# Gender differences in language



## MarX

Hi!

There is a whole article about "Gender differences in spoken Japanese".


> The Japanese language is unusual among major languages in the high degree to which the speech of women seen collectively differs from that of men. Differences in the ways that girls and boys use language have been detected in children as young as three years old (Tannen).


Doesn't this exist in every language?

Just to take an example, in Chile, it's quite unlikely that females use the pronoun *vos*, whereas  it's not that unusual for males, especially among youth, to say it in very informal situations.

I'm referring to the language.
There is already another thread talking about sexism in general.

Thanks!

Salam,


MarX


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## anothersmith

It used to be the case in English that men would curse more than women, but I'm not sure that's true now.


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## Olcheyenne

Hi, 

I'm taking a sociolinguistics class right now, and we've actually been discussing gender and language. Yesterday, I listened to a presentation on the use of "like" to introduce a quote. 

eg. She just kept on talking and I was like "oh my gosh, when will this end?"

There have been several studies, in Canada, the US and other English speaking countries, that measure how the use of "like" has increased in the past decades. The studies focus on why it and how it has increased: who uses it, in what kind of situation, etc.

I don't find this very surprising, but the results (for now anyway, this sort of thing is constantly changing) show that females use "like" more than males.

Gender differences in langauge are not unique to Japanese, although the morphology of the Japanese language may index genders in a more direct, or obvious, manner. 

I think it has a lot to do with specific situations and not just a culture in general.


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## uioptvb

Gender differences is hard to tell in some languages, such as German.


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## sound shift

I've seen claims that women are more concerned than men about "correctness". I think there may be something in this - I think I hear men use non-standard forms (heavy local acents, slang, etc) more than women. I also think that women have been leading the move to a more frontal pronunciation of the vowels in words such as "food" amd "home". This fronting used to be virtually confined to elements of the upper classes.


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## palomnik

This thread reminds of a line in one of Dashiell Hammett's novels about how you can tell whether a man is talking to another man or a woman on the telephone by his tone of voice and choice of words.

Setting that aside, it is true that there is a wealth of sociological data on the difference between male and female speech in languages all over the world. However, there are relatively few languages where this sort of thing is actually recognized as a grammatical fact. Japanese is probably the most prominent example of this; in Japanese men and women use different pronouns and different syntactic particles in their speech, and linguists generally consider this to be exceptional compared to other languages.

In fact, I'm only acquainted with one other language that displays this phenomenon to the extent that Japanese does, and that would be Lakota, which even has different words for "hello" depending on whether you're male or female.  No doubt some other Native American languages display the same differences, since as a _sprachbund _Native American languages tend to have a lot of similarities even when they are not linguistically related.


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## Olcheyenne

There are some languages in Australia (Yanyuwa) and North America (Yana and Koasati) that are said to have exclusive gender differences. Whats interesting about Japan, and I'm sure this is the case in a lot of languages, is that speech does not indicate if your are a man or a woman but rather if you are displaying what are seen to be masculine or feminine traits.


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## MarX

Olcheyenne said:


> There are some languages in Australia (Yanyuwa) and North America (Yana and Koasati) that are said to have exclusive gender differences. Whats interesting about Japan, and I'm sure this is the case in a lot of languages, is that speech does not indicate if your are a man or a woman but rather if you are displaying what are seen to be masculine or feminine traits.


This reminds me of what many Central American and Colombian (except from the North) guys said:
Addressing another guy with *tú* sounds feminine.
I don't know about girls addressing another girl.
Perhaps in those areas *tú *is more prominent among females?


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## Flaminius

palomnik said:


> In fact, I'm only acquainted with one other language that displays this phenomenon to the extent that Japanese does, and that would be Lakota, which even has different words for "hello" depending on whether you're male or female.  No doubt some other Native American languages display the same differences, since as a _sprachbund _Native American languages tend to have a lot of similarities even when they are not linguistically related.


Hello,
This is most interesting.  Okinawan, a language in the Japonic language family, has a similar feature.  "Hello" by men is _haisai_ and that by women is _haitai_.  If the latter is an older form of the former, claims that women are more concerned than men about "correctness" gain some more support.


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## anothersmith

Olcheyenne said:


> Whats interesting about Japan, and I'm sure this is the case in a lot of languages, is that speech does not indicate if your are a man or a woman but rather if you are displaying what are seen to be masculine or feminine traits.



