Essay: Gender Differences in Using Language, Dialect Variation And Children Genders in Language Acquisition

I. INTRODUCTION

Does gender difference influence the language? Firstly, the language must be defined in order to answer the question. People do not care how the language works, how it affects our relationships, that is, people do not notice the power of language. It is an indispensable means of communication for people and language is used as a means of mutual communication between people. “Language is defined as an advanced system of voices that allows each community to be transferred to others by the help of common rules shaped by their own characteristics in terms of emotion, thought and desire: sound, form and meaning” (Korkmaz, p. 2). It is sometimes a living thing that shows some improvement in various reasons due to its own internal structure.
In sociolinguistics, gender differences have an important place because men and women are two concepts that are cited together with sociolinguistics. As the male and female languages are different from each other, their language formations will also show differences. The difference in the use of language by men and women can be attributed to the physical structure of their formation. However, some researchers have also found that this information is opposite. “It has been seen that there is no connection between the physical or other characteristics of the person or objects to whom this name refers in a language examination to a name” (Konig, 1992, p. 25). “Lyons ‘species have many bases indicating that gender classification is based on a ‘ natural ‘ meaning, but it is not sexual and Wardhaugh says that “those who discriminate are those who use language, and that there is no such thing as sexuality on the ground” (Konig, 1992, p. 25). The purpose of this study is to question whether gender differences can affect the language used and whether both physical and social factors can change dialect variation.

“Men usually have to undertake more pressure than women in life and the differences in job skills may be explained in great part through differences in the ways by which they are raised” (Xia, 2013, p. 1485).Women are more effective in controlling communication than men in communication with men, and sometimes women can influence communication not only by using language but also by body language. “Within the social sciences, an increasing consensus of findings suggests that men, relative to women, tend to use language more for the instrumental purpose of conveying information; women are more likely to use verbal interaction for social purposes with verbal communication serving as an end in itself” (Newman, Groom, Handelman, & Pennebaker, 2008, p. 212).The importance of this study is to increase awareness language learners’ gender differences in using language, dialect variation and children genders in language acquisition.

II. LITERATURE REVIEW

a. Gender Differences in Using Language

All societies have diversity in language use. It is a fact that most people, both women and men, who use language vary in their opinion. The variability in language use of even a person in daily life and in formal life may reduce the possibility of non-diversity between women and men’s conversations. Socialization patterns, the environments in which people live, and even the difference in political opinion can be affect women’ and men’ speaking styles (Louazani, 2015). In this study, the using language of some men and women will be examined together with some researches.

“At a discourse level , men are more likely to use familiar forms of address even where reel status of speakers suggest that a formal, impersonal tone is more appropriate and the women are more likely to initiative conversations, they succeed less often because males less willing to co-operate . In tag questions, women lead to use tag questions more frequent; men are more likely to use commands when women use them more likely to be interrogatives” (Louazani, 2015, p. 25).

Some stereotypes of male and female speech.

Stereotypes of male speech:

• Use deeper voices/ lower in pitch.
• Swear and use taboo language.
• More assertive in group interaction (interruptions, few tag question).
• Topics are « traditional » male topics like business, politics, economics.
• Use non-standard speech, even middle class.
• Use explicit commands (gimme the pliers).

Stereotypes of female speech:

• Minimal responses: mhm, yeah, mmmmm.
• Talk more than men.
• Use more tag questions.
• Use more interrogatives.
• Use more hedges (sort of, kind of).
• Use more super polite speech: would you please

(Louazani, 2015, p. 26).

Although the roles of women are seen as traditionalized housewives, they are more informed than many areas men and can be considered to have used language more precisely because of their interrogative personality (Newman, Groom, Handelman, & Pennebaker, 2008). It is also stated that as the majority of primary school teachers are women, they play a leading role in standardizing language norms in society. The differences in the daily speech of the people were investigated and the information on the gender differences in language was further clarified. “Mirroring phrase-level findings of tentativeness in female language, women have been found to use more intensive adverbs, more conjunctions such as ‘but’, and more modal auxiliary verbs such as could that place question marks of some kind over a statement unlike women, men have been found to swear more, use longer words, use more articles, and use more references to location” (Newman, Groom, Handelman, & Pennebaker, 2008).

