Abstract
Although this chapter is about sex differences in language, it is not intended to serve as a catalogue of research findings. Rather, it has two main concerns: the first, which it shares with Chapter 4, is the sexism of linguistic science, as expressed by a mass of assumptions and practices reflecting the status quo; while the second is the political significance of sex difference itself. Hence the chapter heading is deliberately ambiguous, referring not only to the politics of variation but also to the politics of studying it.
In a society where women are
devalued it is not surprising
that their language should be devalued. …
Dale Spender
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Notes
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Elinor O. Keenan, ‘Norm Makers, Norm Breakers; Uses of Speech by Women in a Malagasy Community’, Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, ed. R. Bauman and J. Sherzer (CUP, 1974) p. 142.
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Caroline Henton, ‘Sex Specific Phonetics and Social Realisation’, unpublished 1983.
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Dale Spender, Man Made Language (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) p. 8.
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© 1985 Deborah Cameron
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Cameron, D. (1985). The Politics of Variation: Sex Differences in Language and Linguistics. In: Feminism and Linguistic Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17727-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17727-1_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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