That's so true!  I had a Japanese teacher who lived in Japan when her daughter was only 6 or 7 years old.  Her daughter wanted to play on the playground equipment, but the teachers wouldn't let her do it as long as she was referring to herself as "watashi" (I, fem.).  Once she started referring to herself as "boku" (I, masc.), they started letting her play on the equipment.


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## MarX

anothersmith said:


> That's so true!  I had a Japanese teacher who lived in Japan when her daughter was only 6 or 7 years old.  Her daughter wanted to play on the playground equipment, but the teachers wouldn't let her do it as long as she was referring to herself as "watashi" (I, fem.).  Once she started referring to herself as "boku" (I, masc.), they started letting her play on the equipment.


I thought "boku" was a no-no to girls.


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## anothersmith

MarX said:


> I thought "boku" was a no-no to girls.



Her teachers didn't think so.


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## Flaminius

So, a gender girl striking out into activity areas considered as sociologically masculine was more egregious an error for the teachers than a physiological girl assuming the social rôle of a boy?  The whole thing makes perfect sense in terms of social theories but somewhat troubling to my simple mind.

If the girl completely stopped using _watashi_ and started using _boku_ all the time, the teachers must have done something.  If the switch was temporary, they might have understood it as a display of assertiveness or aggression that the girl can manage herself in the supposedly masculine scenes on the playground.


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## anothersmith

Flaminius said:


> So, a gender girl striking out into activity areas considered as sociologically masculine was more egregious an error for the teachers than a physiological girl assuming the social rôle of a boy?  The whole thing makes perfect sense in terms of social theories but somewhat troubling to my simple mind.
> 
> If the girl completely stopped using _watashi_ and started using _boku_ all the time, the teachers must have done something.  If the switch was temporary, they might have understood it as a display of assertiveness or aggression that the girl can manage herself in the supposedly masculine scenes on the playground.



I'm just relating an anecdote told to me by my Japanese professor.  She didn't say whether the use of "boku" was temporary or permanent.  I found the anecdote interesting, which is why I reported it in this thread.


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## Outsider

Maybe the teachers were not sure whether she was a girl or a boy, and when she started saying _boku_ they thought she must be a boy.


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## avok

Sorry but if she is a girl, why can't she use "watashi" (I, fem.)?


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## anothersmith

avok said:


> Sorry but if she is a girl, why can't she use "watashi" (I, fem.)?



She could -- and did -- use "watashi."  But as long as she used "watashi" they wouldn't let her play on the playground equipment.  Only boys were allowed to play on the playground equipment.  That's why she started referring to herself as "boku."

I experienced something similar when I was very young.  When I was young, girls were required to wear skirts or dresses to school.  That didn't change until I was 11.  As long as we were required to wear skirts and dresses, we weren't allowed to play on most of the pieces of playground equipment.  They were afraid boys would see our underwear.


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## Lugubert

For Swedish, the only difference I know of is in Southern Sweden. There's a word "kär" (which in standard Swedish means 'in love with') that means 'cute, cuddly, sweet' etc. You very rarely hear a man using it. There are similar cases in Standard Swedish for the same phenomenon ("gullig") that men seem to avoid, but to my ears not quite as consistent as in the South.


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## Etcetera

In Russian, gender differences are quite serious - there are different pronouns for "he" and "she", and verbs acquire a feminine ending in the Past Tense. 

As for differences in speech - well, most women express their thoughts and feelings more emotionally than men. But I think it is more or less so everywhere. And it doesn't have much to do with the structure of a language.


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## Olcheyenne

I think it's important to acknowledge that expressing thoughts and feelings "more emotionally than men" is not a charasteric of women's speech, but a _feminine_ stance in speech. It reflects the role that a speaker has in society, so it may be true that a lot of women speak this way.


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## Vale_yaya

Lugubert said:


> For Swedish, the only difference I know of is in Southern Sweden. There's a word "kär" (which in standard Swedish means 'in love with') that means 'cute, cuddly, sweet' etc. You very rarely hear a man using it. There are similar cases in Standard Swedish for the same phenomenon ("gullig") that men seem to avoid, but to my ears not quite as consistent as in the South.


 
Now that you say that I guess we (women) do say: Que lindo!!!!... How sweet!!!... cute!!!... pretty!!!... and you barely hear that coming out of a man's mouth. (Ecuador/Southamerica).

