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Wardaugh, Ronald (2002) An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. (4th^ ed.) London: Blackwell, 313 - 330 Gender A major topic in sociolinguistics is the connection, if any, between the structures, vocabularies, and ways of using particular languages and the social roles of the men and women who speak these languages. Do the men and women who speak a particular language use it in different ways? If they do, do these differences arise from the structure of that language, which would therefore be one kind of confirmation of the Whorfian hypothesis (chapter 9), or, alternatively, do any differences that exist simply reflect the ways in which the sexes relate to each other in that society, whatever the reason? May it be possible to describe a particular language as 'sexist,' or should we reserve such a description for those who use that language? If the answer to either question is affirmative, what could and should be done? These issues generated a considerable amount of thought and discus-sion in the last decades of the twentieth century and many are still unresolved. They are also very emotional issues for many who have chosen either to write on them or to discuss them, and that they should be so is quite understandable. The literature on these issues is now vast; it has been one of the biggest 'growth' areas within sociolinguistics in recent years. In this chapter I will attempt to see what some of the underlying facts are and to avoid the kinds of rhetoric and dialectic that characterize much of the discussion of 'sexism in language,' a topic which often seems to invite 'large' arguments based on 'small' data. I should note too that in earlier editions of this book I entitled this chapter 'Language and Sex' rather than 'Language and Gender' or just simply 'Gender,' the current title. I said then that I preferred not to use the word gender because it was a technical term in linguistics (see Corbett,
- and many of the issues dealt with in the chapter focused on claims about 'sexism.' I think that statement is still true. However, the current vogue is to use gender rather than sex as the cover word for the various topics discussed in this chapter and I have therefore adopted it here. Sex is to a very large extent biologically determined whereas gender is a social construct (but one heavily grounded in sex) involving the whole gamut of genetic, psychological, social, and cultural differences between males and females. Wodak (1997b, p. 13) says that gender is "not..
. a pool of attributes 'possessed' by a person, but... something a person 'does.'" Elsewhere (1997a, p. 4) she adds that 'what it means to be a woman or to be a man [also] changes from one generation to the next and... varies between [ 313 - 314 ] different racialized, ethnic, and religious groups, as well as for members of different social classes.' In such a view, gender must be learned anew in each generation. Caméron (1998b, pp. 280-1) states that view in a slightly different way: Men and women... are members of cultures in which a large amount of discourse about gender is constantly circulating. They do not only learn, and then mechanically reproduce, ways of speaking 'appropriate' to their own sex; they learn a much broader set of gendered meanings that attach in rather complex ways to different ways of speaking, and they produce their own behavior in the light of these meanings... Performing masculinity or femininity 'appropriately' cannot mean giving exactly the
same performance regardless of the circumstances. It may involve different strategies in mixed and single-sexed company, in private and public settings, in the various social positions (parent, lover, professional, friend) that someone might regularly occupy in the course of everyday life. The following pages will focus on gender and how language is used in 'performing gender.' We will look at some of the evidence that there are gender differences in language use. One purpose will be to evaluate that evidence: just how good is it? However, the main purpose is to try to discover, when indeed there is good evidence, what it is good evidence of. That languages can be sexist? That those who use languages may be sexist? That language-learning is almost inevitably tied to gender-learning? That such learning is almost always skewed in such a way as to favor one gender over the other? That change is not only desirable but possible? It is issues such as these that will be our concern. Differences That there are differences between men and women is hardly a matter of dispute. Females have two X chromosomes whereas males have an X and a Y; this is a key genetic difference and no geneticist regards that difference as unimportant. On average, females have more fat and less muscle than males, are not as strong, and weigh less. They also mature more rapidly and live longer. The female voice usually has different characteristics from the male voice, and often females and males exhibit different ranges of verbal skills. However, we also know that many of the differences may result from different socialization practices (see Philips, Steele, and Tanz, 1987). For example, women may live longer than men because of the different roles they play in society and the different jobs they tend to fill. Differences in voice quality may be accentuated