ozarque: Linguistics; gender and language; genderlects; minor clarification...

ozarque (

ozarque) wrote,
@ 2008-01-06 07:40:00

Linguistics; gender and language; genderlects; minor clarification...
In a comment responding to yesterday's post on gender and language,

foomf paid me the compliment of mentioning a form of language behavior that appears in my writing -- the language behavior of the Ozark Grannys in my science fiction. I appreciate the compliment, and think that it might be helpful if I provided a minor clarification about it here. Like this:

The way my Ozark Grannys communicate is neither a dialect nor a "genderlect," it's a register. That is, it's a set of language behaviors tightly linked to a particular life-role.

When a police officer testifying in a courtroom says "The perpetrator was observed roughly ten yards from the crime scene at 6:46 p.m. on December 14th and was subsequently captured by surveillance cameras in the act of forcibly entering the building...", that officer is using a register. It's not the way the officer ordinarily communicates, it's a language behavior that's part of the skill set for his or her job.

The set of language behaviors characteristic of my Ozark Grannys is like that; it's part of the skill set used in the performance of the Granny life-role. And any male in that fictional culture older than about the age of seven, as a result of having been exposed to that register since infancy, could communicate using that register if he chose to do so.

I know it's a hassle to go to the links I posted yesterday and read through those items. It might be helpful, therefore, for me to quote just one paragraph from the second of those links, which says:

"I don't disagree with those of you who are saying that you do observe men and women talking differently. That's not a matter of controversy. I'm saying... that those differences are not due to gender. Suppose we're talking about just that one item of bodyparl that we all appear to agree is for sure an S-item [Subordinate-item]: batting the eyelashes. I am saying that when you observe someone batting his or her eyelashes, it's not happening because that person is a man or a woman, it's happening because that person has chosen -- for whatever reason -- to signal some degree of subordination."

[As I said before, I make that claim only for American English, and am not suggesting that it's valid for other Englishes and other languages.]

(Post a new comment)

	roseross 2008-01-06 02:03 pm UTC (link)
	That makes sense. I've been a jill-of-all-trades, and I quickly found that you've mastered a new job when you master the specialized terminology that comes with it. (Reply to this)

archangelbeth
2008-01-06 02:05 pm UTC (link)

It's early in my morning, I'm fighting off a cold, my thyroid pill hasn't cut in, and there's a distraction plonked on my lap...

Would this suggest that instead of "genderlect," male/female ways of speaking are, well, long-term registers for the life-role of being male/female?

I'd expand on this more, but I just woke up and my brain is fuzzy. I hope someone more clear-headed can expand on it with what I want to say/ask. O:>

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Response to archangelbeth...

ozarque
2008-01-06 02:45 pm UTC (link)

"Would this suggest that instead of 'genderlect,' male/female ways of speaking are, well, long-term registers for the life-role of being male/female?"

That's a good question, and hard to answer without falling into the Linguist Register... Let's see if I can manage to say something sensible.

Every individual speaks or signs an "idiolect" of at least one native language -- a form of that language which is idiosyncratic to that person. The idiolect is composed of all the dialects and registers of the native language in which the person is fluent. Any individual male or female is going to speak a variety of the language that includes at least one dialect, plus a number of different registers. To say that there's a "Male Register" or "Female Register" of the language would over-generalize.

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	Re: Response to archangelbeth... archangelbeth 2008-01-06 06:45 pm UTC (link)
	Hmmm. I suspect that I'm missing some of the nuances. (My failing, not yours.) I can grok the last bit, though -- that it'd be an over-generalization... Over-simplification, too? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: Response to archangelbeth... continued... ozarque 2008-01-07 02:06 pm UTC (link)
	Yes. Over-simplification too. (Reply to this)(Parent)

jaylake
2008-01-06 02:37 pm UTC (link)

You taught me what a speech register was, since as I recall, the term is used explicitly in the Ozark books with sufficient context for me to understand it as a (then) teen-aged reader. That concept has been very useful in my life in practical terms, especially in my day job as a technical marketer, where I routinely move back and forth in written and oral communications between divergent audiences, including engineers, senior managers, corporate customers and end users. Thank you.

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	Response to jaylake... ozarque 2008-01-07 02:07 pm UTC (link)
	And thank you in return, for your comment and for the encouraging words. (Reply to this)(Parent)

fibermom
2008-01-06 03:19 pm UTC (link)

I don't disagree with you in the least, but one example of male/female language difference came to my mind when you first brought this up, and I haven't been able to see how it would fit in with the dominance hypothesis. That is color words. Most men do not, I think, feel free to use a large variety of color words in their speech. Presumably this is not true of those who need to make those distinctions in their work, but even then I bet they are more likely to go with Pantone numbers than to say "cerise" or "ecru." Why would having control of that vocabulary seem subordinate?