But regarding slangs... nowadays "these young kids" I'm just amazed of how much "crap" they say... no matter gender anymore... 

Same with bad words, cursing... and beyond... 

On my times (hey!!! I'm not that old)... no way it would be allowed for a girl/woman to burp, curse, or do anything gross... it would be just bad behavior... it's always been different with men... you know... the "machismo" thing... everything is changing slowly... 

Of course, there's still "a lot of" men who think that conduct is not appropiate at all coming from a lady. 



Etcetera said:


> As for differences in speech - well, most women express their thoughts and feelings more emotionally than men. But I think it is more or less so everywhere. And it doesn't have much to do with the structure of a language.


 
Same here. Girls tend to express their feelings more than men... making faces... being loud... 

There's still people who "think" that men shouldn't cry, because "men don't cry"... ???. Same thing with playing with dolls... or even think about dressing pink... NO WAY!!!... not even as a kid...


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## PABLO DE SOTO

In Spain things are changing and young girls tend to speak in the same way than boys do, but some years ago there were slight differences, women did not curse, they used less slang and in certain areas with  local accents, women tended to avoid some strong features of the local pronunciation, so in my hometown ceceo ( pronouncing s as z) was common among men, but rare among women.
Of course, intonation is different , but I suppose that this is usual in every language.
There are still some words that are tabu for men, like "mono" ( cute, pretty) but in Spanish there are no major grammar differences between the male and female languages aside from the gender differences of every romance language  "estoy cansado, estoy cansada".
In some areas, like Canary Islands , women tend to use more  diminutives  and some affectionate words when addressing someone like "mi niño", "mi cielo" (my baby, my heaven)


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## Broccolicious

What an interesting thread!

In Khmer, the word for 'yes' is different depending on the gender of the speaker: men say 'baht' and women say 'jas'.


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## MarX

Broccolicious said:


> What an interesting thread!
> 
> In Khmer, the word for 'yes' is different depending on the gender of the speaker: men say 'baht' and women say 'jas'.


As far as I can remember, in Thai the word for "yes" also depends on the gender of the speaker.


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## VivaReggaeton88

MarX said:


> This reminds me of what many Central American and Colombian (except from the North) guys said:
> Addressing another guy with *tú* sounds feminine.
> I don't know about girls addressing another girl.
> Perhaps in those areas *tú *is more prominent among females?



In Central America (except Panamá), two men would not be heard speaking to each other in the "tú" form (unless they were gay or foreigners). The women however do use "tú".


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## avok

VivaReggaeton88 said:


> In Central America (except Panamá), two men would not be heard speaking to each other in the "tú" form (unless they were gay or foreigners). The women however do use "tú".


 
What?? Then what do you use??


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## MarX

avok said:


> What?? Then what do you use??


*Vos*. With the same conjugation as in Argentina (except the subjunctive).


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## Sepia

uioptvb said:


> Gender differences is hard to tell in some languages, such as German.


 
Probably because there isn't any. At least I could not put my finger on words or constructions that would have be used differently by men and women. Except of course in words referring to themselves that have different genders, but that is a different story.


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## avok

MarX said:


> *Vos*. With the same conjugation as in Argentina (except the subjunctive).


 
OK...


By the way, in Turkish there is no gender difference. We all talk the same way girls, boys, the confused


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## elianecanspeak

In Hebrew verbs are inflected differently in the first person depending on the gender of a speaker : מודה  modah (female speaker), modeh (male speaker)  [admit or give thanks].

In Thai there is a gender particle that attaches as a sentence suffix: "-ka" (ค่ะ) when females speak, "-krap" ( ครับ) when males speak.

In Costa Rica I noticed a tendency for women to speak in artificially high-pitched voices, similar to the long-standing norm in Japan.

I had a friend who told me that during World War II he was among the American military trained in Japanese for interrogating prisoners.  Because they used Japanese women as teachers, the Japanese prisoners were interrogated by American men speaking women's Japanese, which the prisoners found quite astounding.


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## Sepia

anothersmith said:


> That's so true!  I had a Japanese teacher who lived in Japan when her daughter was only 6 or 7 years old.  Her daughter wanted to play on the playground equipment, but the teachers wouldn't let her do it as long as she was referring to herself as "watashi" (I, fem.).  Once she started referring to herself as "boku" (I, masc.), they started letting her play on the equipment.



That is really weird!!