by beliefs about what men and women should sound like when they talk, and any differences in verbal skills may be explained in great part through differences in upbringing. [ 314 - 315 ] (It has often been noted that there is far more reading failure in schools among boys than girls, but it does not follow from this fact that boys are inherently less well equipped to learn to read, for their poor performance in comparison to girls may be sociocultural in origin rather than genetic.) There is also one important caveat concerning all such studies showing differences between groups, one I made earlier (page 156, above) and will repeat here. For many in the two groups under comparison there will be no difference at all: the next person you meet on the street may be male or female, tall or short, long-lived or short-lived, high-voiced or low-voiced, and so on, with not one of these characteristics being predictable from any other. (Given a thousand or more such encounters some tendencies may emerge, but even knowing what these are would not help you with the very next person you meet.) Numerous observers have described women's speech as being different from that of men (see Bacon, 1986, Arliss, 1991, pp. 44-112, and pages 160-205 of this book). I should also observe that there is a bias here: men's speech usually provides the norm against which women's speech is judged. We could just as well ask how men's speech differs from that of women, but investigators have not usually gone about the task of looking at differences in that way. For example, in discussing language change in Philadelphia, Labov (2001, pp. 281-2) deliberately
female lakáw. What was interesting was that this kind of pronunciation appeared to be dying out, because younger women and girls do not use these forms. That older speakers recognized the distinction as gender-based is apparent from the fact that women teach their sons to use the male forms and men narrating stories in which women speak employ female forms in reporting their words. This practice is in direct contrast to the aforementioned situation in Gros Ventre, where there is no such changeover in reporting or quoting. There is also a very interesting example from English of a woman being advised to speak more like a man in order to fill a position previously filled only by men. Margaret Thatcher was told that her voice did not match her position as British Prime Minister: she sounded too 'shrill.' She was advised to lower the pitch of her voice, diminish its range, and speak more slowly, and thereby adopt an authoritative, almost monotonous delivery to make herself heard. She was successful to the extent that her new speaking style became a kind of trademark, one either well- liked by her admirers or detested by her opponents. In the area of morphology and vocabulary, many of the studies have focused on English. In a paper which, although it is largely intuitive, anecdotal, and personal in nature, is nevertheless challenging and interesting, Lakoff (1973), claims that women use color words like mauve, beige, aquamarine, lavender, and magenta but most men do not. She also maintains that adiectives such as adorable, charming, divine, lovely, and sweet are also commonly used by women but only very rarely by men. Women are also said to have their own vocabulary for emphasizing certain effects on them, words and expressions such as so good [ 316 - 317 ] such fun, exquisite, lovely, divine, precious, adorable, darling, and fantastic. Furthermore, the English language makes certain distinctions of a gender-based kind, e.g., actor-actress, waiter-waitress, and master-mistress. Some of these distinctions are reinforced by entrenched patterns of usage and semantic development. For example, master and mistress have developed quite different ranges of use and meaning, so that whereas Joan can be described as Fred's mistress, Fred cannot be described as Joan's master. Other pairs of words which reflect similar differentiation are boy-girl, man-woman, gentleman-lady, bachelor-spinster, and even widower-widow. In the last case, whereas you can say 'She's Fred's widow,' you cannot say 'He's Sally's widower.' Lakoff cites numerous examples and clearly establishes her point that 'equivalent' words referring to men and women do have quite different associations in English. A particularly telling example is the difference between 'He's a professional' and 'She's a professional.' Other investigators have documented the same phenomenon in other languages, for example in French uses of garçon and fille. One of the consequences of such work is that there is now a greater awareness in some parts of the community that subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, distinctions are made in the vocabulary choice used to describe men and women. Consequently, we can understand why there is a frequent insistence that neutral words be used as much as possible, as in describing occupations e.g., chairperson, letter carrier, salesclerk, and actor (as in 'She's an actor'). If language tends to reflect social structure and social structure is changing, so that judgeships, surgical appointments, nursing positions, and primary school teaching assignments are just as likely to be held by women as men (or by men as women), such changes might be expected to follow inevitably. This kind of work does two things: it draws our attention to existing inequities, and it encourages us to make the necessary changes by establishing new categorizations (e.g., Ms), and