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Response to fibermom...

ozarque
2008-01-07 02:12 pm UTC (link)

I don't have a research study to point you to as evidence, but my opinion is that the claim that men don't use words like "cerise" or "ecru" is a myth. Very "masculine" male artists and designers and fashion designers and interior designers use those words just as freely as their female counterparts do. It's like saying that having control of the vocabulary of trout-fishing and fly-tying "seems dominant"; a woman who enjoys those activities uses the same vocabulary as her male counterparts. Specialized vocabularies tend to be red herrings in this context.

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Re: Response to fibermom...

maggieno
2008-01-07 11:38 pm UTC (link)

As someone who worked in a graphics group for nearly 30 years, I'll stand (sit?) as reference for the habits of the males I knew in that field. My artists, male and female, used/argued over specific color words and not Pantone numbers (unless they were talking specs with design support or printers).

I will say that the artistic males in my social group tend not to use colors much in conversation unless the color is integral to the subject being discussed, whereas the females, artistic or not, are more inclined to include descriptive colors. As with anything, there are exceptions; and, male or female, those who are disinclined to notice color in the first place are quick to drop any such reference that is challenged by someone who sees the color differently because said color identification is just not important enough to spend time talking about it.

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almeda
2008-01-09 08:20 pm UTC (link)

I think that's more cultural than linguistic (if those things can be separated) -- once a male American is taught reasons why distinguishing gradations of color is important, they acquire the ability to distinguish them and talk about them.

Auto-body colors, for example, my husband is quite fluent in the divisions between (like how Honda's 'Naples Gold' differs from Toyota's 'Metallic Beige' -- the former is our car, the latter my in-laws' Prius); if I ask him to help me with clothing colors he falls back on "It's kind of a pinky orange, not as orange as your other one."

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	fibermom 2008-01-09 08:25 pm UTC (link)
	I love that example. It reminds me that I have heard my dad describe a vehicle as "candy apple red," though most of the men I know would rather poke themselves in the eye than describe a piece of clothing as "apricot." (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

almeda
2008-01-09 08:33 pm UTC (link)

I bet similarly-acculturated men of that age group could also distinguish fine differences between 'candy-apple red,' 'fire-engine red,' 'Camaro red,' and so on, and even if pressed could explain how any given one of those shades differs from their wife's favorite dark-red shade of lipstick.

It's like the does-language-change-your-brain hypothesis: do guys not care about fine color distinctionsbecause they're not raised talking about beige/eggshell/cheesecake/custard distinctions, or do they not care about it because they're taught it's not sufficiently manly? :->

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fibermom
2008-01-09 08:39 pm UTC (link)

I think they're embarrassed to use those words. Apart from the excellent counter-examples above, I think that most American men would feel the same way about saying "cerise" as they would about wearing ruffles: it's girly. I don't think that they cannot distinguish between cerise and fuschia, or even that they don't know the words as part of their passive vocabulary. They just wouldn't want to say those words.
And it may be that such words, once they have been established as part of women's sphere, become embarrassing to use just as skills like cooking and knitting, at times and in places where they are done by women rather than men, become embarrassing for men to do. And maybe that is about subordination, after all.

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kibbles
2008-01-06 03:46 pm UTC (link)

Oh wow. I do that. That register thing. Wow. And not just work related either.

There is a certain odd grammar I have to use when speaking with my non verbal child. I've used it with other kids with similar language issues, and I hear their therapists, teachers, and parents use similar ways of speaking.

Then when talking to people causally, especially from back home, Brooklyn, I speak a certain way. Anything else would sound fake, snotty, funny. Even if having the most complex and intellectual discussions I'd still speak differently. Same with when I want someone to feel at ease, I slip into that. It's not 'just' the Brooklyn accent, it's the way I speak.

And then when I need to be taken seriously, in a work environment, at school, an interview, when dealing with people who need to see me as an intelligent and serious woman, I speak differently as well. Yet when I worked and needed something from certain people, people at the bottom of the corporate food chain, as it were, and wanted them to find me likable, I'd slip into the language of the paragraph above, if I wanted them to see me as a peer and not a boss of some sort. It worked well, and maybe it sounds manipulative but I just wanted them to be comfortable with me and honestly it's just natural.

Edited at 2008-01-06 03:49 pm UTC

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writerwench
2008-01-06 04:24 pm UTC (link)

I do the same - deliberately employ a specific register according to my situation. I've had to learn a number of work registers in my life, and can still use them with relative ease - legalese, publisher's cant, academic parlance, etc. - and the dominant/subordinate variants of each.
It is to me a basic tool in my skill-set as a professional temporary worker, that I can fit into a distinct linguistic situation quickly and without giving offence.

