CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Language is a
social-cultural-geographical phenomenon. There is a deep relationship between
language, culture and society. It is in society that man acquires and uses
language.[1]
The
study of correlation between the use of language and "the structure of
society" forms the core of sociolinguistics which also accounts for the
points such as "the context and manner of the interaction" (in a
market, house, church ; loudly or whispering), "the relationship between
speaker and addressee" (close friends, employer-employee, mother-child)
and "the social backgrounds of the speaker and addressee" (sex, age,
social class,etc.) (Radford, et.al, 1999:16).
Language
as social, value-loaded practice, which reflects an intricate network of
social, political, cultural, and age relationships within a society. For
instance, in a community where men are socially superior to women, linguistic
differences between men and women are only one example of more extensive
differences having to do with the social structure of the community itself.
There is no denying that linguistic behaviour is not to be kept separate from
society and its values. The slightest difference in the language of the two
sexes reveals that women are not on the same footing as men.[2]
CHAPTER II
DISCUSSION
A.
LANGUAGE
Languages
are constantly changing, sometimes into entirely new varieties of speech,
leading to subtle differences in how we present ourselves to others. This
revealing account brings together twelve leading specialists from the fields of
linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, and psychology, to explore the
fascinating relationship between language, culture, and social interaction.
Language
is seen as arising in this framework, which can be variously conceived as we
shall see, and fulfilling some function within it, but the framework itself
precedes, or at least can be characterized independently of language.[3]
Language provides many windows
on speakers’ attitudes to themselves and others. Our everyday speech encodes a
surprising amount of information on our attitudes. In this section, we start to
investigate attitudes by looking at how attitudes to women and men are
reflected in language.
B.
SEX
All
human beings are differentiated as males and females with respect to the
biological basis, in fact, not only human beings but also criterions, duties
and expectations in all cultures differentiate. The term is increasingly restricted in
sociolinguistics to refer to a biologically or physiologically based
distinction between males and females, as opposed to the more social notion of
gender[4].
Not grammatical
gender (i.e., different
classes of noun
that may be called
‘masculine’, ‘feminine’).
Not sex of speaker
which (largely)
reflects biological
or physiological
differences between
people. Used
increasingly in
sociolinguistics to
indicate a sociaidentity that
emerges or is constructed through social actions.[5]
B.1 Sex In Language
Sexim in language refers to the concept of whether language discriminates
against women in its lexicon and in its use (grammar). As for the relationship
between language use and sex and gender, it can be said that language may
reflect and maintain social attitudes towards men and women. To support this
view Crystal (1987) indicates that language sets up a "male-oriantated
view" of the world and incites sexual bias which causes disparagement of
the part which women take in society. This discrimination is seen in its
grammar and lexicon.
a. In
Grammar
The most apparent reflection of the discrimination in language is
obviously seen in grammar. The problem is originated from lacking sex-neutral
use of third person singular pronoun in English. In that view, generic `he` can
be dealed in two perspectives with respect to gender bias and formality. In
terms of gender bias, the use of indefinite pronouns such as anyone and
everyone procreates the problem. Although these pronouns refer to both sexes,
the pronoun `he`, coined by prescriptivists, is used after these indefinite pronouns
in the sentences, regardless `he` is the masculine pronoun. For example;
Everyone left his seats after the bomb denouncement. In that sentence both
`everyone` and `his` refer to both men and women.
b. In
Lexicon
The other important reflection of sexism in language is in lexicon. The
problem is caused by the use of 'male' features in a sex-neutral context.
Moreover, another lexical fields that are taken into account as errors
resulting in discrimination in language are marital status, asymmetries ( in
other words, marked and unmarked forms), jobs and pejorative words about women.
