GENDER DIFFERENCES IN LANGUAGE USE: DO MEN AND WOMEN USE LANGUAGE DIFFERENTLY?

GENDER DIFFERENCES IN LANGUAGE USE: DO MEN AND WOMEN USE LANGUAGE DIFFERENTLY?

SOFOVIC, Dina

Gender exerts a powerful influence on all facets of human communication and raises many profound social issues. General usage of the term gender began in the late 1960s and 1970s, increasingly appearing in the professional literature of the social sciences. The term helps in distinguishing those aspects of life that were more easily attributed or understood to be of social rather than biological origin. When we encounter people from other societies or cultures, we may fail to understand them for many reasons, including differences in language, values, gestures, emotional expression, norms, rituals, rules, expectations, family background and life experiences. Differences in the ways that man and women use language have long been of interest in the study of discourse. For men and women, communication can be a very long drive, using different roads, often to get to the same place. Much of language is ambiguous and depends on context for its interpretation, a factor far more important than gender. The idea that men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate is a myth in the everyday sense. But it is also a myth in the sense of being a story people tell in order to explain who they are, where they come from, and why they live as they do. Whether they are true or not in any historical or scientific sense such stories have consequences in the real world. They shape our beliefs and influence our actions. The word woman does not share equal status with man; terms referring to a woman have undergone pejoration. If we examine pairs of gender-marked terms such as lord/lady, baronet/dame, Sir/Madam, master/mistress, king/queen, we can see how the female terms may start out on an equal footing, but they become devalued over time. Men and women language differ in many ways. We learn those rules and an appropriate way of using language since we start using the language. In other words, a verbal language, a nonverbal language, and an emotional display vary depending on the gender. Generally, these keep changing more and more with future because surrounding environment encourages each gender to develop more perfectly to adapt to new change. Keywords: Gender, Gender differences, Communication, Language

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2014

3401