How Genders Use Language Differently

surferfelix

For the past few weeks or so, I have been looking at the way in which we communicate with one another. Our language is a medium that defines our thinking, so knowing what differences might lie within the communication styles of men and women might help us understand one another a bit better.

How Genders Use Language Differently

Deborah Tannen is a linguistics professor at Georgetown university, and the publisher of 'You Just Don't Understand", a book that hopes to explain why men and women often talk past one another. One thing she noticed, was that when young girls were interpersonally conversing with one another, they can have serious conversations about people they knew. But when boys were asked to have an interpersonal conversation about 'something serious' they jumped from topic to topic and ended up talking about games or competition.

Personally, I don't agree with all of Tannens work and especially not her political beliefs, but I found this observation quite useful. Especially because there is not a lot of evidence to conclude that this changes once these boys and girls get older. She claims that women seek 'human connection' in conversation, whilst men seek 'status', and in the more objective studies there is some evidence to back that up.

How Genders Use Language Differently

You can find several other studies that indicate that girls and boys develop differently emotionally after age 7-8. In boys, the emotional lexical cortex development significantly slows down, whilst in girls it continues to develop during puberty. This means that asking a girl 'how she feels' might lead to a more effective answer as to asking a guy that same question. Women are just a bit more in touch with their emotional selves.

Language corpora also seem to back this up. Not only do women talk much more in general, but they also use words associated with 'family' and 'kids' much more frequently than men do (and they also laugh more). Tannen's 'status' claim does somewhat fall short here. After quickly browsing through several language corpora, I didn't find any support for her claim that men talk a lot more about 'status'. Perhaps this is because sole words aren't indicative of status speech, its the context surrounding these words that matters. I choose to believe this because I know how significant status is for men. What is unclear though, is to what extent that is reflected in our language.

I think Carol Gilligan, a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, explains male language a bit better. She believes men seek autonomy in terms of 'justice'. Ethical goals that men care for like individual rights, fair play, a square deal etc, can be pursued without having intimate connections to other people. The work of her colleague, Lawrence Kohlberg, showed that women were rated as less morally mature regarding these topics. Women instead based their ethical decisions on terms of compassion, loyalty and a sense of responsibility.

I hope I could elicit some of the differences in this MyTake. I'm looking forward to the comments 😁

How Genders Use Language Differently
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