- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
-
Sparkle (0)
I recently jumped into a conversation on sexist terminology and women’s talk when I could not help but disagree with a male colleague who argued that women’s talk in mixed-sex interactions is usually characterized by “disfluency” and the use of approval-seeking questions. While this may be true to an extent, I usually find that within female interactions/discourse, my female friends and I resort to epistemic modal forms (such as “perhaps,” “maybe,” “possibly”) as well as approval-seeking questions to express interpersonal sensitivity and unity. To me, resorting to this terminology signifies co-operativity rather than uncertainty.
Upon his insistence that women’s use of certain linguistic forms often reflects their lack of confidence, I stopped to ask him what his understanding of “language” was. As he searched for an answer, I could not help but accept the thought that language is essentially man-made. In a patriarchal order, it is men who have the power to construct language, linguistic categories, and meanings. As members of the dominant group, having ascertained that their male identity is constant, males are not required to modify their understandings: they are never referred to as “she” or “woman.” But having ascertained their female identity, women must constantly be available for clues as to whether or not they are included in a reference, for sometimes they are included in the term “he” or “man” and sometimes they are not.
As a female, I personally often feel linguistically invisible and generally predisposed to see more male images in the world. Why is it surprising, then, if many women seek confirmation of their inclusion in the “human species”?
As our conversation proceeded, I wondered whether gender-based language reform would ever be a possibility in an effort to dismantle the mutated nature of females or whether the structure of language could be defied to simply make women more linguistically visible.
