Male and female variants of speech in the Yana language. Women's and men's speech: similarities and differences
AMERICAN STUDIES
Male and female speech patterns in the Yana language
As you know, some languages have the following feature: in them the forms used by men differ from the forms used by women. Of course, this feature has nothing to do with grammatical gender. In this article, I propose to address gender differences in Yana, a Northern California language that is (or has been) divided into four dialects: Northern, Central, Southern, and Yahi. Only data from the first two dialects will be used here, although the basic facts apply to all four^. Apparently, the number of languages in which the opposition of male and female forms is as developed as in Yana is small. Therefore, the facts presented in this article will, I hope, be of general interest to researchers of language and linguistic psychology.
To clarify the point, it can be noted that in Yana there is no category of gender. On the other hand, there are a small number of verb stems that exclusively denote activities performed by either a man or a woman, e.g. ni-, ni- “man walks”, but “a- “woman walks”, bu-ri-, bu-ri- “man dances”, but dja-ri, dja-rT- “woman dances”1^. In the latter case the difference in the verb probably reflects an actual difference in the nature of the dance.Further, a series of verbs denoting more or less anodular appearance, receive the suffix -yai- if they refer to a woman, e.g. lulmai-"a "to be blind" (about a male person), but lulmai-yai-"a "to be blind". This -yai- is the incorporated form of the suffixal element -ua "female person", often found in nouns, e.g. k!ñwi "witch doctor", but k!uwi-ya "witch doctor", bai-djü-si "hunter", but bai-djú-ya "huntress".
Male and female forms of speech in Yana. - In: "Teeuwen St.W.J., ed., Donum Natalicium Schrijnen." Nijmegen - Utrecht, 1929, pp. 79-85.
1 For information about the Yana language, see: S a r i g E. Yana Texts. - “Univ. Calif. Publ. Am. Arch, and Ethn>, 1910, 9, pp. 1-235; The position of Yana in the Hokan stock, ibid., 1917, 13, pp. 1-34; Yana terms of relationship, ibid., 1918, 13, pp. 153-173; The fundamental elements of Northern Yana, ibid., 1922, 13, pp. 215 - 234; Text analyzes of three Yana dialects, ibid., 1923, 20, pp. 263 - 294. The Yan orthography used here is explained in these works.
The vast majority of words in Yana have two variants: the full, or masculine, form, and the reduced, or feminine, form.
form. The terms "male" and "female form" are not entirely adequate, since the masculine form is used only by men when addressing men, while the feminine form is used by women when addressing men or by women and by men when addressing women. In other words, female forms are used approximately three times more often than male forms. There is certainly no question that the male form is taboo for women, since a woman does not hesitate to use the male form when quoting a man's speech to a man, for example, in telling a myth in which one male character addresses another.
There appear to be two different methods of contrasting masculine and feminine variants, depending on phonetic and grammatical factors. The masculine variant may coincide with the absolute, or theoretically basic, form of the word, in which case the feminine variant is formed from the masculine by phonetic reduction of the final syllable; or the feminine version coincides with the theoretically basic form of the word, in which case the masculine version is formed from the feminine by adding a certain syllable, the choice of which depends on the category of the given form. In both cases, the male version is longer than the female. As we will see below, very specific oppositions based on gender appear in interrogative. It must be made clear that formal differences by gender apply only to complete words and not to stems or suffixal elements as such. Thus, the male forms "ai-pa "fire", "ai-"shs^a "my fire" correspond to the female forms "ai" "fire", "ai-"shgh" "my fire"; the contrast between "ai-pa and "ai disappears as soon as a suffixal element (e.g., "my") is added to the absolute or thematic form "ai-". Similarly, the masculine forms k!yich "witch doctor", k!y\*awa “healer” correspond to the feminine forms k\uge^ (-\\a here turned into a voiceless yes plus a voiceless g, or voiceless xyu with an 1-shaped timbre), k\n^\-uya (-ua turned into a voiceless u with i -shaped timbre); the contrast between k!i\U1 and k!ida* is not realized in forms meaning “healer”, since the suffix -ua protects the element k!i\*a- from reduction.
Of course, it is impossible in this work to fully describe all the rules for the formation of forms that distinguish gender, since this would require too many grammatical details. We can only illustrate the main phonetic and morphological contrasts.