As for the
asymmetries or marked and unmarked forms, English makes distinctions of a
sex-based kind, for example, actor-actress, host-hostess, etc. What we
understand from asymmetry is that among male/female pairs, most of the male
terms are unmarked, whereas, female terms are formed by affixing a bound
morpheme or by compounding. As an illustration;
|
Male
|
Female
|
|
Actor
Host Author Count |
Actress
Hostess Autheress Countess |
B.2
Manners of male and female speech
Just like the other concepts causing linguistic variation such as age,
region or religion, gender has a considerable effect on linguistic variation.
For two sexes get into interaction continuously, this intercourse strives to
prevent the ascension of linguistic differences between men and women. In spite
of this, there exist remarkable linguistic distinctions in the manner of male
and female speech.
1.
Gender
preferential differences
Gender preferential differences are met much more common in the languages
of the world than gender exclusive differences. In this phenomenon men and
women use distinctive lexical items, for example, women tend to recognize more
precise terms for colors such as mauve, burgundy, ecru, crimson, herringbone,
lavender, yet, men usually recognize more types of cars such as Cherokee,
Mercedes, diesel. The pitch of speech, which clarifies that women's voices are
higher than men's, is the other variable differentiation. Non-standard usage of
language, including double negation and invariable don't, the distinct topics
that sexes choose during an interaction such as relationships, sports, beauty,
sex and so on and the behaviours of the sexes in an interaction form the core
of gender preferential differences.
a. Lexical varieties
In the area of morphology and vocabulary, there are many studies focusing
on English, for the lexical distinctions that men and women make in different
contexts are very noticable. For example, while women possess a wide range of
specific color names such as mauve, beige, aquamarine, magenta, rose, paisley,
burgundy, chartreuse, and crimson, most men do not. In addition, women
frequently use such words and phrases as fantastic, adorable, precious,
exquisite, admiring, darling, divine, lovely, sweet, such fun, cute, thrilling,
beautiful- as Maltz and Borker (1982) indicate that according to Goodwin
(1980a), girls generally use the inclusive forms such as: 'let's' , 'we gonna'
, 'we could' , and 'we gotta' in their activities.
b. Pitch
The other difference is found in the physiology of both sexes. That is
the pitch of speech. The average pitch of women's speech (the degree of vocal
fold vibration) is conventionally agreed that it is higher than the pitch of
men.
c . Non-standard Usage
The third concept is
non-standard usage of language. Firstly, to explain what we mean by
non-standard and standard English would be useful for us to percieve this part.
Standard English is the speech variety that stands in all English-speaking
countries. Besides this single variety, there are, of course, other varieties
which are called non-standard. Relying on many studies, women generally choose
and use forms which are much closer to the standard ones more frequently than
men, who belong to the same social status or age. Non-standard English is
examined in two perspectives which are non-standard grammatical features and
non-standard phonological features.
Among non-standard grammatical features, the first 'oft-cited' (thr term
of Southerland and Katamba, 1996) characteristic is double negation. For
example, the first sentence illustrates a multiple negation;
1) I
did not do nothing.
2) did
not do anything.
3) I
did something.
As for non-standard phonological features the realizations of (ing)
results in problem. There are two realizations of (ing), which are [in] the
non-standard one and [I?] the standard one. For example, the pronounciation of
'walking' may be different, according to different speakers, like [walkin] or
[walki?].
d. Conversation
The last feature that men and women show distinctions is conversational
styles. Gender patterns in conversational styles consist of turn-taking, topic
selection and control, minimal responses / backchannel behavior / sympathy,
interruption and overlapping speech, and the initiation and ending of
conversation. These characteristics can be explained seperately as women's
features and men's features.
Firstly, as one of women's features, a striking difference in male and
female contributions to conversation is women's great tendency to ask
questions.
The second feature is the frequent use of minimal responses such as 'mm
hmm', 'really?', 'is that so?'. To keep the conversation going, women show a
great tendency to do conversational backchanneling or minimal responses the
meanings of which are ' I'm listening to you, please continue' but for men ' I
agree with you' or at least ' I follow your arguement so far.'. Therefore,
women are listening more often than men are agreeing. The pronouns 'you' and
'we' are also seen frequently in women's speech to stress the existance of the
other speakers.