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	kibbles 2008-01-06 07:18 pm UTC (link)
	I'm in nursing school now, I wonder how talking to doctors and other nurses etc. will change from talking to patients? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

writerwench
2008-01-06 10:59 pm UTC (link)

Apart from the inclusion or exclusion of medical terminology, I would hope that you'd resist the temptation to use that brightly professional, slightly nannyish tone that many nurses adopt when carrying out patient care, as a reaction to the situation of physical contact and carrying out processes that are very much not normal social interaction, but somehow an appropriate tone must be used that conveys, 'I know I'm doing things to you that are not within your normal sphere of touch acceptability, but it's necessary for your care, so I'm going to be very bright and brisk and slightly nannyish so you can relax into small-child-mode and allow this touch.'

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	writerwench 2008-01-06 10:59 pm UTC (link)
	Although having followed that thought to its conclusion, what is the alternative? Professional interaction with patients must be a minefield of wanting to be cheerful, slightly impersonal, but not patronising. (Reply to this)(Parent)

kibbles
2008-01-06 11:30 pm UTC (link)

Looking at the textbooks (that I peeked at when waiting to talk to my advisor), they do cover how to speak to people, and a lot of it has to do with making people feel in control, empowered. I can't think of examples off the top of my head though. It did seem like they made a big deal out of it. So I wonder how much that nannyish thing is due to their training (or where they got trained or whatever).

(Reply to this)(Parent)

gramina
2008-01-06 10:52 pm UTC (link)

This is interesting to me because, while I think of myself as using essentially the same tone (not sure if it's a register or not) to speak to a work peer, a work subordinate-not-in-my-line-of-command, a superior, or a superior-not-in-my-line-of-command (I have no subordinates in my line of command), it occurs to me that there are... hm. Topics? Items of content? that get filtered in any of those circumstances. That is, I might for instance tease a peer about a new haircut, I would hesitate to do the same to a superior or subordinate, because the power-differential makes that feel risky.

I think I tend to stick with my native way-of-speaking, and flex it for the audience more in terms of content or vocabulary than style; the exception being if I'm angry or afraid.

(Oddly, if I'm angry but not afraid (or very tired) I will go very, very southern in my speech patterns. If I'm angry and afraid, though, I will go either very High Church Episcopalian (as I think of it) in my speech patterns, or very very More Academic Than Thou. Why use a $5 word when a $25 word will work??? Having noticed that I do that, I feel sort of like a puffer-fish: "I know bigger words than you! You can't hurt me!" /eyeroll/)

But if I'm not feeling angry or threatened, I *think* my *manner* of speech is pretty consistent across types/classes. Now I'm going to have to go pay attention and see if that's true!

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	Response to kibbles... ozarque 2008-01-07 02:14 pm UTC (link)
	It doesn't sound manipulative, it sounds practical and efficient; it sounds like normal language behavior. All else being equal, the more registers people are fluent in, the more successful they're likely to be. (Reply to this)(Parent)

(Anonymous)
2008-01-06 04:59 pm UTC (link)

(Michael Farris)

"The way my Ozark Grannys communicate is neither a dialect nor a "genderlect," it's a register. That is, it's a set of language behaviors tightly linked to a particular life-role. ... And any male in that fictional culture older than about the age of seven, as a result of having been exposed to that register since infancy, could communicate using that register if he chose to do so."

IIRC in the Ozark universe only men could achieve the highest rank of magicianhood though (very rarely) a woman could become a regular magician. But could a man who so intended become a Granny? (And if so would he be called a Granny or something else?)

If only women were eligible to be Grannys then I would assume that the way they speak is a gender-based register irrespective of mens' ability to speak the same way.

IME even in languages with overt markers of the speaker's gender (such as Japanese and Thai) both genders can use each other's forms. With Thai (which I'm more familiar with) woman and men can easily produce forms of the other gender for whatever reason (such as to render a direct quote by a person of the other gender more vividly or to produce forms for learners to emulate).

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	Response to Michael Farris... ozarque 2008-01-07 02:18 pm UTC (link)
	I've never written any sf set on Planet Ozark that had males "cross-dressing" -- forgive me if I have my terminology wrong -- and trying to pass themselves off as Grannys, for whatever reason. But I know no reason why that couldn't be done. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

Re: Response to Michael Farris...
(Anonymous)
2008-01-07 09:13 pm UTC (link)

(Michael Farris)

That's not quite what I meant. I meant that would it be possible on Planet Ozark for a man to do the work of a Granny? This would include doing roughly the same sort of magic, naming children, being privy to the same information on how the planet runs, keeping up the same kind of running commentary on others' failings in the granny speech register etc). I wouldn't assume that cross-dressing would be part of that anymore than the rare female magicians were cross-dressers (unless they were, which was a possibility I hadn't entertained before and which opens up new possibilities ...)

