The study of sex/gender differences in language

Prior to the emergence of ‘feminist linguistics’ in the mid-1970s the exploration of the differences in linguistic behaviour of the sexes had featured primarily in anthropological and later in sociolinguistic studies. Anthropologists observed some phonological, grammatical and lexical contrasts in a range of ‘exotic’ languages where the sex of the speaker or addressee determined the choice of the linguistic form. Such differences were usually referred to as sex-exclusive differences (for a more detailed account, see, e.g. Bodine 1975; Brouwer et al. 1978; and Coates 1986). Sociolinguists studying urban dialects of European languages presented evidence of sex-preferential differences at the phonological, syntactic and prosodic levels (for a selective survey of English language studies, see Coates 1986). Despite various shortcomings of explanatory and methodological nature in earlier anthropological and sociolinguistic studies with respect to the gender issue (see Cameron and Coates 1985; Coates 1986; and Milroy 1987), such studies provided and still provide a substantial database for the analysis of gender differences in language within a feminist linguistic framework.

Over the past 15 years psycholinguists, pragmalinguists, conversational analysts, etc., have also increasingly become interested in a more serious study of the differences and similarities in the linguistic behaviour of the sexes (see Thorne, Kramarae and Henley 1983).