Men And Women In Sociolinguistics

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Generally, men and women have distinctive characters in many aspects; how they behave and are supposed to behave, how they respond to their surrounding and how their surroundings ‘sense’ them, and so on. If men and women seem all so different in many ways, how about the language they use? Some of us may bring up questions like ‘do men and women also speak in different language?’, which is easy to answer; of course not. It is somehow impossible even just to imagine it, since we could not possibly understand each other if we speak in different sounds, words, and sentence structures. The fact is, it is not the language that is different, but how men and women use it. In sociolinguistics—a study of how society affects the way a language is used…show more content…
When speaking, women use more hedges, fillers, and tag questions than men do. For example, when a woman is asked for her opinion about something, she might answer with “well, it is sort of silly”, which means she adds the words well and sort of as the hedges. These hedges, fillers, and tag questions are usually used to soften their words, which shows that women tend to speak in a polite manner. On the contrary, men use less of them, and this makes their ways of speaking are seen as less polite than women. Unlike women, men usually will answer straightforwardly when they are asked for an opinion and say directly whether something is good or…show more content…
Unlike men, women generally use more standard form of language. Men, however, tend to speak using vernacular language—the most colloquial variety in a person’s linguistic repertoire. This difference of language choice between men and women is explained in several theories in sociolinguistics. The first explanation is based on the social status; women use more standard language because they are more status-conscious than men. Since standard speech forms often associated with high social status, women use it to achieve higher status. This theory is specifically applied for women who do not have paid employment, because they cannot use their job as a tool to claim such status (Holmes, 2008). Other theory says that women use standard form of language because they are considered as the guardian of society values which means they are supposed to be a role model for her family, so they should talk correctly and standardly, especially when they are speaking to their children (Holmes, 2008). In addition, vernacular forms of language usually express machismo, as they carry macho connotations of masculinity and toughness (Holmes, 2008). This shows that society often associates vernacular forms as men’s language, and so do the standard forms for
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