But it is analogue to what my old sensei told me: Sailors he knew, who had gotten off in Tokyo, found girlfriends and started learning Japanese from them, were laughed at by japanese men. Because they used words that were only appropriate for women. 

In Danish and in German there is hardly any difference any more. There used to be words in certain constellations that only women would use. Like using the equivalent of "sweet" to describe a person. Today that is ok for a guy to say too. He doesn't even have to be gay ... 

I have always wondered what caused this change - steadily increasing numbers of guys that grew up with single mothers maybe?


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## Awwal12

Japanese personal pronouns do not reflect the gender directly, afaik. They rather reflect social relationships between the speaker and the interlocutor. A girl can refer herself as "boku"; it won't be normal (well, in such a patriarchal and uniform society as Japanese one), but it won't be _grammatically incorrect_ as well. (By the way "watashi" hardly can be called a feminine pronoun at all, it's just a normal, a bit formal pronoun expressing a respect to an interlocutor; "watakushi" and "atashi" are more "feminine" - afaik again.)


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## Istriano

MarX said:


> Hi!
> 
> 
> Just to take an example, in Chile, it's quite unlikely that females use the pronoun *vos*, whereas  it's not that unusual for males, especially among youth, to say it in very informal situations.
> 
> 
> MarX


The same is true for *tu *in Carioca (Rio city) Portuguese,
women are not likely to use *tu *(unless they are from a favela), they seem to prefer *você*. On the other hand men are fine with *tu *(even many middle class men) in informal situations.

Furthermore, Brazilian men use more EM with verbs of movement (like Eu vou na praia = I'm going to the beach) than women who seem to prefer more formal A: (Eu vou à praia = I'm going to the beach).
There is a paper on it, but I cannot find it.

It seems that in many societies women use a more formal variety of language. Labov says it's because the societies are more man-friendly (men have power) so women use the formal/standard language to compensate for this as they go up the power pyramid.

I don't think this works. You may say language professors (90% of whom are woman) speak the ''most correct'' language, but their job does not seem that fancy at all and it's one of the least paid jobs (especially for 1st grade /basic school language teachers).

Using dialectal/informal and relaxed speech is more forgiving in men.

ALSO:

1. Men tend to use archaic forms even when they're not part of the standard anymore, so they're archaic ''colloquialisms''
(as in the case of ''em'' (in) with verbs of movement in Brazilian Portuguese)

2. Women tend to use new, innovative informal forms, for example
Canadian Vowel Shift in Canada and Northern Cities Vowel shift in Chicago/Detroit/Cleveland/Buffalo:
women tend to sound more regional because of their strong accent (shifts) while
Canadian men and men from Northern Cities region tend to sound more General NorthernAmerican...

It's said that *the language change *is lead by middle class women in their late20ies/early30ies,
so if you want to know how your standard language will sound like in 50 years, just observe their speech .


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## Istriano

Sepia said:


> Like using the equivalent of "sweet" to describe a person. Today that is ok for a guy to say too. He doesn't even have to be gay ...



This is normal in India, a guy can say of his friend ''he is a sweet boy''
and even tho' they're not gay.
Furthermore, in India men are fine with wearing pink.


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## elianecanspeak

I am having difficulty adjusting to the "valley girl" (San Fernando Valley, California" manner of speech for girls and women that is becoming more and more pervasive in the US.  It is reinforced from earliest childhood by Disney animation heroines. I have always reacted negatively to the artificially high childish voices typical to women in areas of Mexico and Central America, but now I hear it all around me.  I (unfortunately) saw the film "Letters from Juliet" and the contrast in the range and subtlety Vanessa Redgrave and the sex kitten voice of the young actress Amanda Seyfried telling.  I could see why the male lead at first assumed her character to be unintelligent.  I have had to train myself to look beyond the tone, inflection, and word choice before I make any judgments.


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## Sepia

Istriano said:


> This is normal in India, a guy can say of his friend ''he is a sweet boy''
> and even tho' they're not gay.
> Furthermore, in India men are fine with wearing pink.




One couldn't when I was a kid, but it is OK now - I'd even say that the time where it really changed was during the Eighties.


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## Slavianophil

I have read somewhere that in the Chukchi language, there are in fact two pronunciation standards - male and female. Men and women use different phonemes in the same words. For example, women say 'l' where men say 'r'.