One large class unites all non-monosyllabic nominal and many verb forms in which the absolute form, coinciding with the masculine version, ends with a short vowel (a, (, and; but not e, o). In the corresponding feminine version, the final vowel is deafened, as well as and the preceding consonant, if it is not voiceless in itself. “Intermediate” or “voiceless weak” stops (b, gL, g, o\y> become aspirated voiceless (p?, g/, ks, gxc). Consequently, the feminine variant in -g,"* may be the result of a reduction of the forms -gL and -si;
eg in the male version t-za-gL, in the female p1-za-g/1, “they say that he is leaving”; in the masculine r"asN, in the feminine r"agL "place".
The following table of masculine and feminine endings covers the available examples (-a replaces -a, -1 or -i here):
There are very rare examples of a final glottal stop with a preceding vowel in the absolute - masculine - form. The best example is the ending of the soft imperative, -gn^aga", which gives -gn^ag"a in the feminine version, for example. gLtt^aga" "please tell him", in the feminine version gLtp^ag"a.
A special subtype of the first main class of forms is the second person singular in -pita (masculine variant), e.g. g/TvGpita “you say”, tfimsiwa,numa “it was told to you, he tells you”, “ai”pshpa “your fire”. The parallel feminine form does not end in *-pit"a, as one might expect, but simply in -pi. However, the masculine form should not be considered as a combination of the absolute -pi with the masculine element -ta, which would be consistent with the second class of forms, but as a form identical to the absolute form of na-pita. This is made clear by the fact that the element -pita must be postulated for both the masculine and feminine forms in the interrogative, e.g., in the masculine version of "are you speaking?" in the feminine g/GvGpita. Moreover, the final -ta occurs without the preceding one -pi- in such forms as the masculine gLpshhua"ta "I tell you", the feminine ^shsh\ua"ta.
The second class of forms includes all nominal forms whose subjects do not end in a short vowel, all monosyllabic nominal subjects, demonstrative words, and many verb forms. All these forms are characterized by an additional masculine syllable. All names whose themes end in long vowels (a, g, й, ё, о), diphthongs (ш, ай, іг) or consonants, as well as all monosyllabic nominal themes, are suffixed with -pa in the masculine version, but remain unchanged in the feminine option, with the exception of excursion (-g). Examples:
The above rule in some cases is somewhat obscured by the effect of phonetic laws: for example, in the northern dialect, final syllabic pits, if they are not protected by the immediately following nasal, turn into g. and p; in addition, g/ and p" before nasal consonants turn into voiceless nasals with a glottal stop. If the topic ends in 1 or voiceless G, the suffix -pa is assimilated into -1a, for example, in the masculine version dal-la “hand”, in female dal*". In the Yahi dialect, the suffix -pa (-1a) is used in some cases
(for example, in the masculine version "au-na "fire"), in some - hi (for example, in the masculine version ya-hi "man").
To demonstrative words ending in -e, to form masculine forms, add -"e. So, in the masculine version aidje"e "that", in the feminine aidje; in the masculine aiye"e "that one", in the feminine aiye; in the masculine aige"e "over (to) that", in the feminine aige.
A significant number of forms, mostly verbal, are obtained by adding -"a or -"i to the absolute forms used by women. These forms include:
The third person of futuruma is -si-"i, for example in the masculine version trûsi"i "he will do", in the feminine t/tisi. Wed. masculine form t/ûsi "he does", feminine fus1.
The first person of the futurum is -sik!ô-"a, for example in the masculine version t"usiklô"a "I will do", in the feminine t"usikîô.
The third person usitative on -ta- "a, for example, in the masculine version trûma"a "he used to do", in the feminine t"ùma.
Third person dubitative with -k!u- "i, for example in the masculine version nisaklu"i "perhaps he will leave", in the feminine nisâklu.
Third person passive in -wa-"a, for example in the masculine version ap"djîsiwa"a "he was killed", in the feminine ap"djîsiwa.
Some third-person causative forms subject to contraction, for example:
Thus, from mô- “there is” the following are formed: the masculine form môt"i “they say that he eats,” the feminine mot/1, the masculine môtrê"a “they say that he feeds,” the feminine môt"ê.
