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A talk by Anthony Pym in a course on variation in English - Transcript below: Do men and women use language in the same way? This is an interesting question for anybody who’s a man or a woman, or anything in between, and who uses language. It’s also interesting because there’s lots of false preconceptions about it, and a bit of research can perhaps challenge them. First let’s get the question clarified. We’re talking here about language use. We’re not talking about language systems—language systems, like Catalan, Spanish, French, German, whatever. Our European language systems are undoubtedly sexist. They oblige me if I’m speaking Spanish, for example, if I say, “Estoy viejo—I’m old,” that’s viejo, and the woman has to say vieja, and we’re obliged to say if we’re a man or a woman by that language system. Which in that respect is quite fascist, as Roland Barthes put it. That’s one question though. It’s a little different though when we look at what people do with the language system when they speak. Do men and women use the language system in the same way? For example, that viejo/vieja variation is systemic, but it’s not quite the same way as the observation, for example, that in Scotland schoolgirls tend to say water and got—they pronounce the /t/—whereas schoolboys tend to say wa’er and go’ depending on where they are in the social class. Both the men and women speakers there recognized that the system requires them to say water and got, but what they actually do is different, and it’s different according to . . . or, the way they do it correlates with whether or not they’re men or women. Okay. So that’s the kind of stuff that we’re interested in, in social linguistics of variation. There are all the cultural variables of gender that come on later. We know that with enculturation we become masculine/feminine, we mix these things, and that that studying of gender as a cultural phenomenon is quite different from the biological physical reality of sex—men or women. The problem for us with that though is that the gendering is itself linguistic; it’s already within the linguistic variables—not purely linguistic, there are many other things happening, but you can’t separate the language variables from that kind of gender. So it can be done; we just keep things simple at this level of social linguistics. Classical

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