Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 The study of language in its socio-cultural context
- 2 Language, culture, and world-view
- 3 Language and social class
- 4 Language and race: some implications for linguistic science
- 5 Language and gender
- 6 Bilingualism
- 7 Dialectology
- 8 Sociolinguistics and syntactic variation
- 9 Language birth: the processes of pidginization and creolization
- 10 Language death
- 11 Language planning: the view from linguistics
- 12 Ethnography of speaking: toward a linguistics of the praxis
- 13 The organization of discourse
- 14 Conversation analysis
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
- Contents of Volumes I, II, and III
5 - Language and gender
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 The study of language in its socio-cultural context
- 2 Language, culture, and world-view
- 3 Language and social class
- 4 Language and race: some implications for linguistic science
- 5 Language and gender
- 6 Bilingualism
- 7 Dialectology
- 8 Sociolinguistics and syntactic variation
- 9 Language birth: the processes of pidginization and creolization
- 10 Language death
- 11 Language planning: the view from linguistics
- 12 Ethnography of speaking: toward a linguistics of the praxis
- 13 The organization of discourse
- 14 Conversation analysis
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
- Contents of Volumes I, II, and III
Summary
… Why can't a woman talk more like a man?
(H. Higgins, phonetician)Introduction
Questions of gender are now seen as a major challenge in almost every discipline that deals with human behavior, cognition, institutions, society, and culture. Within linguistics, however, sex/gender studies have played a relatively minor role: ‘feminist linguistics’ is far better known in literary than linguistic circles (see e.g. Ruthven 1984, Chapter 3). There are, of course, occasional publications in linguistics journals and papers at linguistics meetings. It is fair to say, however, that the recent ‘feminist intervention,’ which is largely responsible for the increased attention to gender in so many areas of intellectual inquiry, has been little felt by most linguists, many of whom have scoffed at claims (e.g. in Spender 1980) that language is ‘man made.’
Why have linguists been relatively inactive in the rapidly growing area of research on language and gender? One reason is that most of the initial impetus for investigation of this area derived from feminist thinkers' concern to understand gender, especially the mechanisms that create and maintain male dominance, and not from interest in language as such. This emphasis made the early research of limited professional interest to linguists though often of considerable personal and political interest to many of us as participants in the women's movement.
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- Information
- Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey , pp. 75 - 99Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988
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