If not, I'd would think that the granny's register is (in addition to whatever else it is) a gender-based register as the life role it's associated with is only available to one gender (and males being able to mimic the register would be irrelevant).

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Re: Response to Michael Farris... continued...

ozarque
2008-01-08 05:04 pm UTC (link)

Keeping in mind that what we're talking about here is an entirely fictional culture...

I perceive no reason at all why a man couldn't "do the work of a Granny" and fill that role. It would be far harder for a man than for a woman, because a man would be constantly running into resistance from those he was trying to granny at and granny for. He wouldn't be able to count on the almost automatic respect -- tempered with annoyance, to be sure, but respect all the same -- that a female Granny could count on. He'd be challenging a stereotype, and the culture would fight back. Just to get grudging acceptance and recognition as a Granny, he'd have to do his grannying twice as well as a woman would. But it's a standard trope .... no different from the young girl who is determined to be a troubador or a knight or a dragonrider or, for that matter, a President of the United States. It would make an interesting novel.

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dagoski
2008-01-06 06:23 pm UTC (link)

Register! That's the word I was looking for when you first brought this up. As I'm not a linguist(I only play one at work), I stumble on these definitions. This is partially because Urdu and Hindi are classified as registers of Hindustani due to roles they had in centuries past. The roles have vanished, but the classification remains and I tend to think of register as meaning the same thing as regional dialect. That's not the case of course.

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Response to dagoski...

ozarque
2008-01-07 02:37 pm UTC (link)

The linguistic history of Urdu/Hindi/Hindustani is far outside my area of expertise; I may well be wrong in what I am about to say.

I did a quick Google search for "Urdu and Hindi are classified as registers of Hindustani," and if I'm understanding the items I read correctly, the term "register" in this context is being used in much the way that "Standard English" would be referred to as a register in traditional language teaching. That is, it's being used to refer to a manner of speaking that's considered to distinguish "educated" speakers from "uneducated" ones in a wide variety of life-roles. In American English the idea that there is a "Standard English" register is valid only for written language (and that's using the term "valid" loosely, IMO); my guess from the materials I read -- and it's only a guess -- is that that would be true in the Urdu/Hindi/Hindustani context as well.

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(Anonymous)
2008-01-07 09:24 pm UTC (link)

(Michael Farris)

I think it would be more accurate to say that Hindi and Urdu are two literary languages that share a register, sometimes known as Hindustani. That is when talking about daily life business (everyday home language) there is very little difference between the two.

In more official registers, such as those of written prose, news broadcasts, political debate, scientific or theological dialogue they diverge into mutual unintelligibility in that the vocabulary need for those fields was/is developed very differently.

Or you could say that a single spoken language (whatever you want to call it) was developed into two separate literary languages.

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dagoski
2008-01-07 09:38 pm UTC (link)

That's what I remember from the reading I did now that you've reminded me. I do a lot of descriptive cataloging in a field I have no formal training in so I tend get foggy on the research I've done for each.

What's the difference between a register and gloss? Tamil has a digloss and the reading I've done seems to tell me that the two versions are almost entirely distinct versions of the language. Once again, this is something I had to catalog and the state of Tamil right now seems to be in flux as the various dialects settle out into a standard spoken form in an era of widespread broadcast media. Needless to say I'm still a little bit confused.

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(Anonymous)
2008-01-07 09:54 pm UTC (link)

(Michael Farris)

The Tamil language situation is marked by extreme diglossia (other examples include Arabic everywhere it's spoken and German in Switzerland)
Diglossia means there are two variants of the language, traditionally termed L (low) and H (high).

L = everyday spoken language, normally not written (though approximations may appear in comics, political cartoons, some kinds of popular literature), additionally there may be a number of very different low forms.

H = formal spoken language (used in broadcasting, political speeches, academia etc) usually a spoken version of the written language that people choose not to use in everyday life. In some diglossic situations the H form may also have some use as a lingua franca between speakers of different L forms.

According to one article (can't remember where) a kind of 'standard' spoken L-Tamil is slowly coming into existence in urban centers where speakers of different L varieties come together (and don't necessarily want to or can't use the H form). A good approximation is supposed to be the way that the heroes and heroines of Tamil movies speak. This apparently has no effect on the H form which Tamil speakers want to keep around for its own sake.