suggesting modifications for old terms (e.g., changing policeman to police officer and chairman to chairperson). One particular bit of sexism in languages that has aroused much comment is the gender systems that so many of them have, the he-she-it 'natural' gender system of English or the le-la or der- die-das 'grammatical' gender systems of French and German. The possible connections between gender systems (masculine, feminine, neuter) and gender differences (male, female, neither) are various. See Romaine (1999) for some observations and claims concerning these connections, e.g., her claim (p. 66) that 'ideological factors in the form of cultural beliefs about women... enter into gender assignment in [grammatical] systems that are supposedly purely formal and arbitrary.' In English such connections sometimes create problems for us in finding the right pronoun: compare the natural 'Everybody should hand in their papers in five minutes' to the apparently biased 'No person in his right mind would do that.' Again, he-she distinctions can often be avoided - sometimes clumsily, to be sure - so it probably does not follow that languages with gender distinctions are sexist. It is the people who use languages who are or who are not sexist; Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Turkish do not make the kinds of gender distinctions English makes through its system of pronouns, but it would be difficult to maintain [ 317 - 318 ] that males who speak these languages are less sexist than males who speak English! There certainly are gender differences in word choice in various languages. Japanese women show they are women when they speak, for example, by the use of a sentence-final particle ne or another particle wa. In Japanese, too, a male speaker refers to himself as boku or ore whereas a female uses watasi or atasi. Whereas aman says boku kaeru 'I will go back' in plain or informal speech, a woman says watasi kaeru wa (see Takahara, 1991). Children learn to make these distinctions very early in life. However, Reynolds (1998, p. 306) points out that 'the use of boku.
.. by junior high school girls has recently become quite common in Tokyo. Girls who were interviewed in a TV program explain that they cannot compete with boys in classes, in games or in fights with watasi.... The use of boku and other expressions in the male speech domain by young female speakers has escalated to a larger area and to older groups of speakers.' In polite conversation a female speaker of Thai refers to herself as dichan whereas a man uses phóm. In Thai, too, women emphasize a repeated action through reduplication, i.e., by repeating the verb, whereas men place a descriptive verb, mak, after the verb instead. Different languages do seem to prescribe different forms for use by men and women. To cite another example, according to Sapir (1929a), the Yana language of California contains special forms for use in speech either by or to women. However, very few are like the language of the Dyirbal people of North Queensland, Australia, who have a special language which is gender- differentiated in a rather novel way (Dixon, 1971). The normal everyday language, Guwal, is used by both genders; but, if you are a man and your mother-in-law is present, or if you are a woman and your father-in-law is present, you use Dyalŋuy, a 'mother-in-law' variety. This variety has the same phonology and almost the same grammar as Guwal but its vocabulary is entirely different. However, both genders have access to both varieties. Another Australian aboriginal language, Yanyuwa, spoken by approximately 90 to 150 people, has gender-differentiated dialects. The dialects use the same word stems but there are different class-marking prefixes on nouns, verbs, and pronouns. According to Bradley (1998), men use
are often different politeness requirements made of men and women. Still other gender-linked differences are said to exist. Women and men may have different paralinguistic systems and move and gesture differently. The suggestion has been made that these often require women to appear to be submissive to men. Women are also often named, titled, and addressed differently from men. Women are more likely than men to be addressed by their first names [ 319 - 320 ] when everything else is equal, or, if not by first names, by such terms as lady, miss, or dear, and even baby or babe. Women are said to be subject to a wider range of address terms than men, and men are more familiar with them than with other men. Women are also said not to employ the profanities and obscenities men use, or, if they do, use them in different circumstances or are judged differently for using them. Women are also sometimes required to be silent in situations in which men may speak. Among the Araucanian Indians of Chile, men are encouraged to talk on all occasions, but the ideal wife is silent in the presence of her husband, and at gatherings where men are present she should talk only in a whisper, if she talks at all. Some writers are not impressed with the kinds of findings reported in the preceding paragraphs. These findings come from quantitative, variationist studies of the kind I discussed in chapters 6-
