by Maureen Cutajar

Created on: December 24, 2009

Men complain they do not understand women, and women complain that men do not understand them. Why is it so difficult for men and women to communicate effectively when they are using the same language? A number of books have been written as an attempt to answer the question and most of them are best-sellers.

Many studies about the subject tend to indicate that men and women behave differently as a result of different socialising practices. It has been observed that since childhood, boys and girls behave differently in their peer groups. While girls tend to establish harmony and cooperation in the group, boys’ groups are characterised by leaders, dominance and power.

Similar patterns have been observed in the speech styles of men and women. Folklinguistic norms state that men value aggressiveness, arguing, storytelling, ostentatious behaviour, and they tend to dominate the conversation. Women, on the other hand are said to seek for approval, contributing to the conversation rather than interrupting, use more listening cues and often make use of indirectness, tag questions and rising intonation.

Lakoff claims that women use more colour words than men, make extensive use of intensifiers and have their own class of adjectives. She maintains that women’s use of rising intonation and tag questions reflect women’s insecurity in society.

Other studies which may be interpreted as a result of women’s insecurity and their need of approval are a number of the sociolinguistic studies in which women were more likely to use higher-status variants. Other interpretations were that women value politeness more than men, or that women make use of more prestige forms to achieve status in society.

James and Drakrich add that female friendships are characterised by sharing confidences whereas male friendships share activities. Moreover, women are more likely to initiate conversation and ask questions to maintain it, are less likely to interrupt or ignore what is being said and allow men to dominate the conversation.

These different discourse patterns are bound to result in a lack of communication. Women value details and immediacy in a conversation to express concern and understanding, but men are not socialised to be concerned but to act, be strong and solve problems.

There are two main approaches which try to explain the gender differences in language. The Dominance approach attributed the difference in language behaviour to the social dominance of men.

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