Jender, kesopanan, dan stereotip Pertemuan 11

Matakuliah : G0362/SociolingusticsTahun : 2007

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Learning Outcomes

Pada akhir pertemuan ini, diharapkan mahasiswa akan mampu :• Mahasiswa dapat menunjukkan perbedaan

bahasa laki-laki 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 questions2. 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’, grammar8. ‘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.