- For example, Cameron (1998a, pp. 945-6) says that these findings "belong to the tradition of empirical sex difference studies that do no more than set out to find statistically significant differences between women's and men's behavior. This research formula has proved as durable as it is dubious (not to say dull)." She adds that this kind of work "deals in arcane sound changes presented through complex statistics." In this view, merely to observe, count, and graph linguistic phenomena is not enough. An investigator needs some kind of theory about such behavior and some ideas to test before beginning an investigation. And, possibly, as we will see, some kind of ideology to suggest the 'right' theory. In setting out a list of what she calls 'sociolinguistic universal tendencies,' Holmes (1998) does offer some testable claims. There are five of these: ● Women and men develop different patterns of language use. ● Women tend to focus on the affective functions of an interaction more often than men do. ● Women tend to use linguistic devices that stress solidarity more often than men do. ● Women tend to interact in ways which will maintain and increase solidarity, while (especially in formal contexts) men tend to interact in ways which will maintain and increase their power and status. ● Women are stylistically more flexible than men. It is through testing claims such as these that we are likely to refine our understanding of those matters that interest us. There are differences in gendered speech, some undoubtedly real but others almost certainly imaginary. Any differences that do exist surely also must interact with other factors, e.g., social class, race, culture, discourse type, group membership, etc. In the next section we will look more closely at some possible explanations for them. We will also try to avoid examining women's speech in relation to men's speech as though the latter provides the norm. (To show just how
'normal' that is, the paragraph on page 319 beginning 'Still other gender-linked.. .' was deliberately written in that way. You might try to recast it using women's language behavior as the norm.) [ 320 - 321 ] (See question document) Possible Explanations When we turn to matters having to do with how men and women use language in a wider sense, that is, in social interaction and to achieve certain ends, we find clues to possible explanations for the differences we encounter. One analysis of how women are presented in a set of cartoons produced some interesting findings (Kramer, 1974). The cartoons were taken from thirteen issues of The New Yorker magazine published between February 17 and May 12, 1973. The analysis showed that, when both genders were represented in the cartoon, men spoke twice as much as women. In the cartoons men and women also spoke on different topics, with men holding forth on such topics as business, politics, legal matters, taxes, and sports, and women on social life, books, food and drink, life's troubles, and lifestyle. Women spoke less forcefully than men, and men swore much more than women. Men were also more blunt and to the point in their speaking. There was also some evidence that the use of words like nice and pretty was gender-linked. Although such cartoons are nor actual records of what happens in speech, they must be based on what people think happens if they are to be effective. They make use of the stereotypes we have about the speech of men and women. Let us look at some better evidence freed from such stereotyping. In conversations involving both men and women many researchers agree that men speak more than women do. One also found that when men talked to men, the content categories of such talk focused on competition and teasing, sports, aggression, and doing things. On the other hand, when women talked to women, the equivalent categories were the self, feelings, affiliation with others, home, and family. When the two genders interacted, men tended to take the initiative in conversation, but there seemed to be a desire to achieve some kind of accommodation so far as topics were concerned: the men spoke less aggressively and competitively and the women reduced their amount of talk about home and family. A thorough review of the literature by James and Drakich (1993) showed inconsistency in the findings when 56 studies of talk either within or between genders were examined. What was important in determining who talked was "the context and the structure of the social interaction within which gender dif-ferences are observed" (p. 281). James and Drakich add (pp. 302-3): women are expected to use and do use talk to a greater extent than men to serve the function of establishing and maintaining personal relationships (this is not surprising, as the responsibility for interpersonal relationships primarily rests with women); for example, as we have observed, women, to a greater extent than men, are expected to talk, and do talk, simply in order to keep the interaction flowing smoothly and to show goodwill toward others, and they are expected to talk, and do talk, about personal feelings and other socioemotional matters relevant to interpersonal relationships to a greater extent than men.... what is particularly important [ 322 - 323 ] in female friendships is the sharing of intimate feelings and confidences through talk, whereas in male friendships the sharing of activities is more important.