7. Possessive verbal and nominal forms, as well as adverbial combinations ending in -k"i-"a, for example. in the masculine version lautrkfi"a "they say that his X is strong"* (the result of the contraction of the quotative -tfi and the possessive -kfi"a), in the feminine lautfk"i, in the masculine rnômauk"i"a "[he eats] him (t .e. other) food", in the feminine mômaukfi, in the masculine bâwisakVa "in the evening", in the feminine bawisak "i.
“The English translation of the possessive form of yana is difficult to translate into Russian: it looks like “his is said to be strong; for lack of a better option, the English substantivized his is translated into Russian as “his X”. - Approx. translation
A special group of verb forms are imperatives. The male variants with -"V and -"a" correspond to the female ones with -"* and -"a, i.e. the final glottal stop disappears in the female variants, for example, in the male variant nisa"i" “go away!”, in the female nisa"1. The absence of a final glottal stop is also characteristic of feminine imperatives with the first person of the object, for example. in the masculine version diwai-dja" "look at me!", in the feminine diwai-tc*a, in the masculine diwai-krigi "look at us!", in the feminine diwaik"ik"".
Interrogative forms differ from the two classes of forms we have already considered in that the suffixes or enclitics used by men and women are different. In the usual interrogative in masculine forms there is an element -n, requiring dynamic stress and a falling (not rising) tone on the preceding vowel, for example. "au"asfn "is there fire?" In the corresponding feminine form, the final vowel is lengthened, usually retains its original quality and receives a strong stress and falling tone, e.g. "au"asT "is there fire?" However, some forms in -a correspond to the feminine interrogative in -"(, for example, in the masculine version (ts!ewal"awa-ranjan "did I make a noise?", in the feminine ts!ewal"awarandjT; in addition, forms ending in a diphthong or consonant are obtained in the feminine version -уГ, for example, in the masculine version ga"layau-nan "cry", in the feminine version ga"layau-yT. The feminine interrogative from the demonstrative word lengthens the masculine ending -"e, for example. in the masculine version aidje"en "that one?", in the feminine aidje"e.
Another interrogative, more emphatic than the previous one, is actually expressed by an enclitic - pa in the masculine version and gi in the feminine - attached to the corresponding form with the meaning of gender, for example, in the masculine version tsllwal"asi"nuga pa "are you making noise?" , in women's ts!ewal"asi"nukfga.
As we have already seen, most words in Yana have distinct masculine and feminine variants. There are, however, some words that are the same in the speech of both sexes. These include: 1. syntactic particles (ai, indicator of the third person of the subject; aitc", article; dji, article in possessive forms of the first person; dju, article in possessive forms of the second person; k*", indicator of third person possessiveness; gi, object particle);
substantive verbs and “it is” and be “it is... which...”:
some passive forms ending in a long vowel (e.g. ap"djTwara "he was killed", tlml "to be the addressee of speech").
Further, final short vowels are dropped before words beginning with smooth vowels, so that the gender distinction sometimes disappears in a sentence or phrase. In such cases, the original form of the consonant appears, for example, the masculine pfadi "place" and the feminine pfatri appear as part of the masculine form aitcf pfad aidja "place there" and the feminine form aitc" p*ad aitcf, respectively. There are also morphological processes that require information absolute forms within a word to forms that coincide with
female variants, for example, the male version dalüwi "both hands" and the female daluoj1 take the form dalua?1 in some cases, for example. in the masculine version daluWkVa "his hands", in the feminine dalüojikri.
To summarize, we can conclude that female and male speech variants in the Yana language originate from two psychologically distinct sources. In a minority of cases we are dealing with gender-distinguishing particles. In the vast majority of cases, female variants can best be explained as abbreviated forms, which, from the point of view of their origin, have nothing to do with gender, but are isolated female variants or reduced forms motivated by the phonetic and morphological economy of the language. Perhaps the reduced female forms are conventional symbols of the less central or less ritually significant status of women in society. Men, when communicating with men, speak more fully and leisurely; When women are involved in communication, the shortened way of pronunciation is preferable! This explanation is plausible, but the female forms in Yana now represent a complex and completely formalized system, in many respects opposed to the parallel system of forms used when addressing men to men.
Most scholars who have studied gender, especially gender differences in speech, argue that there is a difference between the way men and women speak.
