. While personal pronouns have been studied in terms of gender effect, function words have not been as extensively examined. The British National Corpus — an enormous collection of spoken and written language samples comprising over 100 million words — was studied in an attempt to detect the gender of the author based on function word usage alone, without considering the actual meanings of words. As a result of this study, it was found that function words could be used to predict gender with an accuracy rate of nearly 80%, using a prediction equation derived from training documents.

When written samples of text were analyzed with respect to being informative (characterized by longer words and more nouns) or involved (characterized by present-tense verbs and more pronouns), gender could again be predicted. Female writers tended toward "involved" language, whereas male writers tended toward "informative" language (Newman et al., 2008). This distinction reflects a broader pattern in which men favor factual, referential communication and women favor interpersonal, relational expression.

Conclusion

What may not be commonly known is that scholarly focus on gender differences in language is relatively recent. The first extant study on gender differences in language was published in 1944. During the feminist movement of the 1970s, the linguistic patterns associated with male competitiveness and female cooperativeness were first reported. One line of research focused on "gender as culture" and evaluated gender differences in linguistic behavior between women and men. Theories concerning the potential existence of a distinctively "women's language" were proposed, and other work analyzed how women and men differed in interpersonal communication across various media. Taken together, this body of research underscores that gender is a significant and multifaceted variable in the study of human language use.

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