Skip to content
Home » gender

gender

Ethnographies of Language and Gender

Recently Elise Berman asked colleagues via the LINGANTH email list to recommend recent ethnographies of language and culture. Several people responded; some titles and links to publishers are collected here.

(Socio-) Phonetics in the news

The Fresh Air interview of David Thorpe and Susan Sankin makes me look forward to Thorpe’s film, “Do I Sound Gay?” But Sankin’s suggestions that women and young people’s speech is pathological leads me to re-read Robin Lakoff, Deborah Cameron, and Nelson Flores.

Video clips for teaching language ideologies

Several colleagues have suggested film and video clips that may be useful in teaching about language ideologies, including the value of standard and non-standard varieties, social stereotypes, and style shifting. This post includes several YouTube videos.

Arana: Good sociolinguistic conclusion despite questionable examples

Gabriel Arana recently published a defense of creaky voice at The Atlantic. He notes that recent criticism of young women’s use of creaky voice, or “vocal fry”, is part of a long tradition of critiquing the speaking styles of less powerful groups of people. Arana’s conclusion that “normative judgments about linguistic prestige are relative, and merely reflect social attitudes” is absolutely correct and well-known to linguistic anthropologists and other scholars of language. The particular speech patterns he analyses to support his conclusion – up-talk, like, and creak – are somewhat questionable, however.

Gendered interactional styles in Friends

This clip from the TV show Friends demonstrates a media representation of male and female interactional styles. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGoC8FTLKSI&feature=related [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGoC8FTLKSI&feature=related[/youtube]

“Ordinary” language use

In “Lesbian bar talk in Shinjuku, Tokyo” Hideko Abe shows how identity positions are constructed and claimed through language use. One passage, which shows how use of the word futsuu (ordinary) includes homosexual and heterosexual subjects in the same category, bears additional analysis.