language and gender

What is the overall conclusion about whether women talk more than men?

There is no reliable evidence that women talk more than men

What are the three explanations for gender differences in language use?

1) Biological/innate sex differences (hard to prove because social factors are hard to control).

2) Separate socialization — girls and boys learn different communication norms growing up.

3) Differing social expectations related to power — men and women are expected to play different roles in interaction.

What are "report talk" and "rapport talk"?

Terms from Deborah Tannen's work. Report talk (associated with men) uses language to convey information and accomplish tasks. Rapport talk (associated with women) uses language to build and maintain social relationships. Some research partially supports this distinction.

What does the Madagascar example show about beliefs on gender and language?

In rural Madagascar, indirectness and formal oratory (kabary) are highly valued — and associated with men, not women. Women are seen as too blunt and direct. This contradicts Western beliefs that women are naturally more indirect and polite

What is the kros in Papua New Guinea?

A female speech genre in Gapun village — a long, angry public monologue delivered from inside one's house. It is exclusively associated with women and seen as natural female behavior.

What is covert prestige?

he hidden social value attached to non-standard speech forms, particularly in local working-class communities. Even though speakers claim to value the standard, men in particular may secretly value non-standard forms as markers of toughness, masculinity, or local identity.

What is a tag question?

A short question added to the end of a statement, consisting of a pronoun plus an auxiliary verb, with opposite polarity to the main clause.

Example: "The way prices are rising is horrendous, isn't it?"

What are modal tags vs. affective tags?

Modal tags express the speaker's degree of certainty or doubt about something. Affective tags express the speaker's attitude toward the addressee

-for example, facilitative tags encourage the other person to speak, or solidarity tags invite agreement.

What is vocal fry / creaky voice?

A mode of phonation where the vocal folds vibrate irregularly, producing a creaking sound. It occurs naturally especially at the ends of utterances when airflow is reduced.

What is modal voice?

Regular, periodic vibration of the vocal folds — the normal, non-creaky mode of phonation

What is co-articulation?

When sounds next to each other influence each other's pronunciation, e.g. "in Montreal" becoming "im Montreal" because the following sound is an M. It is more common in casual/informal speech.

What is the general principle about phonological reduction and register?

Rules that shorten or reduce sounds (flapping, contraction (“wanna”), vowel deletion, co-articulation) tend to correlate with informal registers; formal speech tends to be less reduced

What is the Canadian Shift?

A change in progress in Canadian English where the vowel in words like "bat" (the "a" sound) is moving back, sounding more like "bot"

What is the general finding about women and changes in progress?

The observation that women are ahead of men in some linguistic changes but more conservative than men in others — the two patterns seem contradictory

: What is Labov's generalization to explain the gender paradox?

Women conform more closely than men to sociolinguistic norms that are overtly prescribed (part of prescriptive rules), but conform less than men to norms that are not overtly prescribed

What is the communication index?

A measure of how socially connected a person is — how many people they talk to, how many friends they have locally

How does the communication index relate to linguistic change?

Higher communication index (more social connections) correlates with being further along in the direction of change- only for women

What is perceptual compensation?

When listeners mentally undo co-articulation they expect speakers to have made — e.g. hearing a rounded S before U and mentally correcting it back to a plain S, knowing speakers co-articulate

What did Alan Yu find about the AQ and perceptual compensation?

Lower AQ (fewer autistic traits, more extroverted) correlates with less tendency to do perceptual compensation — meaning more extroverted people are more likely to implement sound change

What is the significance of the AQ/perceptual compensation result for understanding gender and change?

It suggests a possible cognitive/phonetic mechanism underlying the sociolinguistic finding — the same factor (social extroversion/connectedness) that predicts leading change in both studies, and in both cases only significantly for women

What are "stable sociolinguistic (specific linguistic features that correlate with external social factors like class, ethnicity) variables"?

Variants that are not actively changing in the language — women tend to use more conservative (older/standard) forms of these compared to men