International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Scholarship on gender and discourse has a long, interdisciplinary history. Anthropologists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries documented differences between women's and men's speech in non-European cultures. However, gender differences within cultures have never been sufficient to constitute separate women's and men's languages. Around the early twentieth century, academics' attention also turned to the English language. Gender and language variation was an early research topic for linguists. One bold but inaccurate view was that a larger variability in articulateness among men than women was evidence of men's greater intelligence. Psychological studies dating from the 1930s and 1940s charted the emergence of sex differences in language use. A longstanding but still controversial claim is that of an innate female superiority in verbal ability ( Weatherall 2002 ). A feminist concern with language and communication also has a long history (→  Feminist Communication Ethics ). Publications from the first women's movement in the late nineteenth century noted the use of diminutive terms to address women and not men. The significance of women changing their name on marriage was also criticized. However, it was the second women's movement starting in the 1960s that generated research on the relationships between gender, language, and power. Feminists documented how language, ... log in or subscribe to read full text