A Brief Overview on Language and Sex

It is the fact that the nature of language depends on the nature of human creature. That is why, since human being develops wider and greater in more complicated ways, consequently language develops as well.
One believes that there is a close connection between language structures, vocabularies in use, word expressions, and the social role of men and women. Some linguists then offer the term ‘sexist in language’.



Male and Female Differences
The study about language from the sex point of view will be particularly interesting, since language phenomena, in the majority of cases, are arising from the term of sex. This overview is going to investigate how male and female influence language in use. There may be assumptions among societies that females have less muscle, low voices, but more mature and living longer than men. In some cases it is true. Females live longer because they have different roles and jobs in society. Being consideration, there are beliefs arising from social construction that females voice should be more tenderly polite and lower. Therefore a voice quality and any other verbal skills between male and female are claimed different. As what have occurred in the Lesser Antilles of West Indies, male and female Caribs Indians tend to speak in different language.
Still, language and sex has also pointed the phonological differences between male and female. Let’s see what is happening Gros Ventre, an Amerindian language of the Northeast United State, in which women have palatalized velar stops (i.e. kjatsa/bread) whereas men tend to have palatalized dental stops (i.e. djatsa/bread). In Northeast Asian language, Yukaghir, women and children tend to have /ts/ and /dz/, while men have /tj/ and /dj/. However, both old men and women have /cj/ and /jj/. That is why, the term differences not only pointed to sex-related but also age-graded. Haas (1944) figured out that in Koasati, an Amerindian language spoken in Southeastern Lousiana, men often pronounced ‘s’ at the end of verbs while women did not. Any other examples including phonological differences evidently arise from several parts of the world.
Again, language and sex may also be observed form the area of morphology and vocabulary. There are words and expressions which are used by women only (or just the opposite). Lakoff (1973) once listed some words expression that commonly and frequently spoken by women, such as; lovely, sweet, charming, divine, so good, such fun, precious, adorable, darling, fantastic, and so on. Furthermore, English as a language that is widely socialized has particular distinctions of sex-based, for instance; actor-actress, man-lady, father-mother, boy-girl, widow-widower, bachelor-spinster, etc. But sometimes, we also may find such inconsistencies. Let’s observe the word ‘policeman, chairman’ that are pointed to both male and female. Consequently, linguists should generate all those problems by establishing the new categorization in which can accommodate the gender system. Being comparable, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Turkish do not have such distinctions of sex-based. However, Japanese women tend to ass the ‘ne’ in a sentence final particle. Men according to Japanese use ‘wasi’ or ‘ore’ to point him, while women use ‘watasi’ or ‘atasi’.
Still, Thai, Yana language of California, Dyirbal people of North Queensland (Australia), the Trobriand Islander and many parts of the world have specific way to point male and female. In general, those language varieties very likely refer to how the speakers (members of society) view language perhaps from their cultural background.

Some Possible Explanations
Kramer (1974) found out how men women are different in the way they behave and view things by observing the cartoons in The New Yorker magazine that was published between February 17 and May 12, 1973. It illustrated some different characteristics of both sexes, men speak more than women, and they usually take business, politic, sport, legal, tax, aggression, and doing thing as their topics in most conversations. In the opposite, women prefer to talk about life style, social life, book, food and drink, life’s trouble, feeling, home and family, and affiliation. In cross-sex conversation, women tend to apologize to men, do not protest when they are interrupted and very rarely interrupt men, while men frequently interrupt women, challenge, and dispute, try to control topics, and are inclined to make categorical statement. In can be simply to say that the majority of cases, men are dominant and women are subservient in cross-sex conversation.
Maltz and Borker (1982) stated that the clash and miscommunication between men and women happen quite often in North America because they come from different sociolinguistics subcultures; as a result, both of them have their own linguistics behavior or even language in conversation. The signal ‘mhmm’ of women’s means ‘I am listening’ but ‘mhmm’ of men’s refers to ‘I am agreeing’. Hence, they often do not reach out the harmonistic in social interaction.
Those symptoms of problem, as it had been said by Lakoff, is arising primarily from the differences of interests, roles, jobs, types of conversation, and reactions between women and men.
The issues of reconstructing language following the problem of distinctions between femininity and masculinity then come to some suggestions to avoid sexist in language, i.e. early man, salesman, and common man are modified into early human, salesperson, ordinary people. Anyway, what about the word ‘she’ and ‘he’? Language logically may not be sexist. It is only the matter of how men and women as the user of language itself want to achieve their own purposes. Since sexual differences naturally exist, consequently it gives the effects on the variety of language itself as their means of communication.
Keenan (1974) argued that sex differences in language refer to social origin rather than linguistics behavior. He figured out that men in Malagasy have different behavior toward language from that is appeared in common. They (men) do hardly such efforts to reach out good communication, avoid the clash and confrontation, tend to be indirect in speech, request inexplicitly. In other hand, women are the opposite of men. They are open, direct, and straightforward in expressing things and criticize. For that reason, women of Malagasy usually handle such things, interacting with strangers, buying and selling, negotiating price, and reprimanding children. Those phenomena are brought up inherently. Their boys are taught to be as men, and so are women.
We come to wrap up this discussion by restating that in certain societies, men are more powerful and assertive. They are considered to be superior and frequently control the social interaction, while at the same time; women tend to be less powerful and inferior. Other than in some other societies, those types of social definition do not exist. And as long as human grow and change to keep up the continuity of life, language will also develop following the nature of human growth.