Language and Sex: The Relationship of Language to Behavior

Long before linguists have focused on the role language plays in the position of women in society, they had studied and are still studying the presence of lexical, phonological, and morphological forms that are used only or predominantly by speakers of one sex or the other. Now linguists are interested in sociolinguistic variation: men's and women's speech is investigated along with social status, style, age, and ethnicity. Studies of linguistic variation related to sex in some Arab, American, and British communities reveal the fact that women are more conservative than men in their tendency to standard linguistic forms. Women are sensitive to linguistic variants that are socially stigmatized; therefore, they consistently produce forms which approach those of the standard language. And because women feel socially insecure, they are more status conscious than men are in the equivalent social roles. It follows from this that women tend more than men to use the forms of language that carry higher status connotations. In this paper, the author will attempt to investigate the hypothesis that the same holds true for sex-linked variation not only in highly sophisticated countries but also in still developing and non-developing communities which have been studied.