Language and Gender

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg (Institut für Anglistik), language: English, abstract: While the most obvious function of language is to communicate information with other people, language also contributes to two other important functions: to establish and maintain social relationships and to express and create the social identity of the speaker. These functions may be recognized less often because information such as class or race is conveyed not as much through what we say, as through how we say it. In other words, information is conveyed as much by how we compose our utterances as through the precise character of our thought. This is certainly true of gender. All of us have different styles of communicating with other people. Our style depends on a lot of things: where we are from, how and where we were brought up, our educational background, our age, and it also can depend on our gender. Generally speaking, men and women talk differently although there are varying degrees of masculine and feminine speech characteristics in each of us. But men and women speak in particular ways mostly because those ways are associated with their gender. The styles that men and women use to communicate have been described as 'debate vs. relate', 'report vs. rapport, or 'competitive vs. cooperative'. Men often seek straightforward solutions to problems and useful advice whereas women tend to try and establish intimacy by discussing problems and showing concern and empathy in order to reinforce relationships. At the end of this term paper the reader ought to have an overview of the different studies existing in gender language, thus the question of differences between these studies ought to be clarified. Many authors have different opinion concerning this topic, whereas this term paper investigates similarities and differences between these opinions.