For example, Belyanin V.P. in “Psycholinguistics” he proposed the peculiarities of language use by men and women.
Features of the speech style of men and women manifest themselves at two levels - speech behavior and speech. For example, men interrupt more often, are more categorical, and strive to control the topic of dialogue. It is significant that, contrary to popular belief, men speak more than women. Men's sentences tend to be shorter than women's. Men in general use abstract nouns much more often, while women use concrete nouns (including proper nouns). Men use more nouns (mostly concrete ones) and adjectives, while women use more verbs. Men use more relative adjectives, while women use qualitative adjectives. Men are more likely to use perfective verbs in the active voice.
Women's speech includes a greater concentration of emotionally evaluative vocabulary, while men's evaluative vocabulary is often stylistically neutral. Often women tend to intensify primarily positive assessments. Men use negative evaluation more pronouncedly, including stylistically reduced, abusive language and invective; they are much more likely to use slang words and expressions, as well as non-literary and profanity.
When using syntactic connections, men more often use subordinating rather than coordinating connections, as well as subordinate clauses of time, place and purpose, while among women, subordinate degrees and concessive clauses generally predominate.
Psycholinguistic experiments on the restoration of destroyed text have shown that women are more sensitive to the semantic structure of the text - the samples they restored show greater coherence. Women try to restore the original text as much as possible, and men build a new one; their texts deviate from the standard more than women's ones.
A. Kirillina and M. Tomskaya in their article “Linguistic Gender Studies” gave distinctive characteristics of male and female written speech.
Male written speech:
use of army and prison slang;
frequent use of introductory words, especially those that have the meaning of statements: obviously, undoubtedly, of course;
using a large number of abstract nouns;
the use of words with the least emotional indexation when conveying an emotional state or assessment of an object or phenomenon; monotony of lexical techniques when conveying emotions;
combinations of officially and emotionally marked vocabulary when addressing family and friends;
use of newspaper and journalistic cliches;
the use of obscene words as introductory words (Love, *****, found) and the monotony of obscene words used, as well as the predominance of obscene invective and constructions denoting actions and processes, as well as the predominance of active and transitive verbs;
inconsistency of punctuation marks with the emotional intensity of speech.
In one of the psycholinguistic analyzes of essays conducted by E.I. Peas, based on 97 parameters, it turned out that men are characterized by a rationalistic style, while women are characterized by using an emotional style. Male associative fields are more stereotypical and ordered; the male strategy of associative behavior (more explanatory and functional characteristics attributed to the stimulus) differs significantly from the female (situational and attributive) strategy. In addition, associative fields in male and female speech are correlated with different fragments of the world picture: hunting, professional, military sphere, sports (for men) and nature, animals, the surrounding everyday world (for women).
Men switch harder, getting carried away by the topic under discussion, and do not respond to remarks related to it.
Of course, the “impassable” boundaries between male and female speech are defined as usage trends. And, nevertheless, this data can be used to identify text written by a man or a woman.
A conventional name for lexical preferences and some other features of language use depending on the gender of the speaker. Sexual differentiation of speech has become known since the 17th century, when new native tribes were discovered, which showed quite significant differences in speech depending on the gender of the speaker. First of all, this concerned women, since their speech behavior was regulated more than that of men, so initially the so-called “female languages” were discussed in the scientific description. Most often, differences appear in vocabulary, but they can extend to other phenomena, as, for example, in the Japanese language. There are different sets of modal-expressive particles, forms of politeness, etc. In European languages, there are also some differences in the use of language, but they are not universal, but appear in the form of trends. Initially, speech differences were explained by the nature of women and men, that is, they were considered constant factors. In the 60s of the twentieth century, with the development of sociolinguistics, the probabilistic nature of differences was established.
