Language and Gender


Book Description

Updated and restructured new edition of a textbook for courses in language and gender which is accessible to non-linguists.




Women, Men and Language


Book Description

Women, Men and Language has long been established as a seminal text in the field of language and gender, providing an account of the many ways in which language and gender intersect. In this pioneering book, bestselling author Jennifer Coates explores linguistic gender differences, introducing the reader to a wide range of sociolinguistic research in the field. Written in a clear and accessible manner, this book introduces the idea of gender as a social construct, and covers key topics such as conversational practice, same sex talk, conversational dominance, and children’s acquisition of gender-differentiated language, discussing the social and linguistic consequences of these patterns of talk. Here reissued as a Routledge Linguistics Classic, this book contains a brand new preface which situates this text in the modern day study of language and gender, covering the postmodern shift in the understanding of gender and language, and assessing the book’s impact on the field. Women, Men and Language continues to be essential reading for any student or researcher working in the area of language and gender.




Gender, Language and Culture


Book Description

This book analyzes the relationship between gender, age and role in Japanese television interviews. It covers a wide range of topics on Japanese communication; cultural and gender variables are interwoven in the interpretation of the findings. The study shows how participants interact through language and how they project their identities in the context of the interview. Based on a qualitative analysis, speech in mixed and same gender interactions is analysed, turntaking, terms of address and aizuchi (listener's responses) are examined. The findings reveal interesting characteristics of all-female interactions, such as the influence of age that appears to be more important than gender; an observation that has repercussions in the study of gender and language differences in modern Japan. This book is an interdisciplinary study that integrates notions of politeness and theories of gender and language, and will be of interest to people researching Japanese culture and communication, gender studies and institutional language.




Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity I


Book Description

The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language. The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple in grammatical gender systems, whether the distribution of gender systems across the world’s languages relates to the language ecology and social history of speech communities. Contributors demonstrate how the complexity of gender systems can be studied synchronically, both in individual languages and over large cross-linguistic samples, and diachronically, by exploring how gender systems change over time. In addition to three chapters on the theoretical foundations of gender complexity, volume one contains six chapters on grammatical gender and complexity in individual languages and language families of Africa, New Guinea, and South Asia. This volume is complemented by volume two, which consists of three chapters providing diachronic and typological case studies, followed by a final chapter discussing old and new theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of the dynamics of gender complexity.




The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality


Book Description

Significantly expanded and updated, the second edition of The Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality brings together a team of the leading specialists in the field to create a comprehensive overview of key historical themes and issues, along with methodologies and cutting-edge research topics. Examines the dynamic ways that women and men develop and manage gendered identities through their talk, presenting data and case studies from interactions in a range of social contexts and different communities Substantially updated for the second edition, including a new introduction, 24 newly-commissioned chapters, ten updated chapters, and a comprehensive index Includes new chapters on research in non-English speaking countries – from Asia to South America – and cutting-edge topics such as language, gender, and popular culture; language and sexual identities; and language, gender, and socio-phonetics New sections focus on key themes and issues in the field, such as methodological approaches to language and gender, incorporating new chapters on conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and variation theory Provides unrivalled geographic coverage and an essential resource for a wide range of disciplines, from linguistics, psychology, sociology, and anthropology to communication and gender studies




Grammatical Gender in Maltese


Book Description

Is grammatical gender merely stored as a syntactic property of nouns, or is it computed according to a noun’s semantic, morphological and phonological properties every time it is required? In many languages, gender appears to resist systematic treatment and can even cause problems for non-native learners. Native speakers of these languages appear to have no difficulty in assigning the correct grammatical gender to thousands of nouns in their language. Being an offshoot of Arabic, Maltese inherited a system comprising two gender categories, masculine and feminine. Numerous nouns were introduced in Maltese through contact with Sicilian and subsequently with Italian, two languages that also have a masculine/feminine-based gender system. However, the more recent contact, with English, seems to have complicated matters. This work investigates how grammatical gender functions in Maltese, how native speakers apply different criteria to classify nouns, and how this choice is reflected in syntactic agreement. It also takes into consideration the wider psycholinguistic context that influences the choice of category, and provides valuable data for theories that seek to explain the linguistic categorization of nouns in various languages.




A Beginner's Guide to Language and Gender


Book Description

A Beginner’s Guide to Language and Gender offers a broad and accessible introduction to the study of gender and language use for those new to the subject. The book introduces the theoretical and practical perspectives, including relevant frameworks necessary to understand ways in which language interacts with gender/sex in various settings, including: in media, in schools, in places of business, in places of worship, and at home.




Gender and Language in Sub-Saharan Africa


Book Description

Gender and Language in Sub-Saharan Africa: Tradition, Struggle and Change is the first book to bring together the topics of language and gender, African languages, and gender in African contexts, and it does so in a descriptive, explanatory and critical way. Including fascinating new work and new, often challenging data from Botswana, Chad, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, this collection looks at some ‘traditional’ uses of language in relation to the gender of its speakers and the gendered nature of the languages themselves; it also identifies and explores social change in terms of both gender and sexuality, as reflected in and constructed by language and discourse. The contributions to this volume are accessibly written and will be of interest to students and established academics working on African sociolinguistics and discourse, as well as those whose interest is language, gender and sexuality.




Gender Across Languages


Book Description

This is the second of a three-volume comprehensive reference work on “Gender across Languages”, which provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical, lexical, referential, social) in 30 languages of diverse genetic, typological and socio-cultural backgrounds. Among the issues discussed for each language are the following: What are the structural properties of the language that have an impact on the relations between language and gender? What are the consequences for areas such as agreement, pronominalisation and word-formation? How is specification of and abstraction from (referential) gender achieved in a language? Is empirical evidence available for the assumption that masculine/male expressions are interpreted as generics? Can tendencies of variation and change be observed, and have alternatives been proposed for a more equal linguistic treatment of women and men? This volume (and the previous two volumes) will provide the much-needed basis for explicitly comparative analyses of gender across languages. All chapters are original contributions and follow a common general outline developed by the editors. The book contains rich bibliographical and indexical material.Languages of Volume 2: Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, Hindi, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Vietnamese, Welsh.




Gender, Language and Discourse


Book Description

Is language sexist? Do women and men speak different languages? Gender, Language and Discourse uniquely examines the contribution that psychological research - in particular, discursive psychology - has made to answering these questions. Until now, books on gender and language have tended to be from the sociolinguistic perspective and have focused on one of two issues - sexism in language or gender differences in speech. This book considers both issues and develops the idea that they shouldn't be viewed as mutually exclusive endeavours but rather as part of the same process - the social construction of gender. Ann Weatherall highlights the fresh insights that a social constructionist approach has made to these debates, and presents recent theoretical developments and empirical work in discursive psychology relevant to gender and language. Gender, Language and Discourse provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date discussion of the gender and language field from a psychological perspective. It will be invaluable to students and researchers in social psychology, cultural studies, education, linguistic anthropology and women's studies.