Abstract
The use of euphemisms is a known driver of language change. It has been proposed that women use euphemisms more than men. Although there have been several studies investigating gender differences in language, the claim about euphemism usage has not been tested comprehensively through time. If women do use euphemisms more, this could mean that women also lead the formation of new euphemisms and language change over time. Using four large diachronic text corpora of English, we evaluate the claim that women use euphemisms more than men through a quantitative analysis. We assembled a list of 106 euphemism-taboo pairs to analyze their relative use through time by each gender in the corpora. Contrary to the existing belief, our results show that women do not use euphemisms with a higher proportion than men. We repeated the analysis using different subsets of the euphemism-taboo pairs list and found that our result was robust. Our study indicates that in a broad range of settings involving both speech and writing, and with varying degrees of formality, women do not use or form euphemisms more than men.
Highlights
What role does gender play in language change and use? This question has long been a matter of discussion among linguists
Some of the pairs come from articles which discuss a perceived societal preference for one phrase over another (Collier, 2010; Hayes-Bautista and Chapa, 1987; Martin, 1991; Nowrasteh, 2017; O’Conner and Kellerman, 2012; Sagi et al, 2015; Silver, 2015; Woelfel, 2019; Yandell, 2015), while others we found in euphemism dictionaries and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (Neaman and Silver, 1995; OED; Rawson, 1981)
We first analyze for all euphemism-taboo pairs, the number of times they are used by each gender, and for how many of these pairs women have a higher euphemism proportion than men do
Summary
What role does gender play in language change and use? This question has long been a matter of discussion among linguists. Lakoff discusses the causes of these differences and what they tell us about women’s role in society. The difference we focus on in this study is one she mentions only briefly, namely that women use euphemisms more than men do Jespersen (2013, originally published 1922) claims that women use euphemisms more often, and discusses this supposed characteristic of women’s language at length. Both Lakoff and Jespersen believe that women use euphemisms more out of a desire to speak more tactfully and to avoid directly mentioning “unladylike” topics. Jespersen states that women have often invented euphemisms to avoid mentioning “certain parts of the human body and certain natural functions” (2013, p. 245)
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