'gloss' is a separate term, often used in linguistics. Here a gloss is an explanation (rather than translation) of a word in a language. So that the gloss of the Thai polite particle 'khrab' would be "polite sentence particle; male speaker"

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	Response to Michael Farris... ozarque 2008-01-08 05:05 pm UTC (link)
	Thank you for posting this. (Reply to this)(Parent)

foomf
2008-01-06 07:37 pm UTC (link)

Thank you for the clear disambiguation! I didn't know that term.

I wonder, though, with the comment from

dagoski that talks about Urdu and Hindi starting as registers of Hindustani, whether a register is part of a continuum between slang, idiom, dialect, and language. Is there a taxonomy that shows "register" somewhere along the classifications, like "species" vs. "order"?

Does the change over time mean that a register can turn into a dialect? Or are they different in structural and functional ways?

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Response to foomf...

ozarque
2008-01-07 02:45 pm UTC (link)

You're most welcome; thank you again for the comment.

It would be impossible, IMO, to contruct a continuum that would have "slang, idiom, dialect, register, language" as its stages; they're not comparable units. And it would be very unlikely that a register would turn into a dialect. For that to happen, there'd have to be severe geographic isolation of the speakers of that register over a very long period of time; I think that -- barring apocalyptic events -- the existence of the Internet now makes that impossible.

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	ethesis 2008-01-06 11:43 pm UTC (link)
	BTW, http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2008/01/05/interview-with-gary-taubes-directory/ for some interesting interviews. (Reply to this)

Off Topic, but -- ? (naturally-arising nongendered 3rd person pronoun in English?)

gramina
2008-01-08 01:15 am UTC (link)

I'm wondering if you've seen anything about these articles, or have any thoughts? It strikes me as really interesting, but as I say in my own LJ, I am so far from being a linguist I can barely see linguistics on the far horizon -- !

Abstract for an article from American Speech; I can only access the abstract, but you may have access to more information.

However, there's also this article from BigNewsDay with more details, though since it seems to be written for a lay audience, I don't know how accurate it is.

Basically, some (limited?) research suggests that middle- and high-school students in the Baltimore area are using "yo" not (just) as an interjection ("Yo!") but as a pronoun (primarily as a subject, but apparently also as an object at times). It seems interesting for all sorts of reasons, but I don't have either enough data or enough of a knowledge-base if I *did* have the data to make any kind of judgment.

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Re: Off Topic, but -- ? (naturally-arising nongendered 3rd person pronoun in English?)

ozarque
2008-01-08 01:30 pm UTC (link)

I've been following this "yo" phenomenon, which seems to be restricted to the Baltimore, Maryland area. Language Log has a thorough article about it, with links to various other stories, and with a number of clear examples, at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005298.html#more .

There have been many attempts to establish a gender-neutral third person pronoun in English, none of them successful. But this is, so far as I know, the first time the word chosen has been one that already has two other distinct meanings. It's very hard to add a new form to a closed word-class like the pronouns of a language, and the choice of one that would then have three possible meanings would, it seems to me, tend to stack the odds against it.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: Off Topic, but -- ? (naturally-arising nongendered 3rd person pronoun in English?) (Anonymous) 2008-01-08 02:29 pm UTC (link)
	(Michael Farris) FYI only with the normal caveats: A commenter in this thread: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002991.php Claims to have worked as a teacher in Kansas City KS and to have heard it there as well. He claims that while it was used almost exclusively by boys (mostly African American), the referent could be male or female. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: Off Topic, but -- ? (naturally-arising nongendered 3rd person pronoun in English?) ozarque 2008-01-08 05:07 pm UTC (link)
	Response to Michael Farris.... Interesting. It would so.... I don't know what adjective to use here, maybe "enchanting" .... if "yo" actually made it into the pronoun set and succeeded as a gender-neutral third person pronoun. But so odd. Thanks for posting the link. (Reply to this)(Parent)

Re: Off Topic, but -- ? (naturally-arising nongendered 3rd person pronoun in English?)

almeda
2008-01-09 08:26 pm UTC (link)

I heard a linguist interviewed on NPR assert (as the thesis of a book she'd just written or some such; this was over a year ago) that in modern urban American English, a chief driver of innovation, change, and new forms that gradually become widely-accepted is middle-school-aged girls.

Apparently their dialects are highly regionalized and fast-changing, perhaps as a way of quickly distinguishing (and creating) in-groups and out-groups by making specific vowel sounds and intonations 'right' or 'wrong' for their peer-groups.

I've never been able to find more info on this assertion, though I find it fascinating.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

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