Gender Equality & Linguistic Change The purpose of this rese

The purpose of this research is to examine what consequences, if any, the recent emphasis on equality between the sexes may have for linguistic change. The plan of the research will be to set forth the social context in which the impulse toward changes in the language as an attribute of sex identification has arisen in recent years, to discuss the role that mass media have played in influencing linguistic change, and then to explore the character and extent of linguistic innovations that appear to have failed to take root in the culture.

Introduction to Sociolinguistics cites various studies showing that "'equivalent' words referring to men and women do have quite different associations in English." These various citations are useful as far as they go; however, the full implication of the evidence in such studies is perhaps better conveyed in a statement intended not for the scholarly community but for the popular culture. In The Female Eunuch, wherein Greer describes the evolution of contemporary language as an attribute of historical tension between the sexes on one hand, and as evidence of sex inequality as a fundamental of social organization on the other. She describes sex bias of the language as symptomatic of a socially sanctioned and scarcely concealed hatred of women.

Unfortunately the enfeeblement of abuse by hysterical overstatement is not the commonest phenomenon in the language of woman-hatred. Many more terms which originaly applied to both men and wom

use of) changes in standards of equality between the sexes. Mulac and Lundell have a different focus in studies that seek to predict the sex of a speaker based on the characteristic patterns of speech. In one study, they used three categories of speech attributes (sociointellectual status, aesthetic quality, and dynamism) to find out whether the sex of a speaker could be predicted based on the prevalence of attributes in one category or another. Speakers were asked to describe pictures of landscapes. Female speakers were found to predominate where the effect of their descriptions was linked to language that displayed sociointelelctual status and pleasing aeshtetics. Male speakers were found to predominate where dynamism of description also predominated. Tannen's You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation describes sex differences in the very structure of language use. Differences in the style of communication between men and women, she argues, can cause misunderstandings in conversations between men and women and have the effect of hindering the career advancement of women because of the social roles that inform language use. However, other experts argue that social role or hierarchical status, regardless of sex, i

Category: Psychology - G