Women talk more than men: the perpetuation of linguistic myths on gender differences and so-called “women’s language”

Women talk more than men. Women talk about feelings, men about things. Women intimacy, men seek independence. And women never swear.

Or that’s what author of You Just Don’t Understand, Deborah Tannen, would have us believe. Yes, these are the language myths ingrained into our culture, endorsed by linguists such as Tannen. And studies which back these myths make it into the media, and the studies that don’t support these myths…? Pop them into the recycling bin. Must be anomalies, says the popular media.

Men and women speak differently. We’ve all seen instances of this in our day-to-day lives. We scour our brains for examples when men and women we know have used language in different ways. We think of Mary from the office who just can’t be shut up. We think of a father or an uncle who sits in his sagging armchair and barely utter a single sentence in the course of an entire evening. We hear these myths and we shape our reality to fit them. We forget bossy Dave who always interrupts, or stand-offish Samantha who says the bare minimum. Anomalies again, right?

The simple fact of it is that the media doesn’t want to hear about the millions of ways in which men and women’s language are similar. A study which says there is no real difference between the language use of men and women just isn’t interesting. The media wants sensational headlines like: “Women speak three times more words a day than men.” Cited by hundred of scientific journals and the press, The Female Brain (2006, Louann Brizendine) came out with the claim that women speak 20,000 words a day, as compared to the 7,000 of a man.

Do women really talk more than men?

However linguists, such as Mark Liberman of Language Log and professor of linguistics at Pennsylvania University, found this claim to be outlandish. When he checked her sources, he found that these figures came not from a linguistic study, but from a self-help book. Nevertheless, the claims by The Female Brain went down as fact by the popular media.

When a linguistic study was actually conducted into the average daily word count of men and women, rather than the guesswork of Louann Brizendine, the results were, unsurprisingly, very different. James Pennebaker, of the University of Texas, conducted the EAR study. This study concluded that men and women, on average, use roughly the same amount of words per day, with no significant difference. But this never made the national press, but Brizendine’s sensational (and false) claims did. What a shock.

As Mark Liberman said on the subject on the Language Log: “My current best guess is that a marriage counsellor invented this particular meme about 15 years ago, as a sort of parable for couples with certain communication problems, and others have picked it up and spread it, while modulating the numbers to suit their tastes.”

In 1975, linguist Robin Lakoff came up with several claims in regards to “women’s language.” Lakoff claimed that women tended to, amongst other things, you know, kind of, hedge a bit, sort of. Well, that’s what it, err, seems like. Women also use simply magnificent empty adjectives, like lovely and adorable. How divine! And again, women tend to avoid course language, like the “f” word… and shit like that. Oh, I’m sorry, did I just swear? I’m so sorry. Oh, look, I’m apologising a lot, according to Lakoff, that’s because I’m a female. Sorry. Can’t be helped.

A language study in 1980 by O’Barr and Atkins challenged Lakoff’s lovely theory. They conducted a study in a courtroom to study language differences between the genders. What they found is that the people who most often used the language features defined by Lakoff, were not always necessarily women, but the speakers with the least power. Female barristers used far less features than males who were being charged with a crime, for example. And so what Lakoff initially called “women’s language,” O’Barr and Atkins redefined as “language of the powerless.” Their study showed that if women did use more of the language features talked about by Lakoff, it was not because they were women, but because of women’s position in society. If women are powerless in life, their language will reflect this. The same would be true for a powerless man. Your gender has little, if anything, to do with it.

Are men less emotionally charged linguistically than women?

As Deborah Cameron writes in her book, The Myth of Mars and Venus, the differences between men and women’s use of language is the cause of “nurture, not nature.” Any studies conducted into the language differences of men and women will be ultimately flawed, because the participants would have already been socialised into Western culture. Women will have learnt that they are supposed to talk more, to be more emotional and more compassionate. Men will have learnt that they are supposed to talk more pragmatically, be less emotionally-inclined and to be more concerned with facts and figures. This will have been drummed into the participants from the day they were born. As the line goes, “Sex is what you’re born with, gender is what you’re given.” It is impossible to know whether males or females would talk in an identical or near-identical way if it were not for the process of socialisation. As it stands, any studies conducted into language difference are dodgy at best.

And sure, there are slight variations in the way that men and women use language, but these differences are a lot less wide than the popular media would have us believe. And when these differences occur, let’s not assume that it’s because men and women are biologically programmed to speak differently. The way in which we have been socialised and taught to use language plays a massive role, as well as the equality of the genders in the environment in which we live, as proven by O’Barr and Atkins.

When it comes down to it, despite my gender, I can swear as much as Dave from your local, and my dad can hedge like a bastard.

Sorry, Tannen, you’ll have to go back to the drawing board.