Women’s language vs. men’s language

Gender distinctive usage of language

Gender influences the distribution of social roles and economic and social activities one gets access to. These activities, in their turn, influence language use.

Gender influences

-belief that women’s language should be more refined than men’s, -Vocabulary range as an improvement,

R. Lakoff - vocabulary differences

-Precise color terms, -Affective adjectives (adorable), - Women use super polite forms and hedges (you know, well, kind of)

Mary Talbot (1998)

The context of interaction determines the function of a linguistic form. The problem of the inequality of men and women is not a linguistic but rather a social one.