Differences intonation

Intonation can determine people’s communicative goals, intonation can be independent of the speaker to help explain what is desired, and it can be more effective in conveying the message that is desired to be conveyed through toning. “Women often like to speak in a high-pitch voice because of physiological reason, but scientists point out that this also associates with women’s ‘timidity’ and ‘emotional instability’ ” (Xia, 2013, p. 1485). Men, unlike women, may not use more determined and curious tones.

“Example: Husband: When will dinner be ready?
Wife: Around six o’clock..

The wife is the only one who knows the answer, but she answers her husband with a high rise tone, which has the meaning “will that do”. This kind of intonation suggests women’s gentility and docility. The husband will surely feel his wife’s respect.” (Xia, 2013, p. 1485). In table 1, the data of researches are presented to the reader.

Table1. The pitch data of stressed syllable, nuclear pitch accent of female and male samples.” (Jiang, 2011, p. 975).
Sentence
type Stressed
Syllable
(F) Pitch
accent
(F) Stressed
Syllable
(M) Pitch
accent
(M)
1－Decl 7.433 11.147 3.275 2.218
2－dec-q. 9.539 14.509 5.767 6.310
3－yes/
no-q. 10.544 13.224 8.539 4.381
4－wh-q 10.415 13.650 7.025 4.396
5－excl. 9.638 12.718 7.336 4.160
F=Female; M=Male

Some researchers have also pointed out that when the women do not trust what they say, and when they feel more emotional, the tone of voice can fall, and men can also be sure that their tone is lower than they are. Also the difference between men and women at the pitch of the tone of voice is obvious in Table 1.

Differences in Manners

Women are more emotional in their speech, so women use more polite words with other speakers. Because of their kindness in their conversations, words such as ‘please’, ‘sorry’ etc. are used more often by women (Xia, 2013). “Besides this, women also show that they are reserved when they talk and the following table is based on the research of Zimmerman and West on the interruptions men and women made in a conversation” (Xia, 2013, p. 1487). It is stated that men and women talk more than men in the difference of speech.

Table 2. Interruptions during the conversation

Male female Total
interruptions 46 2 48

It is seen that, contrary to expectations in this study, men are more impatient than women because of their desire to speak themselves in the conversation, and that men are more interruptive than women when speaking both men and women. In addition, it is seen that women are not disturb others during the conversation and that women encouraged other speakers to talk.

Differences in Vocabulary

It has been noticed that women use different words in order to show their feelings differently from men’s point of view. “We can notice that men and women tend to choose different words to show their feelings, for example, when a woman is frightened, she usually shouts out, “I am frightened to death”! If you hear a man says this, you’ll think he is a coward and womanish” (Xia, 2013, p. 1486). These differences were examined in the selection of color words, the use of adverbs, adjectives, diminutives and pronouns.

Color Words

“There is special feminine vocabulary in English that men may not, dare not or will not use and women are good at using color words that were borrowed from French to describe things, such as mauve, lavender aquamarine, azure and magenta, etc., but most men do not use them” (Xia, 2013, p. 1486).

Women often use language more elegantly than using their own language and differences in language use are revealed.

Adjectives

“In everyday life, people can notice that women like to use many adjective, such as adorable, charming, lovely, fantastic, heavenly, but men seldom use them. When a woman leaves a restaurant, she will say “It’s a gorgeous meal.” If a man wants to express the same idea, he may only say, “It’s a good meal.” Using more adjectives to describe things and their feelings can show that women are more sensitive to the environment and more likely to express their emotions with words, which makes women’s language more interesting than men’s sometimes” (Xia, 2013, p. 1486).

Men do not tire themselves to explain indirectly, so instead of using elaborate adjectives like women, they use the language more simply, clear and fluently.

Adverbs

“There are also differences in the use of adverbs between men and women. Women tend to use such adverbs like awfully, pretty, terribly, vastly, quite, so; men like to use very, utterly, really and In 1992, Jespersen found that women use more so than men do, such as, “It was so interesting” is often uttered by a woman” (Xia, 2013, p. 1486).