During the period of active feminist criticism of language (70s - early 80s of the twentieth century), linguists insisted on the existence of intentionalism, i.e., men’s conscious maintenance of their superiority through speech behavior - the length of speech segments, frequency of interruptions, speaking simultaneously with the interlocutor , control over the topic of communication, etc. This did not take into account the high importance of social structures (schools, churches, army, etc.), which take upon themselves the maintenance of male superiority and free the individual from the need to constantly reproduce it in all situations. Along with intentionalism, at this stage of research, the factor of gender was given excessive importance. West and Zimmerman argue that an individual's construction of his gender identity (doing gender) is a permanent process that permeates all the actions of individuals. Further study of communication showed that there are very common situations and contexts in which gender does not play a significant role, therefore it is necessary to take into account the factor of “gender neutrality” (Hirschauer), since there is no reason to give gender more importance than the factor of age, ethnicity and social class, level of education, profession, etc. Along with the term doing gender for the analysis of speech behavior, the term undoing gender has now also been proposed for situations where the gender of the communicants is not significant. Modern research shows that these parameters interact in most cases, so it is very difficult to determine where the influence of one ends and the influence of the other begins. During this period, quantitative research methods also prevailed, the most popular of which were counting the duration of speech segments, the frequency of interlocutor interruptions and changes in dialogue topics. However, in isolation from the context and situation of communication, these characteristics cannot be considered indicative and acquire significance only in interaction with other phenomena that depend on the cultural traditions of a given society. The question today is not how men or women speak, but how, with the help of what speech means, tactics and strategies they create certain contexts. Next, it is necessary to explore the parameters of these contexts and their impact on the success of communication.
In the late 80s - early 90s, the hypothesis of “gender subcultures” arose, going back to the work of Gumperz on the study of intercultural communication, as well as to earlier works on ethnology, ethnography, and cultural history (Borneman, Mead). In the works of Maltz and Borker and Tannen, the principle of intercultural communication is extended to gender relations.
In this case, the focus was on socialization processes. The socialization of an individual was considered as his assignment to a certain subculture, which is characterized by special speech practices that are different in male and female environments. In childhood and adolescence, people move predominantly in same-sex groups, forming subcultures and adopting their characteristic speech etiquette, which, in the opinion of supporters of the hypothesis, in adulthood leads to misunderstanding and speech conflicts, which are equated to intercultural ones.
The hypothesis of gender subcultures led to the emergence of the concept of genderlect - a constant set of characteristics of male and female speech. However, work in recent years shows more and more clearly that it is inappropriate to talk about gender lectus (Samel, Kotthoff). The role of the subcultural factor in this case is greatly exaggerated. The differences in male and female speech are not so significant, do not manifest themselves in any speech act, and do not indicate that gender is a determining factor in communication, as was assumed at the initial stage of the development of feminist linguistics. It has also been established that the same person in different communicative situations exhibits different speech behavior, which is called code switching. A study of communication between persons of the same sex, but different social and professional status, also revealed a number of differences. Thus, the speech behavior of any person at home and at work, in a familiar and new environment is different. At the same time, today science does not deny the existence of certain stylistic features that are characteristic mainly of men or predominantly of women within the framework of a clearly defined communication situation. It is believed that they arise under the influence of both sociocultural (for example, women’s use of swearing is condemned more than men’s swearing) and biological and hormonal factors (see Hypothesis of functional brain asymmetry). The expansion of gender studies beyond the framework of influential European languages and the development of linguoculturology made it possible to obtain data that also testifies to the cultural conditioning of male and female speech. The most promising and justified direction of studying male and female speech is currently considered to be the study of strategies and tactics of speech behavior of men and women in various communicative situations with mandatory consideration of the cultural tradition of a given society. It is also widely believed that women use more diminutive suffixes and polite forms, call their communication partner by name more often, and generally use more contact-building speech acts. Works on the study of male and female associations also give reason to assume some differences in the male and female associative picture of the world (see Images of men and women in linguistic consciousness). The reasons for the differences currently remain a controversial issue, in the discussion of which bio- and sociodeterministic points of view collide.
Men's and women's languages (English)
Literature:
Zemskaya E. A., Kitaygorodskaya M. A., Rozanova N. N. Features of male and female speech // Russian language in its functioning. Edited by E. A. Zemskaya and D. N. Shmelev. M.: Nauka, 1993. pp. 90-136.
Kirilina A.V. Gender: linguistic aspects. M.: Institute of Sociology RAS, 1999. 189 p.
West K., Zimmerman D. Doing gender // Gender notebooks. Vol. 1. St. Petersburg, 1997. pp. 94-124.
Borneman Ernst. Das Patriarchat. Ursprung und Zukunft unseres Gesellschaftssystems. Frankfurt a. Main, 1991 (zuerst 1971).
