Language and gender

Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between language and gender is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, cultural studies, feminist media studies, feminist psychology, gender studies, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistics, mediated stylistics, sociolinguistics and media studies. In methodological terms, there is no single approach that could be said to 'hold the field'. Discursive, poststructural, ethnomethodological, ethnographic, phenomenological, positivist and experimental approaches can all be seen in action during the study of language and gender, producing and reproducing what Susan Speer has described as 'different, and often competing, theoretical and political assumptions about the way discourse, ideology and gender identity should be conceived and understood'. As a result, research in this area can perhaps most usefully divided into three main areas of study: first, there is a broad and sustained interest in the varieties of speech associated with a particular gender; second, there is a related interested in the social norms and conventions that (re)produce gendered language use (a variety of speech (or sociolect) associated with a particular gender is sometimes called a genderlect); and third, there are studies that focus on the contextually specific and locally situated ways in which gender is constructed and operationalized. The study of gender and language in sociolinguistics and gender studies is often said to have begun with Robin Lakoff's 1975 book, Language and Woman's Place, as well as some earlier studies by Lakoff. The study of language and gender has developed greatly since the 1970s. Prominent scholars include Deborah Tannen, Penelope Eckert, Janet Holmes, Mary Bucholtz, Kira Hall, Deborah Cameron, and others. The 1995 edited volume Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self is often referred to as a central text on language and gender.

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