At least, this was the case before 1917, when Chukchi lived in their traditional way and their language was used only in oral communication. After 1917, a writing system and a pronunciation standard were set up for them, based on the male speech. Perhaps, the female way of speaking has disappeared. In fact, as far as I know, many Chukchi speak Russian today even among themselves.


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## Istriano

In Portuguese, thanks is *obrigado *(by men) or *obrigada *(by women).
But more and more women are saying _obrigado _these days.


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## Schmizzkazz

From what I know - in Arabic there are two different words for "you" - depending whether you speak to a female or a male person.


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## chifladoporlosidiomas

I know where I live (here in Northern California) a lot of girls (and gay boys) around my age use "that" to introduce reported speech. 
Example:
"That you were supposed to pick up John but you never went."
Meaning that "X said…"

Girls (and gay boys, again) do use "like" as a (more or less) direct quote:
I was like, "Get out of my way or I'll move you myself!" And she was like, "I'd like to see you try!" 

Other words:
cute
lovely
awww
fugly
whatever

Guys are more likely to curse, slur their words together, use HELLA, BRO/BRUH/BREH, GÜEY, CUZ  more than girls, less tags (I'm tall, _aren't I?_), more slang, more conservative phonology (girls pronounce words in this weird way thats hard to explain; their short Us (put) almost sound like a short E (pet)). And I can't think of anything else at the moment.


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## Aoyama

> I had a friend who told me that during World War II he was among the American military trained in Japanese for interrogating prisoners. Because they used Japanese women as teachers, the Japanese prisoners were interrogated by American men speaking women's Japanese, which the prisoners found quite astounding.


 That is an often told tale, but I don't think it is true (or, more precisely, _it couldn't be true_).
It is very true that male and female speech are different (though that difference tends to diminish in contemporary Japan, where so-called "polite speech" is less respected by the young generation) in Japanese. But 1) someone teaching Japanese, male or female, will use "neutral Japanese", 2) the difference really appears in advanced speech and particular circumstances, and above all in "hierarchic" context. Daily speech and casual conversation won't make much difference.
This being said, one of the big difference between male and female speech in Japanese is not so much the pronouns (though "boku" and especially "ore" -for I- won't be used by females) but the use of the honorific prefix (particle) "o" in front of nouns (uchi = house, o uchi = house said by a female), but "o" can also be used by men in front of superiors. But all this is probably much less important (though still present) nowadays then it was in the past.


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## LilianaB

The same is true about Slavic languages. There is a big difference between how you refer to women and how you refer to me. This is mostly a grammatical difference. In Slavic and Baltic languages there are different pronouns to refer to men and women - 3rd Plural, which would be expressed by _they_ in English. The difference is big in Polish, especially, because of the use of Pan-Pani. Sir-Madam. The verb forms differ too.  Re: 39


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## Aoyama

Some further food for thought here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_spoken_Japanese


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## TheRock87

> In some areas, like Canary Islands , women tend to use more diminutives and some affectionate words when addressing someone like "mi niño", "mi cielo" (my baby, my heaven)​



It's the same situation in Swiss-German. There are girls who put diminutives everywhere.

Mir sind go bade => Mir sind go bädele (We went swimming)
Is Bett ga => Is Bettli ga (Go to bed)


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## elianecanspeak

Elianecanspeak said:
			
		

> I had a friend who told me that during World War II he was among the American military trained in Japanese for interrogating prisoners. Because they used Japanese women as teachers, the Japanese prisoners were interrogated by American men speaking women's Japanese, which the prisoners found quite astounding.





Aoyama said:


> That is an often told tale, but I don't think it is true (or, more precisely, _it couldn't be true_).
> It is very true that male and female speech are different (though that difference tends to diminish in contemporary Japan, where so-called "polite speech" is less respected by the young generation) in Japanese. But 1) someone teaching Japanese, male or female, will use "neutral Japanese", 2) the difference really appears in advanced speech and particular circumstances, and above all in "hierarchic" context. Daily speech and casual conversation won't make much difference.
> This being said, one of the big difference between male and female speech in Japanese is not so much the pronouns (though "boku" and especially "ore" -for I- won't be used by females) but the use of the honorific prefix (particle) "o" in front of nouns (uchi = house, o uchi = house said by a female), but "o" can also be used by men in front of superiors. But all this is probably much less important (though still present) nowadays then it was in the past.



