Matakuliah
Tahun
: G0362/Sociolingustics
: 2007
Jender, kesopanan, dan stereotip
Pertemuan 11
Learning Outcomes
Pada akhir pertemuan ini, diharapkan mahasiswa
akan mampu :
• Mahasiswa dapat menunjukkan perbedaan bahasa lakilaki dan perempuan
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Outline Materi
• Perbedaan arti kata gender dan sex
• Bahasa perempuan dan kepercaya-dirian
• Perbedaan bahasa laki-laki dan perempuan
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Sex and Gender
• Definitions
– Sex refers to the physical characteristics that
someone is born with (male or female);
– Gender refers to the attitudes, preferences, which are
not always related to the physical characteristics.
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Women’s and Men’s language
• Do women and men use language differently?
– Women are taught to be polite since they are very
young. They are not supposed to laugh out loud, not
supposed to swear, etc. There are unwritten rules of
what women are supposed to be like.
– Men, in contrast, do not have the same restriction.
It’s okay for them to swear, laugh, tell dirty jokes, etc.
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Women’s Language
• Consider these utterances:
– Please close the door.
– Could you open the door?
– Could you open the door, please?
– Do you mind opening the door?
– Open the door!
• Which one of the above is likely to be said by men, and
which is by women?
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Female language and Confidence
• Some social dialectologists believed that women are
more status conscious, and this is reflected in their
language.
• Robin Lakoff, however, rejected the idea, saying that
women’s language reflected more on their subordination
status (to men). They are less confident, so they like to
use more fillers and hedges.
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Female Lang. Features
According to Lakoff, women’s language has the
following features:
Lexical hedges or fillers, e.g. ‘you know’, ‘you see’,
‘sort of’, etc.
1. Tag questions
2. Rising intonation on declaratives.
3. ‘empty’ adjectives, such as ‘divine’, ‘charming’.
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Female lang. features (cont’d)
5.
Precise color terms, e.g. magenta, maroon,
aquamarine.
6. Intensifiers, such as ‘just’ and ‘so’.
7. ‘hypercorrect’, grammar
8. ‘Super-polite’ forms, e.g. indirect requests,
euphemism.
9. Avoidance of strong words, e.g. ‘fudge’, ‘my goodness’
10. Emphatic stress, e.g. ‘it was a brilliant performance!’
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Politeness Devices
• Functions of Tag Questions:
– Reflects uncertainty.
e.g. “That is my essay, isn’t it?” (with rising intonation
at the end)
– Expresses criticism, reprimand.
“You could have told me earlier, couldn’t you?”
– Asks for confirmation, or just emphatic
comments.
e.g. “She is lovely, isn’t she?”
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Interaction
• Interruptions
– Research has found that men interrupts more than
women
– The reasons are because women are more
sympathetic, emphatic, accommodating.
– Men interrupts more as they want to assert their
positions
– In cases where men have superior position they may
talk less.
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Sexist Language
• There are words in English that exclude women, such as
“Men” (to refer to both men and women), firemen,
policemen, etc.
• There are words that are marked to be only for women,
such as ‘nurse’, and endings such as ‘-ess’ such as
stewardess, hostess, baroness, etc.
• Other words that describe types of women negatively
such as ‘tart’, ‘spunky’, ‘bitch’, that cannot be applied to
men.
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• How to avoid sexist language?
– Use plural forms to avoid using ‘she/he’
– Use unmarked job titles such as
• Cabin crew instead of steward or stewardess
• Chairperson instead of chairman/woman
• Spokesperson instead of spokesman
• Actor for both male and female, etc.
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Gossips
•
•
•
•
Myth: women talk more so they gossip more
Reality??
Do women gossip more than men?
Do men gossip at all?
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Conclusions
• Men and women are different in their ways of speaking
• The difference may have arisen from the way they are
brought up in the family, or the way the community sees
their roles.
• Females are known to have several traits associated
with their language
• Sexist language is the language that excludes one
gender from the other.
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