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Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender pp 150–162Cite as

Language and Gender

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Theoretical Debates in the Study of Language and Gender

Most people, when they think of work on language and gender, probably think of works like linguist Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand or perhaps even psychologist John Gray’s Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus—studies of “miscommunications” between women and men in heterosexual couples. Indeed, early studies of gender by academics often assumed that gender was most salient “in cross-sex interaction between potentially sexually accessible interlocutors, or same-sex interaction in gender-specific tasks” (Brown & Levinson, 1983, p. 53). Despite an increasing number of different approaches, in studies of language and gender in the North Atlantic this focus remains influential and, at its best, insightful (e.g., Fishman, 1983; Gleason, 1987; Tannen, 1990; West & Zimmerman, 1983; Zimmerman & West, 1975).

However, there are, a number of increasingly controversial theoretical assumptions about gender often implicitly embedded...

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  1. Bonnie McElhinny
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  1. Human Relationa Area Files/Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA

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McElhinny, B. (2003). Language and Gender. In: Ember, C.R., Ember, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-29907-6_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-29907-6_16

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