Language and gender

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Stephanie Brown

Language and gender

 It is unquestionable that, generally speaking, men and women communicate differently.  They always have done, and still do today, use the English language in very different ways.

After looking at two writers, Deborah Tannen and Jenny Cheshire; both of which have performed various studies to observe the different conversational style patterns between genders, I will summarise their findings.

Deborah Tannen claims that there are gender differences in ways of speaking, and this can sometimes be overlooked causing arguments and damaging relationships; "because boys and girls grow up in what are essentially different cultures...talk between women and men is cross-cultural communication"

For her language and gender studies, she traced patterns of speech in past studies and looked at videotapes of men and women talking together to observe how each sex acted, and what main differences there were.

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Tannen found that women and men had very different speech styles. She refers to womens style of conversation as “rapport-talk”, as she believes women today use language for intimacy. Women are taught to believe from a very early age that "talk is the glue that holds relationships together", and carry this state of mind with them through life, using language for closeness, to give and receive support, to negotiate and reach consensus. Overall she found; women talk a lot more than men, often seen as talking ‘too much’, women tend to talk privately, or in small groups of friends, to ...

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