In describing his experience during world war II my friend was referring principally to supersegmentals -- tone of voice and register, and conversational conventions (like "ano ne" introducing a statement of fact).  The Japanese women who taught them were not necessarily professional teachers, so I don't know if they used neutral Japanese.  My colleague demonstrated the hesitant, polite language he learned to imitate as he attempted to match his teacher's intonation, and then the curt military form for giving orders that heard male native speakers use..  This was his own experience, and not something he had heard second hand.


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## Outsider

I ran into this post at the Language Log, and thought you might like to read it.


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## Aoyama

The link is interesting.
As for "ano ne" (in Japanese) "introducing a statement of fact", it is merely the equivalent of "well ..." in English. It can be used by both sexes and has no meaning as to "politeness level".


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## terredepomme

This once happened to a French male who learned Korean. The female teacher seemingly told him that "-yo" is for women only and he should avoid it. While that might have been true in her lifetime, and for some machoist people maybe, in today's world it is commonly used by men, although it does sound much softer, more colloquial, more "feminin" if you will. In the army you are FORBIDDEN to speak in that manner.


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## 涼宮

chifladoporlosidiomas said:


> I know where I live (here in Northern California) a lot of girls (and gay boys) around my age use "that" to introduce reported speech.
> Example:
> 
> Girls (and gay boys) do use "like" as a (more or less) direct quote:
> I was like, "Get out of my way or I'll move you myself!" And she was like, "I'd like to see you try!"



Is that use of ''like'' only from Northern California and not regarded like that in other places where English is spoken? Because that use of 'like' is very common in Spanish and I use it in that way in English too . Now I don't know if my spoken English is more girly or just neutral


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## Explorer41

涼宮 said:


> Is that use of ''like'' only from Northern California and not regarded like that in other places where English is spoken? Because that use of 'like' is very common in Spanish and I use it in that way in English too . Now I don't know if my spoken English is more girly or just neutral


By the way, there is a similar phenomenon in Russian too. Some use the word "такой"/"такая" ("such", "is such", "is like") to introduce a direct speech. It is used only in girltalk (I had to find a name for it  ): let's imagine a girl talks about her date to her friend, girl too: "а он такой 'ты не могла раньше прийти?', а я такая "нет, не могла", а он: "да где же ты была?", а я: "с Витькой гуляла". Разругались, конечно. Ревнивый больно!"


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## 涼宮

Thank you for that information Explorer!  I love food for thoughts, especially about Slavic languages.  Now that makes me wonder if in general terms, girls use more pet words(muletillas/Tic de langage) than men.


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## Explorer41

Well, in that situation the word "такой"/"такая" is used to shorten a speech, to make it faster (it substitutes words like "сказал", "ответил", "полагает, что", which are longer and require more thought to use them). That girl hastens to message as much as possible in a second to her friend ;-). And also her speech becomes very informal. I think, that are two reasons why that way of speech sounds "girlish".

As for "muletillas" (my dictinary translates it as "слова-паразиты", words that litter someone's speech), men in Russia use them too, and often ;-)


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## Brioche

LilianaB said:


> The same is true about Slavic languages. There is a big difference between how you refer to women and how you refer to me. This is mostly a grammatical difference. In Slavic and Baltic languages there are different pronouns to refer to men and women - 3rd Plural, which would be expressed by _they_ in English. The difference is big in Polish, especially, because of the use of Pan-Pani. Sir-Madam. The verb forms differ too. Re: 39



A Polish survivor of Auschwitz wrote a book entitled: "I was a number".  The title of the book is Polish is "Byłem numerem".
The form of the verb shows that it is a man speaking.
If a woman had written about her experiences, it would be "Byłam numerem"

So in Polish if a past tense form of a verb has been used in speaking or writing, you know immediately whether the speaker/writer is a male or a female.
It may be possible by analysis to make an educated guess about the sex of a writer in English, but if the Polish is grammatically correct, you know with certainty.


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## LilianaB

涼宮 said:


> Is that use of ''like'' only from Northern California and not regarded like that in other places where English is spoken? Because that use of 'like' is very common in Spanish and I use it in that way in English too . Now I don't know if my spoken English is more girly or just neutral



Some people use it this way where I live as well: I could here such conversations sometimes on the train. I think mostly girls say it, not the very educated kind. I was always told that it was a sign of not being really educated, nothing else. I think I have heard a man use it, but I think it was more to make a parody on some girls.   _I'm like sitting there and he is like looking at me_.


