Speech differences between women and men on the wrong track?

Abstract

ABSTRACTOver the last few years the methods and techniques used in sociolinguistics have aroused keen interest and have continually been improved. Yet the claims that have been made about differences of degree between the language used by women and that used by men are often based on research methods which seem to be anything but reliable. On the basis of a corpus of 587 utterances produced in buying a train ticket, an investigation was made of whether there is a statistically significant difference between women and men in certain aspects of their language use which have been mentioned in the literature: the number of words used to deal with a set task, diminutives, civilities, forms of language expressing insecurity (repetitions, hesitations, self-corrections, requests for information). In addition to the independent variable of sex of speaker, three other variables were introduced: sex of addressee, age of speaker, and time of ticket purchase (rush-hour or normal). The results of our investigation indicate that there are few significant differences between the language used by women and that used by men in this particular situation, with regard to the variables mentioned above. As a consequence, this investigation has demonstrated once again that intuitions should be considered critically. It is remarkable, however, that sex of addressee seems to affect almost all of the variables under consideration. Consequently, the results strongly suggest that anyone who wants to investigate language by means of interviews must take into account the fact that the kind of language used does not depend only on the informant, but just as much on the addressee. (Language and sex, investigation methods, influence of addressee on speaker.)