When we do observe gender differences in language behavior we are confronted with the task of trying to explain them. One explanation is that languages can be sexist. I will have a little more to say about this idea later. For now, three other claims are of interest. The first claim is that men and women are biologically different and that this difference has serious consequences for gender. Women are somehow predisposed psychologically to be involved with one another and to be mutually supportive and non-competitive. On the other hand, men are innately predisposed to independence and to vertical rather than horizontal relationships. There appears to be little or no evidence for this claim; it seems rather to be a clear case of stereotyping, which offers no more than a facile solution to a difficult problem. The second claim is that social organization is best perceived as some kind of hierarchical set of power relationships. This is a social rather than a psychological fact. It happens that men have the ascendancy in such a system. (Women could but usually do not.) Language behavior reflects the social dominance of men. It is they who try to take control, to specify topics, to interrupt, and so on. They do it with each other and they do it with women, who, feeling powerless, let them get away with it, preferring instead to seek support from other women. Consequently, since women are relatively powerless they opt for more prestigious language forms to protect themselves in dealing with the more powerful. At the same time the use of such forms serves to mark them off from equally powerless males of the same social class. Women may also have weaker social networks than men but they show a greater sensitivity to language forms, especially standard ones. Lakoff (1975) adopts the position that men are dominant and women lack power. Women may have to behave more like men if this unequal relationship is to be changed. Others share Lakoff's view. For example, De Francisco (1997, p. 39) proposes that "power be placed at the centre of [feminist] analysis and that gender, race, ethnicity, social class, age, sexual orientation, and other social categories be examined as political tools of oppression." Crawford (1995) is another who declares that power relations best explain what happens when men and women interact linguistically. Her explicit goal is "to create a feminist social science for all women' (p. 8). Talbot (1998, pp. 133-4) sounds a cautionary note: "A major determinant [of the dominance framework] is that male domin-ance is often treated as though it is pan-contextual. But... all men are not in a position to dominate all women." The third claim, which does not actually deny the second claim, is that men and women are social beings who have learned to act in certain ways. Language behavior is largely learned behavior. Men learn to be men and women learn to be women, linguistically speaking. Society subjects them to different life experiences. [ 324 - 325 ] Maltz and Borker (1982) propose that, in North America at least, men and women come from different sociolinguistic sub-cultures: They have learned to do different things with language, particularly in conversation, and when the two genders try to communicate with each other, the result may be miscommunication. The mhmm a woman uses quite frequently means only "I'm listening," whereas the mhmm a man uses, but much less frequently, tends to mean "I'm agreeing." Consequently, men often believe that "women are always agreeing with them and then conclude that it's impossible to tell what a woman really thinks," whereas "women... get upset with men who never seem to be listening" (p. 202). They conclude that women and men observe different rules in conversing and that in
cross-gender talk the rules often conflict. The genders have different views of what questioning is all about, women viewing questions as part of conversa-tional maintenance and men primarily as requests for information; different conventions for linking; different views of what is or is not "aggressive" linguistic behavior, with women regarding any sign of aggression as personally directed, negative, and disruptive, and men as just one way of organizing a conversa-tion; different views of topic flow and topic shift; and different attitudes toward problem-sharing and advice-giving, with women tending to discuss, share, and seek reassurance, and men tending to look for solutions, give advice, and even lecture to their audiences. (See also Preisler, 1986.) Deborah Tannen (1990, 1993, 1994, 1998) is undoubtedly the best-known proponent of the claim that women and men have been raised to live in different sub-cultures. Consequently, "cross-cultural communication," Tannen's words, can be difficult. In various interesting and entertaining accounts, Tannen has tried to show how girls and boys are brought up differently. Part of the socialization process is learning not only gender-related activities and attitudes but gender-related language behavior. We saw earlier in Fischer's study (pages 160-2, above) how very young children show that they have learned to act "like boys and girls." Gender differences in language become established early and are then used to support the kinds of social behavior males and females exhibit. It is mainly when males and females interact that the behavior each uses separately becomes noticeable. As Holmes (1992, p. 330) says, The differences between women and men in ways of interacting may be the