Gal S. Between speech and silence: The problematic issues of research on language and gender // Papers in Pragmatics. 1989. N 3. V.1. P. 1-38.
Glück Helmut. Der Mythos von den Frauensprachen. In: OBST (Osnabrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheotie). 1979. Beiheft 3, pp. 60-95.
Gumperz John J. Discours Strategies. Cambridge, 1982.
Hirschauer St. Dekonstruktion und rekonstruktion. Pladöyer für die Erforschung des Bekannten // Feministische Studien. 1993. N 2. S. 55-68.
Kotthoff H. Die Geschlechter in der Gesprächsforschung. Hierarchien, Teorien, Ideologien // Der Deutschunterricht, 1996. N 1. S. 9-15.
Maltz D. N., Borker R. A. Mißverständnisse zwischen Männern und Frauen - kulturell betrachtet // Günthner, Kotthoff (Hrsg) Von fremden Stimmen. Weibliches und männliches Sprechen im Kulturvergleich. Frankfurt am Main, 1991. S. 52-74.
Male and female: a study of sexes in a changing world. New York: Morrow, 1949.
Samel Ingrid. Einführung in die feministische Sprachwissenschaft. Berlin, 1995.
Tannen Debora. Du kannst mich einfach nicht verstehen. Warum Männer und Frauen aneinender vorbeireden. Hamburg, 1991.
"Male and female speech" in books
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Low voice, tyranny of grammar and diminutives: does speech have a gender or is it chauvinist stereotypes? As part of the series of lectures “Learning Russian with Capable People,” Alexander Piperski, a lecturer at the Department of Computational Linguistics at the Russian State University for the Humanities and a researcher at the Laboratory of Sociolinguistics at the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, told how men’s speech differs from women’s.
A low voice is salvation from a predator
The most noticeable difference between male and female speech is the pitch of the voice. It's all about the length of the vocal cords: in men they are longer, and in women they are shorter. It is in order to accommodate them that men’s Adam’s apple protrudes on their necks. The vocal cords are structured like the strings on a guitar: if you pinch the string and thereby shorten it, the tone becomes higher. Biologists believe that long vocal cords are an evolutionary adaptation: the owner of a low voice seems larger than the owner of a high voice, and therefore natural enemies are afraid to mess with him. Long vocal cords and a deep voice attracted women to men and scared off predators.
But linguists know that women and men differ not only in the pitch of their voices: grammar, style, and communicative behavior - all this reveals the gender of the speaker. For example, the phrase “they locked up a healthy closet” is much more natural to hear from a man than from a woman, but “this little one” is the opposite. And in Japanese, even the first person pronouns differ depending on gender and status: men say “boku” to themselves, and women say “atashi”.
The Tyranny of Grammar
Grammar is the most tyrannical part of the language system: it determines what meanings the speaker of a language is obliged to express. For example, in Russian we are required to indicate the person and number of the agent for verbs in the present tense (I write, you write, they write), but in Swedish we are not (“to write” in the present tense will be “skriver”, regardless of the person and number). But in the singular past tense in Russian, the verb must indicate gender, so we cannot describe any of our actions in the past tense without revealing our gender: we must say either “I came” or “I came.” And, for example, in Portuguese, grammar requires you to indicate gender when giving thanks: “thank you” from the mouth of a woman is “obrigada”, and from the mouth of a man it is “obrigado” (literally “grateful” and “thankful”). Why a language has these grammatical categories and not others is an unanswered question: in the case of gender, it is tempting to look for a connection between language and culture, but there is no reliable evidence for this.
"Male" and "female" languages
Sometimes they write that there are languages in which there is a male and female version. This is reported about Japanese, and about Chukchi, and about many American Indian languages. So, in the Chukchi language, women say [ts] where men pronounce [r] and [h]: for example, a man will call an arctic fox the word “rekokalgyn”, and a woman will say “tsekokalgyn”. In the Yana language (California, USA), men have longer words than women: if a man says the word “tree”, he will say “’ina”, and if a woman says “’iʰ”. True, if you take a closer look, it turns out that these are not absolute differences between the sexes, but differences in styles: women's language is usually neutral, and men's is more rude, as in Japanese, or more formal, as in the Yana language. It turns out that among the Yana Indians, the language, which was previously considered masculine, is used in communication between men, in official speech, as well as in a conversation between a man and his mother-in-law - and feminine in all other cases by both women and men. This example shows that there are no purely feminine and purely masculine varieties of language, but there are styles that are more or less associated with masculine or feminine behavior.