As for men's features, they often interrupt the speech of others,
especially the speech of women, take longer turns in an interaction, challenge
or dispute the utterences of their partners, moreover, ignore the comments of
other speakers by responding slowly which is described by Zimmerman and West
(1975) as 'delayed minimal response' (Maltz and Borker,1982:198) or by
responding reluctantly.
2. Gender Exclusive Differences
Gender exclusive differentiation means different speech varieties used by
men and women in few societies. In these societies, a woman or a man may not be
allowed to speak the variety of the other gender. In that sense, the varieties
are refered to gender-exclusive.
To identify and classify the distinctions seen in male and female speech
in English is more difficult since there are no accurate classes that are
allowed to be used by only one sex such as grammatical forms, phonological
varieties and lexical items as in Japanese or Koasati. Yet, there are few
frequent differences. For example, the words, phrases and intensifiers that
women use mostly are super, lovely, great beautiful, adorable, darling,
Goodness me, Oh dear, so and such.
Moreover, it is inconceivable for a woman to use "strong"
expletives, such as damn or shit; she can only say oh dear
or fudge. A syntactic feature that Robin Lakoff believes is more widely
used by women is the tag question, as in You'd never do that, would you?
As Fasold (1990: 104) comments, "greater use of this form by women could
mean that women, more often than men, are presenting themselves as unsure of
their opinions and thereby as not really having opinions that count very
much."
C.
CULTURE
Culture in linguistics
is described as socially acquired knowledge of the world, as well as attitudes
towards it. With the acquisition of a mother tongue people acquire a system of
categorizing the entities in the surrounding world and terms used for
describing personal experiences. A category is a set with some
common properties, and it is said that when new vocabulary is learnt it is in
fact inheriting sets of category labels. Therefore, depending on the culture in
which a speaker was brought up the amount of words available in language for
describing certain phenomena might vary. For example in Norwegian there is a
distinction between ‘male parents mother; - farmor; and ‘female
parent’s mother’ – mormor, while both of those terms are expressed by
one English word – grandmother.
Language with its different varieties is the subject matter
of socio-linguistics. Socio-linguistics studies the varied linguistic
realizations of socio-cultural meanings which in a sense are both familiar and
unfamiliar and the occurrence of everyday social interactions which are
nevertheless relative to particular cultures, societies, social groups, speech
communities, languages, dialects, varieties, styles. That is why language
variation generally forms a part of socio-linguistic study. Language can vary,
not only from one individual to the next, but also from one sub-section of
speech-community (family, village, town, region) to another. People of
different age, sex, social classes, occupations, or cultural groups in the same community
will show variations in their speech. Thus language varies in geographical and
social space. According to socio-linguists, a language is code.
The power of language to reflect culture and influence thinking was first
proposed by an American linguist and anthropologist, Edward Sapir (1884–1939),
and his student, Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941). The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
stated that the way we think and view the world is determined by our language
(Anderson & Lightfoot, 2002; Crystal, 1987; Hayes, Ornstein, & Gage,
1987). Instances of cultural language differences are evidenced in that some
languages have specific words for concepts whereas other languages use several
words to represent a specific concept. For example, the Arabic language
includes many specific words for designating a certain type of horse or camel
(Crystal, 1987). To make such distinctions in English, where specific words do
not exist, adjectives would be used preceding the concept label, such as
quarter horse or dray horse.
Cultural differences have also been noted in the ways in which language
is used pragmatically. In our American culture, new skills are typically taught
and learned through verbal instruction (Slobin, 1979). In some cultures, new
skills are learned through nonverbal observation. A distinction has also been
made between cultures that encourage independent learning and those that
encourage cooperative learning (McLeod, 1994).
D.
