LANGUAGE AND SEX

BY :

ERNI RUTMANA

RENITA ELIZABETH DAMANIK

The mhmm a women uses quite frequently means only ‘ I’m listening’, whereas the

mhmm a man uses, but much less frequenly, tends to mean ‘I’m agreeing’.

Consequently, men often believe that ‘women are always agreeing with them and

then conclude that it’s impossible to tell what a women really thinks,’ whereas

‘women get upset with men who never seem to be listening’.

Phonological differences between men and women :

In Gros Ventre, an Amerindian language of the northest United State,

women have palatalized velar stops where men have palatalized

dental stops, e.g. female kjatsa ‘bread’ and male djatsa. It is

interesting that when a female speaker of Gros Ventre quotes a male,

she attributes female pronunciations to him, and when a male quotes

a female, he attributes male pronunciations to her.

In a northest Asian language, Yukaghir, both women and children

have /ts/ and /dz/ where men have /tj/ and /dj/.

Likewise, in a Siberian language, Chuchi, men but not women, often

drop /n/ and /t/ when they occur between vowels, e.g. female

nitvaganat and male nitvagaat.

In Kroasati, an Amerindian language spoken in southwestern

Lousiana, among other sex-linked differences, men often

pronounced an s at the end of verbs but women did not, e.g. male

lakaws ‘he is lifting it’ and female lakaw. What was interesting that

this kind of pronunciation appeared to be dying out, because younger

women and girls do not use these forms.

Brend (1975) claims, that the intonation patterns of men and women

vary somewhat, women using certain patterns associated with

surprise and politeness more often than men. In the same vein Lakoff

says that women may answer a question with a statement that

employs the rising intonation pattern associated with a question

rather than falling intonation pattern. According to Lakoff, women

do this because they are less sure about themselves and their

opinions than are men. For the same reason, she say s that women

oftn add tg question to statement, e.g. ‘They caught the robber last

week, didn’t they ?’.

In the area of morphology and vocabulary, many of the studies have

focused on English.

Lakoff (1973) claims, that women use color words like mauve,

beige, aquamarine, lavender, and magenta but most men do not.

She also mentains that adjectives such as adorable, charming,

sweet, and lovely are also commonly used by women but only very

rarely bt men. Women also have their own vocabulary for

emphasizing certain effects on them, words and expression such as

so good, such fun, exquisite, divine, precious, darling, and fantastic.

There certainly are sex differences in word choice in various

languages. Japanese women show they are women when they speak,

for example, by the use of a sentence-final particle ne. In Japanese,

too, a male speaker refers to himself as wasi or ore whereas a female

uses watasi or atasi.