Linguistic Reflections of Sexism in Everyday Spoken Discourse

Language is an essential tool of human communication and human beings are imbued with an innate capacity to use language for communication. There are different personal variables that could be observed in the individual's use of language most especially in verbal communication. However, one of the potent observable indices in noting differences in human communication is the issue of gender. The concept of culture has been the most popularly recognized issue that can easily affect why, which and how language is used and as such, sex difference is an important factor. Allied with this is the concept of language and power. With an overview of many scholarly works, this work has located some differences observable in the language use of both male and female genders in different discourse patterns. Just as we have sex differences, there are also differences in the patterns of discourse of the sexes because we have been specially created on the bases of sex and gender. This work tries to examine the pattern of discourse between the two sexes with a view to locating the inherent differences in their use of language.