Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

8.4 Women’s speech
Unit 8 Language and gender
Section 2 Language variation

Much early feminist research in sociolinguistics was concerned with investigating whether women speak differently from men. Robin Lakoff (1975), for example, claimed that women use different words from men (e.g. ’pretty’ and ’cute’) and different sentence structures (e.g. tag questions: ’This is hard to understand, isn’t it?’). She characterizes women’s language as being prone to hesitation, and as being repetitive and disjointed. This sociolinguistic work has now been questioned, since it is clear that women are not a unified grouping: there are many hierarchies within the grouping ’women’, such as differences of class, race, economic power, education and so on, with the consequence that groups of women speakers differ from other female speakers, and also each woman varies the way she talks depending on the context (Bergvall et al., 1996; Holmes and Meyerhoff, 2003). Within the business environment, women managers may choose to take on more masculine, assertive styles of speech. The speech patterns of the former UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, or the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, bear greater similarities to the speech of males in similar positions of power than they do, say, to workingclass women’s speech. It is for this reason that it is now extremely difficult to assert that women speak in a different way from men.

However, there are certain elements of speech that we can classify as stereotypically ’feminine’: that is, those elements that seem to signify lack of confidence or assertiveness. These may be drawn on by both women and men in certain situations. O’Barr and Atkins (1982) have shown that within a courtroom setting both men and women from low-income groups are likely to adopt what they term ’powerless speech’, that is, speech that bears a strong resemblance to Lakoff’s definition of women’s speech: hesitant, repetitive, disjointed and so on. Thus it is probable that, when discussing ’women’s speech’, theorists have been describing ’powerless speech’ (see also Unit 9, Language and society). However, this assumes that assertive language is necessarily better than non-assertive language. This seemingly powerless language may be

ineffective in a courtroom setting (and that itself is debatable) but appropriate in a more intimate situation, such as when friends engage in ’troubles talk’.