Small details can be exaggerated by using adverbs while describing events in language use by women.

Diminutives

“Women like to use words that have the meaning of ‘small’, such as bookie, hanky. They also like to use words that show affections, such as dearie, sweetie. If a man often uses these words, people will think that he may have psychological problem or he is not manly. Furthermore, women like to use words that show politeness, such as please, thanks, and they use more euphemism, but “slang” is considered to be men’s preference. From the study people can see that men and women have their own vocabulary choices in achieving emphatic effects. Though in the area of vocabulary, many of the studies have focused on English, we cannot deny that sex differences in word choice exist in various other languages. People need to learn to make these distinctions in their childhood” (Xia, 2013, p. 1486).

With the instinctive attitudes of women, women are given the knowledge that men are strict and clear when they use words such as my dear, sweetheart (Xia, 2013).

b. Dialect Variation

“All known societies classify people at birth as “male” or “female” according to the anatomical distinctions indicating their potential reproductive role, but this is in practice a social classification, relating biological sex to a wider set of social practices, norms, and relations” (Dunn, 2013, p. 2).

Even though the actions of talking and dressing are thought to be individual, contrary to this, the society is shaped by the effects on the individual. In addition, even a small group in workplace and the people ,who is living in the same country, are able to direct people’ way of speaking, which is called dialect. “The term ‘dialect’ is used in the variationalist tradition to refer to systematic linguistic variation statistically associated with a sociolinguistic parameter, and as such can be difficult to delimit” (Dunn, 2013, p. 2). It cannot be said that there is a restriction about dialect, because it can be influenced even by people’s socio-cultural considerations.

“It is well known that gender interacts with other social variables that affect phonology, including regional and ethnic dialects and gender-correlated differences in the production of prestige forms and innovative forms of speech have been reported frequently in the sociolinguistics literature” (Clopper, Corney, & Pisoni, 2005).

The use of different languages by women and men can also be seen as the reason for the formation of various kinds of dialects. “It is useful to emphasize the importance of social gender rather than biological sex in the use of different languages and also it is social gender that the vocabulary that both genders can use is intrinsic to female or male speech” (Demir, 2010, p. 102). Twenty years ago, in some villages of Alanya in Turkey, where dialect research was done, women were calling their husbands even their younger brothers to call them “big brother”, and the brides were hesitant to pronounce their father’s name directly.

According to ancient customs and traditions, women regard men as more important than themselves, and respect their inability to say even their name. That is why there are gender differences on the ground. When women come together, they talk differently, and small communities create divergence in the use of language. Men are more relax to use language than women (Demir, 2010).

“The importance of biological sex in communication systems extends beyond humans too, for example, in many bird species the songs of males and females are distinct. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for birdsong to be transmitted through social learning, leading to vocal repertoires which are differentiated by geographical region – referred to as regional dialects” (Dunn, 2013, p. 2).

That is to say, it should not be regarded as simply a difference in language acquisition or language use. Language can be affected by everything.

“In an extensive review, Labov summarized the observed production differences with the three principles shown below.

Women use more prestige forms than men, and, conversely, men use more nonstandard forms than women.

Women favor incoming prestige forms in changes from above, which are defined as involving forms associated with a high level of social consciousness.

Women also tend to lead in changes from below, which involve variation that has not become stereotyped or associated with particular social groups. However, in a minority of cases such as diphthong centralization on Martha’s Vineyard, men can lead in changes from below” (Clopper, Corney, & Pisoni, 2005).

Dialects are more determined by women because the first language formation of children begins when they are with family members. While the family is the first teacher, the first tutorial in the family is none other than the mother. After children start to go to school with their first steps in life, which is the first place of children meet with language communities.

” … boys’ acquisition of the men’s dialect accompanies social and ritual recognition of their entering the men’s world. This probably contributes to the historical instability of gender dialects, as the interruption of traditional social practices may also interrupt men’s dialect acquisition. A number of descriptions of gender dialects explicitly mention that in quoted speech the gender dialect of the person quoted may be used, even where this is otherwise not the gender dialect used by the speaker” (Dunn, 2013, p. 4).