result of different socialisation and acculturation patterns. If we learn the ways of talking mainly in single sex peer groups, then the patterns we learn are likely to be sex-specific. And the kind of miscommunication which undoubtedly occurs between women and men will be attributable to the different expectations each sex has of the function of the interaction, and the ways it is appropriately conducted. One consequence of such differences is that women's speech has often been devalued by men, for, as Tannen rightly observes, her difference approach in no way denies the existence of male dominance (1993, p. 9). Tannen's solution is an interesting one, although one not without its critics. She believes that men and women should try to understand why they speak as they do and try to [ 325 - 326 ] adapt to each other's styles. However, the self-help nature of her 1990 book You Just Don't Understand might seem to thrust much of such work onto the shoulders (or tongues?) of women rather than men. Although by no means as big a best-seller as John Gray's Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (1992), Tannen's book was widely acclaimed, so its message obviously spoke to many people, women in particular. As Talbot (1998) observes of the book, with its appearance of objectivity and neutrality and its stress on differences and equality, Tannen's approach provides a "comfortable explanation" (p. 139) for some troublesome issues. A variation of the third claim is found in the concept of "community of practice." According to Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1998), gender issues are essentially complex and not easy to separate from other issues. They deplore (p. 485) the fact that too often,
linguistic we can look at a study of norms and norm-breaking in Malagasy (Keenan, 1974). Among the Malagasy, men do not put others into situations in which they may lose face. They use language subtly, try to maintain good communication in their relationships, and avoid confrontations. They are discreet, they prefer indirectness as an express ion of respect, and they are con-sidered to be able speechmakers: men's "requests are typically delayed and inex-plicit, accusations imprecise, and criticisms subtle" (p. 141). We should note that many of these characteristics of men's speech might be associated with women's speech in another society. Therefore, how do women speak in Malagasy? Women do not operate with the same set of rules. They openly and directly express anger toward others. They also criticize and confront, and men use them to do this. They can be direct and straightforward, and because they can be so, they perform tasks, such as interacting with strangers, buying and selling when these require negotiating a price, and reprimanding children, which men prefer not to perform. In this society, then, it is the men who are indirect and the women (and children) who are direct. But the most interesting fact is that it is indirectness of speech which is prized in Malagasy society and regarded as 'traditional' and it is the men who employ it. On the other hand, "direct speech... is associated with a loss of tradition, with contemporary mores" and it is found among women and children (p. 142). Women are definitely inferior to men in this society too, for "where subtlety and delicacy [which are prized characteristics] are required in social situations, men are recruited," but "where directness and explicitness [necessary at times but not prized characteristics] are desired in social situations, women are recruited" (p. 143). Consequently, once more we can see how the speech of the two sexes reflects their relationship within the total society. The kinds of evidence we have looked at strongly suggests that men and women differ in the kinds of language they use because men and women often [ 327 - 328 ] fill distinctly different roles in society. We may expect that the more distinct the roles, the greater the differences, and there seems to be some evidence to support such a claim, for the greatest differences appear to exist in societies in which the roles of men and women are most clearly differentiated. Since boys are brought up to behave like men in those societies and girls to behave like women, the differences are also perpetuated. In societies that are less rigidly stratified and in which men's and women's roles are less clearly differentiated, we may expect to find a reflection of this situation in the language that is used and also, if change in society is occurring, change in the language too. This is, indeed, what we do find, as we saw in chapters 8 and 9: men and women, and even boys and girls, exhibit certain differences in language use in such cities as New York, Norwich, Reading, and Belfast. Most of those differences can be explained by the different positions men and women fill in society. Men have more power and may be more assertive women tend to be kept "in their place" but aspire quite often to a different and "better" place. Women therefore appear to be more conscious of uses of language which they associate with their "betters" in society, that is, those they regard as being socially superior. They therefore direct their speech toward the models these provide, even to the extent in some cases of hypercorrection, as in the example from New York City (page 165, above). Women, therefore, tend to be in the vanguard of change toward the norms of the upper classes, and lower middle-class women are at the very front.
