LANGUAGE AND GENDER

DWI FIRLI ASHARI

MUSTIKA HATI

VIVI NUR AKMALIA

OUTLINE

1. LANGUAGE AND GENDER AROUND THE WORLD

•Gender and genre

•Gender and multingualism

•Gender and politeness

•Gender and ESL contexts

2. GENDER DIVERSITY ACROSS CULTURES IN US

GENDER AND GENRE

•Men and women have their own distinct social spheres.

• Schieffelin (1987) points out that in everyday conversation there are no marked male or female registers.

GENDER AND MULTILINGUALISM

• Gal's work (1978) on the use of Hungarian and German in Austria focuses on the effects of urbanization and industrialization on the speech patterns of women and men.

• Hill (1987) investigates gender differences in the use of a former colonial language and an indigenous language in Mexican.

GENDER AND POLITENESS

• Brown and Levinson (1983) - Politeness is normatively values as skill.

• Keenan’s Study of Malagasy Village in 1974“Me n a re m o re p o lite tha n wo m e n”

“There no straightforward way to operationalize and quantify politeness – Brown & Levinson (1983)

GENDER AND ESL

• Understanding speakers 'language and social background is important.

• Goldstein’s Study of Portuguese Speakers Women in Canada in 1992

“Aro und the ne e d to le a rn Eng lis h to c a rry o ut wo rk ta s ks a nd a s s um e g re a te r re s p o ns ibility a t wo rk”

GENDER DIVERSITY ACROSS CULTURES IN US

RESEARCH ABOUT AMOUNT OF LANGUAGES THAT WOMEN SPEAK IN UNITED STATES

Medicine (1987, p. 159) points out that there are at least 206 distinct languages spoken by Native Americans - which suggests the enormity of the task to be undertaken.

She notes that American Indian women perform three distinctive social roles with respect to language in their communities

DIFFICULTIES OF AMERICAN INDIAN WOMEN IN USING LANGUAGES IN THEIR SOCIETY• they must make decisions about whether to bring up their children as

bilingual or monolingual (in English or the native language) and are often held responsible for the lack of knowledge of a native language by the younger members of the community.

• they also often serve as mediators between their own communities and white society, as represented by Bureau of Indian Affairs bureaucrats, county welfare workers, police officers, judges, and so on.

AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS, CULTURE AND LANGUAGE THAT THEY USE IN SOCIETY

• As with Native Americans, the language of many of these different groups remains unstudied, let alone the social variations within these communities along the lines of gender, age, class, and so on.

• Zentella (1987, p. 158) provides a picture of some of the linguistic issues that Puerto Rican women face. She points out that lower working-class Puerto Rican speakers, in addition to having the problems that all lower-working-class people do, are faced with a number of identity conflicts triggered by the colonial status of Puerto Rico, racism, and feelings of linguistic inferiority.

AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS, CULTURE AND LANGUAGE THAT THEY USE IN SOCIETY (CONT.)Zentella found that children used three criteria in how they decided what to speak and to whom, there are:

•Girls have more exposure to and opportunities to use Spanish than boys because of their greater restriction to the house with mother (1987, p. 173).

•Girls use different amounts of English and Spanish at different life stages. (p.173).

AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS, CULTURE AND LANGUAGE THAT THEY USE IN SOCIETY (CONT.)• Female speakers are more likely to believe in the importance of

speaking Spanish in marking and maintaining Puerto Rican identity and the Puerto Rican nation, although this in no way precludes their Appreciation of the importance of bilingualism and their significant community advocacy for bilingual education (pp. 175-177).

AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS, CULTURE AND LANGUAGE THAT THEY USE IN SOCIETY (CONT.)• Gonzales Velasquez (1992) summarizes studies demonstrating that in

northern New Mexico communities, women are using English more than vernacular Spanish, and men are using vernacular Spanish more than English.

• In describing the discourse of African-American women, Morgan (1991), like Medicine, emphasizes the importance of understanding the communication styles of women because of their responsibility for language socialization in children, and thus language maintenance in the community (p. 4221.

Although, as was noted earlier, many early studies of language and gender in the United States focused on white speakers, the inattentiveness to the ways in which gender was articulated with ethnicity means that researchers must return to white, as well as to ethnically mixed, communities to look at the construction of class, race, sexuality, and age alongside gender.

LANGUAGE AND GENDER IN US