Nuances of communication
People of different genders differ in what they talk about and in what situations. We tend to think that women talk a lot and interrupt often - but research has shown that this stereotype is not true. In mixed groups, men talk more and interrupt more often. But women are more likely to compliment others: this may seem unexpected (we are accustomed to the idea that men give compliments to women), but such is life. And if you don't believe this, open Facebook and see what happens when a girl posts a new photo. Her friends immediately write in the comments “How beautiful you are!”, and men do this much less often - perhaps fearing that their intentions will be misinterpreted. In short, men and women communicate differently, but it is clear that there will always be exceptions to the rules.
Floor and computer
A person can often determine gender from a written text - but why is a computer worse? The task of automatic gender determination is one of the central ones in computational linguistics. Marketers will be very happy about her decision: for example, they would be interested in collecting all the reviews on vacuum cleaners on the Internet and finding out what men and women think about them. But engineers have not yet been able to achieve 100% accuracy: the best modern algorithms can determine the gender of the author of a text with an accuracy of 80–90%. To do this, easily formalized features are extracted from the text (the number of combinations of the form “I + verb in the masculine past tense”, the proportion of punctuation marks from the total number of characters, and so on), and then a statistical model is built that predicts who is most likely to , wrote this text. The signs may also be non-trivial: for example, it turned out that the formality of the style is more likely to indicate male authorship than female authorship. And in order to evaluate this parameter, you can count the shares of parts of speech: formal, and therefore masculine, texts are characterized by nouns, adjectives and prepositions, and feminine texts are characterized by pronouns, verbs, adverbs and interjections.
What do men and women need?
In 2011, Yandex published a study that showed how male and female search queries differ. It turned out that men's queries are on average shorter than women's (3.2 vs. 3.5 words). At the same time, men make typos more often, and also use numbers and the Latin alphabet more often. Women are more likely to ask questions in the form of questions (how to lose weight, how to kiss correctly) and use color names almost twice as often. There is also a difference in the topics: men more often ask about information technology and electronics, while women ask about relationships between people, children, clothes and job searches. Therefore, for example, the request “Grand Theft Auto 5 download” is almost certainly male (it contains the name of the computer game, the Latin alphabet, the number, and a typo), and the request “where to buy a cheap jacket in Moscow” is female (it contains form of a question, and there are as many as six words in it).
The lecturer used the following materials:
1) W.Tecumseh Fitch. Vocal Tract Length Perception and the Evolution of Language. PhD Thesis. 1994. P. 23.
2) E.V. Perekhvalskaya. Gender and grammar // Materials of the international scientific conference “Language - Gender - Tradition”, April 25–27, 2002, St. Petersburg, 2002. pp. 110–118.
3) P.Kunsmann. Gender, Status and Power in Discourse Behavior of Men and Women. Linguistik Online 5. 2000.
4) Janet Holmes. Paying Compliments: A Sex-Preferential Positive Politeness Strategy. Journal of Pragmatics 12. 1988. Pp. 445–465.
5) Arjun Mukherjee, and Bing Liu. Improving Gender Classification of Blog Authors. In Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2010. pp. 207–217.
- Fight for justice
- How about talking?...
In Japan, for more than a thousand years, men and women spoke different languages. Amazingly, until today, the Japanese language was officially divided into masculine and feminine. Once upon a time, women did not have the right to speak a man's language; if their vocabulary was used by a representative of the stronger sex, he was considered a person of unconventional orientation. In addition to the Japanese, residents and residents of the Caribbean islands spoke different languages. Some sources indicate that violation of norms was considered a crime and entailed appropriate punishment.
In fact, this distinction of language based on gender should not come as a shock. You probably thought more than once that you and your significant other spoke different languages? But this is not a reason for frustration, but a great opportunity to master another “foreign” language and learn to understand your partner.
Fight for justice
Differences in the language of men and women are not only a reason for gossip in their circles, but also the subject of study of a separate science - gender linguistics. It is she who examines how the psychology of the sexes is reflected in speech, that is, the speech behavior of representatives of each of them.