The use of language by men and women can be completely different, depending on what the women and men are in. The actual formation of the dialect can also be affected by gender differences.

Gender dialects can also be lexical changes. In other words, it is possible for men and women to pronounce the same word differently. The meaning of word is unchanged, and this change can only affect the writing of the word. “For example, certain nouns in Awetí which are vowel initial in the women’s dialect are pronounced with initial n- in the men’s dialect. There are also cases where men’s and women’s lexemes have no obvious etymological relationship” (Dunn, 2013, p. 6). In short, the language of men and women reflects different uses, even in dictionary, with different appendices.

In a research conducted that the language is found as the dialect of Yanyuwa and also in Yanyuwa the gender differences are very apparent. Below the data presented about this research.

“The Yanyuwa language (Pama-Nyungan) of northern Australia has a complex and well-described gender dialect distinction. The main difference between the dialects is in syntactic categories and their morphological marking: The female dialect distinguishes two noun classes, ‘male’ and ‘masculine’, where the male dialect only has one. In the female dialect ‘male’ and ‘masculine’ noun classes are indicated by different prefixes see Table 3” (Dunn, 2013, p. 10).

Table3. Noun class prefixes in the female dialect of Yanyuwa
Noun Class nominative Non-nominative
Male Nya- Nyu-
Masculine ∅ ji-

“In the male dialect these correspond to a single noun class, marked by different prefixes in non-nominative cases and by zero in the nominative (see Table 4), like the women’s masculine-class and the women’s dialect also makes more distinctions in third-person pronouns than the men’s dialect. These distinctions are highlighted see Table 5” (Dunn, 2013, p. 10).

Table4. Noun class prefixed in the male dialect of Yanyuwa
Noun class Nominative Non-nominative
male/masculine ∅ ki-

Table5. Third-person pronouns in male and female Yanyuwa dialects
women’s dialect men’s dialect
he yiwa yiwa
she anda anda
it alhi anda

“The Yanyuwa language was no longer being transmitted at the time that the gender dialects were documented, so we only have speakers’ reminiscences of how language acculturation happened rather than direct observations, … all children acquire the women’s dialect first from their caretakers. In Yanyuwa society, boys underwent formal initiation at the age of ten, after which they were expected to speak men’s dialect, and rebuked if they spoke the women’s dialect by mistake and older speakers could use the inappropriate gender dialect for various kinds of humorous or rhetorical effect” (Dunn, 2013, p. 11).

c. Children Genders in Language Acquisition

It is difficult for people to understand when they are newborn babies whether they are girls or boys. In other words, when babies are born, they are introduced to the concept of gender not by themselves but by the consciousness of their parents, and babies are traditionally introduced with blue hats for babies who are girls with this concept and babies who are boys. This means that different objects and ornaments are used in certain cultures to specify the gender of the babies clear. “In addition to the visual, color-coding sign, another early attribution of gender is the linguistic event of naming the baby. Moreover, from early childhood girls and boys are interpreted differently, and interacted with differently and people usually behave more gently with baby-girls and more playfully with baby-boys” (Savickienė & Kalėdaitė, 2007, p. 285). That is, the characteristics given to infants by masculinity and femininity can be made either by name, toys or through clothes.

Girls are more often treated with polite attitudes, such as toy dolls, while boys are more likely to be warned than girls because they can play their own games quietly like cotton, while boys like to play with balls, cars and even toy guns and need to play these toys they are the mobilizations that they can make to consume energy.

“As for linguistic aspects, there is enough evidence to claim that girls are usually more advanced in language development than boys (it is obvious, though, that individual differences exist). Girls begin to talk earlier; they articulate better and acquire a more extensive vocabulary than boys of the same age. Studies of verbal ability have shown that girls and women surpass boys and men in verbal fluency, correct language usage, sentence complexity, grammatical structure, spelling, and articulation” (Savickienė & Kalėdaitė, 2007, p. 286).