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## LilianaB

Brioche said:


> A Polish survivor of Auschwitz wrote a book entitled: "I was a number".  The title of the book is Polish is "Byłem numerem".
> The form of the verb shows that it is a man speaking.
> If a woman had written about her experiences, it would be "Byłam numerem"




Yes, You are absolutely right, Brioche. It is self-evident who is speaking because of the grammatical forms. The same is true about Russian, and also about Lithuanian when adjectives are used. There may be some sentences which are neutral in Lithuanian -- where you cannot sense the sex just from the grammatical constructions used. I don't think you can hide sex in Polish and Russian sentences, because the verb form is usually different. There might be some verb forms which overlap, in the present tense especially: some verb forms are the same for the masculine and the feminine gender.On the whole, however you can find out sex of the writer by looking at verb forms, adjectives and pronouns, especially.


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## merquiades

LilianaB said:


> Publicado por 涼宮
> Is that use of ''like'' only from Northern California and not regarded like that in other places where English is spoken? Because that use of 'like' is very common in Spanish and I use it in that way in English too . Now I don't know if my spoken English is more girly or just neutral
> 
> 
> 
> Some people use it this way where I live as well: I could here such conversations sometimes on the train. I think mostly girls say it, not the very educated kind. I was always told that it was a sign of not being really educated, nothing else. I think I have heard a man use it, but I think it was more to make a parody on some girls.   _I'm like sitting there and he is like looking at me_.
Click to expand...


Agree with Liliana.  Mostly California, not really educated, and used by girls.


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## 涼宮

merquiades said:


> Agree with Liliana.  Mostly California, not really educated, and used by girls.



LMAO, so, I've been talking like a girl from time to time, cool . Well, I'll have to correct my ''likes''(not synonym of tastes).


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## Istriano

Females from California use more uptalk than men. (They sound like Norwegians, using high rise terminal not only in questions but in statements too).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal


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## francais2008

I think the girls that use this kind of upspeak are referred to as "valley girls" (like the female characters in the movie Clueless).


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## Istriano

It's not limited to Valley Girls. It's a common ''feature'' of the informal Pacific Northwestern English and Australian English.


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## SãoEnrique

terredepomme said:


> This once happened to a French male who learned Korean. The female teacher seemingly told him that "-yo" is for women only and he should avoid it. While that might have been true in her lifetime, and for some machoist people maybe, in today's world it is commonly used by men, although it does sound much softer, more colloquial, more "feminin" if you will. In the army you are FORBIDDEN to speak in that manner.


 
What means "yo" in Korean?


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## Ithildyn

I don't know if other French speakers (maybe even English speakers) can back me up on this, but I've noticed this trend in myself and fellow female/ female-identified people: replying to questions with "polite" phrasings instead of straightforward negative/affirmative replies.

Example: 
Q:"Would you like [something]?"
♂: "Yes."; "Yes, please."
♀: "Yes, I'd like that."; "If you'd be so kind."; "If you please?"; "That would be nice."; "If you don't mind?" and so on...

It can be annoying too, because the longer answers can be harder for the other person to process. In a crowded, noisy setting and the such, it might lead to getting misunderstood or having to repeat a couple of times.

Yet I somehow learned to give these roundabout answers when people ask me questions instead of going for the most direct route.

Seems it is in line with the bigger trend of female linguistic behaviour being more "polite" and less affirmative than the male, as can be seen throughout this thread. (Now, how much of this is nature vs nurture.... I suspect the latter has the greater influence, but who can really know...)


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## Sepia

I really think that depends on where the English speakers come from. My impression is that Irish males would also tend to answer the way you quote it as more "female". When you ask them for information or directions they also apologize for things they have absolutely no influence on - like the last night bus having already left and such ...


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## Pedro y La Torre

Sepia said:


> I really think that depends on where the English speakers come from. My impression is that Irish males would also tend to answer the way you quote it as more "female". When you ask them for information or directions they also apologize for things they have absolutely no influence on - like the last night bus having already left and such ...



Yes, this is quite true. In fact, Irish women can often come across as much more verbally aggressive than Irish males. 

At the same time, Irish English speakers will usually use pleasantries like "please" far less than other English speakers, at least when speaking amongst themselves.

Example:

"Pass us that pen there will you? Nice one/Cheers/Thanks."


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## tresblase

In Portuguese, you can turn a word into a diminutive if you add -inho (male) or -inha (female), and that is generally more used by women or to describe something related to women... Intonation is also a very important marker.