One of the impetus for the development of this science was, oddly enough, the feminist movement. The fact is that human language is aimed at the male part of the population. This is proven by a number of examples. Have you ever seen a sign at the entrance to the medical office “Doctor Polonskaya A.M.”? Or a competition called “Teacher of the Year”? As a rule, these “female” options for naming professions sound somewhat dismissive, with a dose of irony. That is why we will call a female specialist a doctor, teacher, director, that is, using a masculine noun. Another proof: in many languages, “man” and “man” are the same word. But we will find more offensive confirmation of injustice in the Chinese language. There, the word, as is known, consists of several hieroglyphs, each of which denotes a concept. So, the hieroglyph “woman” is included in words such as envy, jealousy, illness, prostitute, hatred... It is completely unclear why women did not please the male part of the Chinese population.
Apparently, it was these and many other unjust features of language that prompted those who fought for justice (by no means “fighters”!) to organize an important branch of gender linguistics - feminist linguistics. One of the results of this was a certain “equality” of male and female vocabulary in European languages. But it seems our great and mighty feminist movement has been spared. Maybe for the better? Maybe we should perceive this as a nice feature of the structure of a patriarchal (still) society and look for the key to mutual understanding?
How about talking?...
If a woman spends hours discussing a question on the phone that a man would solve in a matter of seconds, this fact does not indicate any mental abnormalities of hers. This is completely normal for the female half, since communication is the most important component of her existence. Many women's need for communication is so great that if they don't have time to chat during the workday, it negatively affects their mood and productivity. At some “women’s” enterprises, even 5-10 minute breaks for communication were introduced. In others, the employees' desks were rearranged so that they could talk without being distracted from their work. The measures turned out to be economically feasible! This, of course, does not mean that men can do just fine without communication, but they need less time for it, and the motivations for communication between the sexes are completely different. It turns out that women's conversations are aimed at relationships, men's conversations are aimed at gaining authority.
That is, it is important for young ladies to feel like “birds of a feather,” and for men, on the contrary, to feel independent and different from others. If it is important for a woman to hear from a friend that she has a similar problem, each representative of the stronger sex is inclined to think that his situation is exceptional.
Men speak briefly, to the point, rarely using figurative means. Their speech is (usually!) smooth intonation, and it doesn’t matter whether they are expressing their feelings for you or talking about the fall of the dollar. The woman, on the contrary, will attack you with a richly intonated speech: “It’s sooo raining there today, it’s just a nightmare!”
The same applies to correspondence on social networks and instant messengers. Let's say you received the following message from your lover: “Good morning.” What might a representative of the fair sex think? “He didn’t put a smiley face, didn’t use an exclamation point, didn’t even call him sunshine. Something must have happened to him, or, even worse, he lost interest in me.” Meanwhile, the author of the message is most likely in a great mood, and it would not have occurred to him what secret meanings his deeply lyrical message hides. If a man does not use appropriate means to convey his emotions in speech (intonation, diminutive words), then in writing he will avoid them even more so. So, if you notice the absence of endless emoticons and exclamation marks in a man’s message, do not be upset: it means absolutely nothing. It’s another matter if this kind of message came from a woman. An unkind period at the end of a message (or, even worse, the absence of a punctuation mark in principle) can portend anything.
There are still many gender differences in language. For example, women often use interrogative forms of sentences, men - affirmative ones. The former usually use complex constructions, the latter - simple statements, but logically connected. Most often, women use polite forms; they strive to speak according to the norms of the language, while men often violate these norms and tend to use profanity. A lady usually uses exclamations such as “Oh!”, “Oh-oh-oh,” and so on, whereas in “macho” speech they are absent. All differences in language behavior are explained by different mental structures and upbringing stereotypes. “Boys shouldn’t cry”, “girls shouldn’t swear” - all these rules, familiar from childhood, often shape the speech behavior of both sexes. However, we should not forget that everything is purely individual. We talk only about traditional cases.
Silence is golden, or how to find a common language with a man
“We cannot predict how our word will respond...”, or how to find a common language with a woman
It is impossible to fit such a difficult thing as communication between a man and a woman into a few (even the most “golden”!) rules. However, remember: in order for a representative of the opposite sex to understand you, you need to learn to speak their language. Peace and harmony to you!
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