The capacity of each child is different like every individual, and the talk times of the children in the same family can be different. Girls can learn to talk faster than boys, but this may be inherited but there isn’t certainty about inherited.

“A language may have two or more such classes or genders. For a noun to belong to a particular declension class often implies that it also belongs to a particular gender. The classification very often corresponds to a real world distinction of sex. Correlations of this sort are, however, never perfect; that is, membership in a particular gender is most often a matter of arbitrary stipulation” (Savickienė & Kalėdaitė, 2007, p. 286).

Meanings of the names can vary according to the gender, but it is a change that depends on the enjoyment of the people to give gender characteristics.

“Research shows that children are capable of distinguishing differences in biological sex at around the age of 2; 62. The category of gender becomes an issue in the process of language acquisition when a child finds out that sex is an inherent property and does not change even if clothes are changed” (Savickienė & Kalėdaitė, 2007, p. 287).

In this period, babies can recognize which gender group they belong to and can make themselves a member of the group they belong to.

“In a study involving Lithuanian children, the researcher suggested that genders of children have little effect on language acquisition. Most researchers claim that during the early stages of language acquisition it is problematic for a child to distinguish between genders because the category of gender is a problematic issue in itself. In data, words which have distinct formal gender markers already appear in early recordings, at 1; 7. The frequency of nouns marked masculine or feminine is displayed in Table 6 and Table 7” (Savickienė & Kalėdaitė, 2007).

Table6.The distribution of masculine and feminine nouns in Rūta’s speech (1; 7–2; 5)” (Savickienė & Kalėdaitė, 2007, p. 288).

1; 7 1; 8 1; 9 1;10 1;11 2; 0 2; 1 2; 2 2; 3 2; 4 2; 5 Total Total
FEM 18 131 426 387 310 396 359 369 337 422 374 3529 40%
MASC 18 167 469 698 454 479 528 622 622 643 487 5187 60%

(“4 Rūta is a first-born and only child of a middle-class family living in Vilnius. Her speech was recorded in natural everyday situations by her mother, a philologist. Recordings were made three or four times per week; they lasted about fifteen minutes each. For the present study we have chosen to analyse Rūta’s speech covering the period from 1; 7 to 2; 6. The corpus consists of 35 hours of recordings. The recorded speech was transcribed by the girl’s mother according to the requirements of CHILDES, or Child Language Data Exchange System

5 Monika is also a first-born and only child of a middle-class family living in Kaunas. The corpus consists of diary remarks and almost 45 hours of recordings (transcribed and only partly coded according to CHILDES; therefore, we were not able to provide the statistical data) (Savickienė & Kalėdaitė, 2007, p. 288)”.

“Table7.The distribution of masculine and feminine nouns in Mother’s speech (1;7 –2; 5)” (Savickienė & Kalėdaitė, 2007, p. 289).
1; 7 1; 8 1; 9 1;10 1;11 2; 0 2; 1 2; 2 2; 3 2; 4 2; 5 Total Total
FEM 68 282 789 707 308 553 408 410 436 387 477 4825 45%
MASC 100 391 827 1096 458 583 430 529 561 500 452 5927 55%

“The data show that masculine and feminine nouns in Rūta’s speech appear in equal numbers only during the 1; 7 period (see Table 6). Starting with 1; 8 and up to the period of 2;6 masculine nouns are more frequent. The same tendency is noticed in Mother’s speech: during the entire period of observation masculine nouns are more common than feminine nouns. The 1; 10 period is exceptional in this respect: masculine nouns are especially dominant, and the same tendency is observed in Rūta’s speech” (Savickienė & Kalėdaitė, 2007, p. 289).

This work can be explained by the language change of Ruta because Ruta has more masculine language features in this study.

“The correct usage of feminine nouns during the early period of language acquisition in Rūta’s case could be explained within the framework of a hypothesis which relates the early and unproblematic acquisition of certain grammatical categories (e.g. of gender or case) to the child’s gender” (Savickienė & Kalėdaitė, 2007, p. 289).