One consequence is that sometimes we view the speech of certain women as being hypercorrect. That too is a normative-laden concept. It assumes a correct male norm and characterizes the female norm as deviant. Once again difference rather than deviance might be a better characterization, with the difference arising from the different experiences that females and males have of the world. Men have power, even lower-class men. They are less influenced linguistically by others and, in the case of the lower working class, may seek solidarity through the "toughness" that nonstandard varieties of the language seem to indicate. If they lead in any kind of change, such change may well be away from the norm (page 199, above). Again, as I indicated earlier (pages 202 - 3, above), women may not find appropriate the kinds of solidarity that men seek through the use of a particular language or certain kinds of language. The peasant women of Oberwart in Austria seek not Hungarian-speaking peasant husbands, but German-speaking worker husbands and, in doing so, lead the traditionally bilingual peasant population away from Hungarian- German bilingualism toward German monolingualism. Women are not without solidarity; it is just a different kind of solidarity from that of men and just as normal. All deliberate attempts to change or modify languages to free them of per-ceived sexism or make them gender-neutral are a form of language planning. Sometimes the goal appears to be to force language to catch up to social change, and at other times it seems designed to bring about social change through mandating language change. Whatever it is, it requires us to accept a very Whorfian view of the interrelationship of language and culture and is subject to all the difficulties of interpretation and implementation that we saw in chap-ter 9. Here is Pauwels' (1998, p. 228) statement of a similar position: [ 328 - 329 ] The aims of many feminist LP (language planning) efforts are to expose the inequalities in the linguistic portrayal of the sexes which reflect and contribute to the unequal positions of women and men in society and to take action to rectify this linguistic imbalance. Language action... is social action, and to bring about linguistic change is to effect social change. Some feminists want to go further than "cleaning up" the language and even deny any possibility of "neutrality." Their expressed mission is to "reclaim" language for themselves (see especially Lakoff, 1990, Penelope, 1990, Sellers, 1991, and Spender, 1985). Spender adopts a Whorfian view of language (see pages 219--26, above), declaring (p. 3) that: "Language helps form the limits of our reality. It is our means of ordering and manipulating the world. It is through language that we become members of a human community, that the world becomes comprehensible and meaningful, that we bring into existence the world in which we live." However, she goes much further than Whorf, asserting (p. 12) that "the English language has been literally man-made and... is still primarily under male control'"and that males, as the dominant group, have produced language, thought, and reality. Penelope argues that women should be aware of "the lies of the fathers' tongues' and of the 'Patriarchal Universe of Discourse.'" Her view is that women should in a sense reinvent language for their own purposes, and many feminists have indeed tried to develop their own linguistic conventions, e.g., non- competitive, non-interruptive speech, in order to "liberate" women. However, other feminists such as Cameron (1992) do not hold such strong views. They would require intervention into
