Carol A. Chapelle - The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

This high‐tech mode of linguistic exchange complicates traditional notions of power in language, because the women working within the industry consciously produce a language stereotypically associated with women's powerlessness in order to gain economic power and social flexibility.

She further argues that:

The very existence of the term sweet talk —an activity that, in the American heterosexual mainstream, has become associated more with the speech patterns of women than those of men—underscores the ideological connection between women's language and sexual language.

In response to economic incentives and requests to reinforce stereotypical gendered images, phone sex workers (both men and women) are exploiting gendered language for their own economic survival. They come from all walks of life, different ethnicities and age groups, and are trying to make a living (and make fun) of the gendered language. They do not naively or passively speak in a language reflecting their subordinate status. Instead, they actively seek out ways to profit from their clientele's lack of imagination by exploiting gendered language.

Indirectness is another common example which should alert us to indeterminacy when we see language used in such a way as to enact gender relations in different contexts. For example, Tannen (1994) finds that both Greek men and Greek women are likely to interpret a question as an indirect request whereas US women are more likely than US men to make such an interpretation. Keenan (1974) finds that, in a Malagasy‐speaking village on the island of Madagascar, men use more indirect language while women are more direct, but this does not mean that women have the dominant role in that society. These examples inform us again of the importance of seeing gender in interaction with a specific community practice. Indirectness, then, according to Tannen (1994, p. 34), can be used either by the powerful or by the powerless; the interpretation of a given utterance, and the likely response to it, depends on the setting, on an individual's status, and on the relationship of individuals to each other, as well as on the linguistic conventions that are ritualized in the cultural context.

We will end this section with an example of men adopting women's language for strategic purposes. As Holmes (1992, p. 317) observes, researchers recorded the speech of witnesses in a law court and found that male witnesses used more women's language features than women witnesses with more expertise in court or a higher occupational status. The following example illustrates this.

Lawyer: And you saw, you observed what?

Witness C: Well, after I heard—I can't really, I can't definitely state whether the brakes or the lights came first, but I rotated my head slightly to the right, and looked directly behind Mr. Z, and I saw reflections of lights, and uh, very very instantaneously after that I heard a very, very loud explosion—from my standpoint of view it would have been an implosion because everything was forced outward like this, like a grenade thrown into the room. And uh, it was, it was terrifically loud.

In this exchange, the male witness used “women's” language—hedges and boosters—in his account of what happened. Sex (i.e., being a man or a woman) was not a determining factor for this kind of gendered language use. Instead, it was used to enact the “powerless” role of the witness (who is not a woman in this case) in his interaction with the lawyer or in his recounting of what had happened, and may even have other pragmatic effects, such as avoiding accountability or responsibilities and thus expecting leniency or acquittal.

To conclude, gender is a complex social concept embedded in our biological wiring and socialization, as well as in mundane and professional interactions with others. Language can either reflect and reinforce a conventional gendered relationship or subvert stereotypical gendered images, as we see in the sweet talk performed by both men and women in high‐tech phone sex industries in San Francisco, or in men's adoption of women's language for courtroom interactions for strategic purposes.

SEE ALSO:Analysis of Dialogue; Language and Identity

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