It is important to note that girls are more likely to be in official use than men.

III. CONCLUSION

As a conclusion, the effects of language and gender on each other have been researched when the language and gender issues are both intriguing and open to research. The subject of language and gender, which is a subject of interest in this study, has been researched. Language and gender are the subjects of sociolinguistic. The word meaning of the language is given and it is emphasized that the concept of language is transferred from culture to culture. In the research on the effect of gender difference on language, the idea that gender difference is the influence on the language and the ideas that there is no effect are presented to the readers. It has been stated that the changes in language use are influenced by social factors because women and men use languages in different areas. In other words, it is emphasized that the person who uses the language in the first place has an influence on the usage of the language, even the political thought, regardless of gender.

In a study, some stereotyped examples were given for the physiology and formation of male and female language use. It is presented that women’s voice tone is higher than men’s voice tone because of women’s frankness. It is presented that men’s level of voice tone is of interest to men’s confidence and that low voice tone is a determinant of the height of self-confidence. In a test conducted against the stereotypical beliefs that women are always interrupted in men’s, men have been shown to be more interrupted than women. In the use of color words, adjectives and pronouns, it is stated that women use more ornate language and men prefer to use simple, clear and understandable language.

Moreover, William Labov summarized the explanation of the matter in relation to the accent. It is emphasized that in all the cases studied in this explanation, women have different language uses than men and that gender effect is due to different dialect usage.
In the Yanyuwa language (Pama-Nyungan) of northern Australia, ıt has been shown through research that the difference in the language is more clearly recognizable, and it has been shown that there is a difference in usage in males, where the difference is less in females than in males. The Yanyuwa dialect is not investigable at present and the dialect difference is emphasized by making observations about it (Dunn, 2013).

Additionally, ıt is presented in a research that the influence of the sex of the children in the acquisition of language is very little. In Lithuanian, a single word for children’s language acquisition is asked of girls and boys and it is understood that there is little difference in the learning and even pronunciation of the word.

Finally, research on gender and language concepts has been conducted in this study and it has been determined through researches and observations that the effects of gender discrimination on language use. It has also been reported that even in the use of dialects, the difference in gender causes different words to be produced and that there is dialectal difference in this number. In other researches, it is seen that the concept of gender is not as effective as adults in children who learned a different language from the mother tongue, and the study is concluded by reaching the knowledge that the concept of gender may be effective in younger children.

For further studies it is suggested that the experiments conducted for such studies should be investigated with more current data, and the gender difference in the human brain should be reported in the field of language use. It is advisable to conduct extensive field search so that more information about the language can be found and the effects of the language on the language, not the gender, can be investigated.

IV. REFERENCES

• Clopper, C. G., Corney, B., & Pisoni, D. B. (2005). EFFECTS OF TALKER GENDER ON DIALECT CATEGORIZATION. Lang. Soc. Psychol., 24(2), 182-206.
• Demir, N. (2010). Türkçede Varyasyon Üzerine. Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Türkoloji Dergisi, 17(2), 102.
• Dunn, M. (2013). Gender determined dialect variation. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 1-27.
• Jiang, H. (2011). GENDER DIFFERENCE IN ENGLISH INTONATION. (pp. 974-977). China: Sichuan University.
• Konig, G. Ç. (1992). DlL VE CİNS: KADIN VE ERKEKLERİN DİL KULLANIMI. Dilbilim Araştırmaları, 25-36.
• Korkmaz, Z. (n.d.). TÜRK DİLİNE GÖNÜL VERENLER. Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 1-11.
• Louazani, K. (2015). Gender Linguistic Behavior. TLEMCEN: Prof. Smail Benmoussat.
• Newman, M. L., Groom, C. J., Handelman, L., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2008). Gender Differences in Language Use. 45, 211-236.
• Savickienė, I., & Kalėdaitė, V. (2007). The Role of a Child’s Gender in Language Acquisition. EESTI RAKENDUSLINGVISTIKA ÜHINGU AASTARAAMAT, 3, 285-297.
• Xia, X. (2013). Gender Differences in Using Language. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 3(8), 1485-1489.

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