The Battle of Ages on the Language Front

What Language Barrier?


Women talk too much. Men and women deal with language differently. This difference is inherent and genetic and there's nothing to be done about it. Men and women will forever be at an impasse of communication because they interpret language differently. Are any of these popular myths true?

Deborah Cameron of Oxford has written a book about the differences (or more accurately, lack thereof) between male and female language use. She discusses the shift in thought and approach to gender differences in language from taboo to common knowledge. However, she challenges this "common knowledge" as a myth, a common misconception to a certain degree. She calls it the "myth of Mars and Venus." To summarize the stereotypes she's talking about, women excel at verbal communication and empathy, and have better language skills overall. Alternatively, men deal better with spacial concepts and are a gender of actions rather than words, and have a firmer grasp of complex systems.

It is often thought that women talk more (possibly too much), but upon closer inspection Deborah Cameron found that the opposite may indeed be true, but the matter of "who talks more" is really a matter of circumstance instead of an overarching gender difference that's ingrained from birth.

Are these stereotypes self-propegating? As Cameron puts it,"Psychologists have found in experimental studies that when interpreting situations people typically pay most attention to things that match their expectations, and often fail to register counter-examples." So if a study participant is asked to recall all the instances of the loquacity of women, they'll more readily classify women as more talkative and negate the experiences where men have been the more talkative sex.

Do these stereotypes have some basis in reality? As Cameron mentions, it has been shown that the person who talks more in a conversation is generally the person who has a higher rank, or is a greater authority on the topic at hand. So women might indeed talk more if the topic of conversation is pregnancy, for example.

To the questions at the beginning of this post, it seems absurd to try to make such broad classifications. For every woman exemplifying some stereotype of language usage, there are also men who share the same characteristics. Language, it turns out, is not a hugely significant sex difference, especially compared to some of the other sex differences which have indeed been proven quite thoroughly (like throwing ability, for example).

This is an exciting topic within language study, and I think it's important to keep an open mind about it in order to keep the discussion moving and uninhibited. It's a great opportunity to be in a stage in history where people are uncertain about such things, as opposed to the fifties where stereotypes were the rule, or slightly earlier in history when saying that there were ANY significant differences between men and women were taboo.