Relation between language and sex.
In language refers to the concept of whether
language discriminates against women in its lexicon and in its use (grammar).
As for the relationship between language use and sex and gender, it can be said
that language may reflect and maintain social attitudes towards men and women.
To support this view Crystal (1987) indicates that language sets up a
"male-oriantated view" of the world and incites sexual bias which
causes disparagement of the part which women take in society. This
discrimination is seen in its grammar and lexicon.
In general, men's and women's roles in language
variation. Within this variation we've seen certain distinctions in their
grammar, lexicon, word choice, topic selection, pronounciation and amount of
talks. Also few of the world languages, in which males and females exhibit
great differences in their speech, have been examined. Finally, in the last
part, you see the factors causing this discrimination and find the answer of
whether the language itself is sexist or it is the society. Briefly, all these
differences among sexes in language result from the discriminating attitudes of
the society towards men and women.
E.
Relation
between language and culture.
Language
with its different varieties is the subject matter of socio-linguistics.
Socio-linguistics studies the varied linguistic realizations of socio-cultural
meanings which in a sense are both familiar and unfamiliar and the occurrence
of everyday social interactions which are nevertheless relative to particular
cultures, societies, social groups, speech communities, languages, dialects,
varieties, styles. That is why language variation generally forms a part of
socio-linguistic study. Language can vary, not only from one individual to the
next, but also from one sub-section of speech-community (family, village, town,
region) to another. People of different age, sex, social classes, occupations,
or cultural groups in the same community will show variations in their speech.
Thus language varies in geographical and social space. According to
socio-linguists, a language is code. Every individual have some
idiosyncratic linguistic features in his or her use of language. language and
culture are complementary to each other. Language cannot live without society.
Since sociolinguistics is based on language varieties. These varieties are due
to cultural and social needs rather than interlingua pressures. Even
language of an individual varies from occasion to occasion. We find that there
are different levels of formalities with in a language and their use depends of
speaker’s purpose, mode and audience. Moreover it also varies due to
socio-economic position of individual or group. This variation of language with
social difference, makes this notion more firm that language is social and
cultural phenomenon and inextricably tied with social and cultural traditions.
The study of Esperanto also revealed this fact that language and culture are
inseparable.
CHAPTER III
CONCLUSION
Language is a
social-cultural-geographical phenomenon. There is a deep relationship between
language, culture and sex. It is in society that many acquires and uses
language
Sexim in language refers to the concept
of whether language discriminates against women in its lexicon and in its use
(grammar). As for the relationship between language use and sex and gender, it
can be said that language may reflect and maintain social attitudes towards men
and women.
Culture in linguistics
is described as socially acquired knowledge of the world, as well as attitudes
towards it. With the acquisition of a mother tongue people acquire a system of
categorizing the entities in the surrounding world and terms used for
describing personal experiences. A category is a set with some
common properties, and it is said that when new vocabulary is learnt it is in
fact inheriting sets of category labels.
So, language
cannot life without society, language and culture complementary each other.
REFFERENCES
Chaer, Abdul dan Leoni
Agustina. 2010. Sosiolinguistik. Jakarta: Rineka Cipta
Jourdan,
Christine and Kevin Tuite. 2006. Language,
Culture and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
http://edition.englishclub.com/category/tefl-articles/languageandsex
http://neoenglishsystem.blogspot.com/2010/12/socio-linguistics
Meyerhoff,
Miriam. 2006. Introducing Sociolinguistics. New York: Routledge Taylor and
Francis Group
[1]
http://neoenglishsystem.blogspot.com/2010/12/socio-linguistics
[2]
http://edition.englishclub.com/category/tefl-articles/languageandsex
[3] Christine Jourdan and Kevin
Tuite, Language, Culture and Society (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press,2006), p.16.
[4] Miriam Meyerhoff, Introducing Sociolinguistics (New York:
Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2006) p. 201.
[5] Ibid.
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