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## SãoEnrique

tresblase said:


> In Portuguese, you can turn a word into a diminutive if you add -inho (male) or -inha (female), and that is generally more used by women or to describe something related to women... Intonation is also a very important marker.



Like pequeninho


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## tresblase

Haha, no Brasil se diz "pequenininho", e não "pequeninho".


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## Forero

I have heard (some computer-aided database study) that there is statistically differential use of prepositions, that men use _of_ more where women opt for _with_ or _for_.


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## greatbear

I haven't done any study, but from my experiences, there aren't too many differences between Hindi of men and women in India, except that it is very rare to find a woman using cuss words and vulgarities, whereas it is very common with the men.


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## Angelo di fuoco

tresblase said:


> In Portuguese, you can turn a word into a diminutive if you add -inho (male) or -inha (female), and that is generally more used by women or to describe something related to women... Intonation is also a very important marker.



I recently was in Barcelona and my landlady was Portuguese. I mostly spoke Spanish with her because I haven't have much exposure to spoken Portuguese, but the correspondence was done in Portuguese and I noted that she wrote "obrigado", not "obrigada", which I found very funny.


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## Chasint

England: I've often noticed that clothing is discussed much more often by women than men. You can spot such a conversation even if you can't hear it because women mime the cut of the clothes as they speak. 

The adjectives are different as well, for example women tend to use bluey, pinky, reddy, mauvey to describe approximate colours where men would say blueish, pinkish, reddish and mauveish.

This 'clothes talk' spreads into other subjects sometimes, for example a woman may talk about 'doing up' where a man says 'fasten'. For men 'to do something up' is almost entirely restricted to clothes. "I do up my shoelaces" a woman might 'do up' the bolts on a door where a man would fasten or secure them.

I am sure there is a crossover especially now that we have more metrosexual men around.


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## Cenzontle

I once heard that U.S. President Dwight D. *Eisenhower *was the first (American?) male to use the word "*lovely*" in public.  With some web searching, I've found that Eisenhower, in two different speeches (1953, 1957) called Bermuda "that lovely island" and "this lovely island", and that on a visit to Newport, Rhode Island, he referred to "this lovely city", "these lovely surroundings", and "this lovely area".


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## laurahya

merquiades said:


> Agree with Liliana.  Mostly California, not really educated, and used by girls.



I don't fully agree with that. Use of _like_ to introduce quotes into speech is very frequently used amongst young people, regardless of their level of education. I use it in everyday speech all the time, although I'd never write it. It's an easy shorthand instead of having to use reported speech. Having said that, if your conversation consists of this constant back-and-forth, it's really annoying. ("I was like, 'What are you doing?' and he was like, 'Getting a drink', and I was like, 'Are you thirsty?'" etc. etc. ) Use of _like_ in place of 'um' is also very common now (although perhaps not as common as ten or so years ago). People use it to give themselves time to think, just as with "so", "well", or the humble pause. "It's like..." is especially used at the beginning of sentences when you want the other person to know you're about to speak but you haven't quite figured out what it is you're going to say yet.  I do agree, however, that sticking "like" in the middle of the sentence for no discernible purpose (no pause, no quote, no comparison) is usually a sign of lack of education. Or at least lack of ability to articulate.



涼宮 said:


> LMAO, so, I've been talking like a girl from time to time, cool . Well, I'll have to correct my ''likes''(not synonym of tastes).



Not really. Although it seems that girls do tend to use this more frequently and more naturally, if I guy said it I wouldn't think twice about it. Well, depending on the accent.


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## germanbz

Biffo said:


> England: I've often noticed that clothing is discussed much more often by women than men. You can spot such a conversation even if you can't hear it because women mime the cut of the clothes as they speak.
> 
> *The adjectives are differen*t as well, for example women tend to use bluey, pinky, reddy, mauvey to describe approximate colours where men would say blueish, pinkish, reddish and mauveish.
> 
> .



Also in Spain about different adjectives used by women and particularly when they are talking about clothes. Adjectives as:

"mono" (beautiful but not "that beautiful")
"cuco" sometimes used as a affective descripcion when talking about babies or kids clothes
"ideal" for really nice clothes in their opinion.

all of them actually would sound quite weird if said by men. In that cases the man's equivalent could be something like:

"está bien..." (with a impersonal condescending voice.
"es majo"  (as usual trying not to show particullar emotions about clothes)
"está guapo"


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