Men's and Women's Speech in Koasati

Abstract

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Language and woman's place

“…It is to be expected that similar cases will be found in many other languages as well. See, for example, Haas" (1964) very interesting discussion of differences between men's and women's speech (mostly involving lexical dissimilarities) in many languages.…”

Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich

“…1 The fact that the speech of men and women may differ in interesting ways, however, has been noted in only a rather small number of linguistic articles and discussions (see, for example, Haas 1944;Fischer 1958;Sapir 1929)^ and, until very recently, research on this topic has tended to concentrate either on non-urbanized communities (Haas 1944) or on relatively peripheral aspects of the subject (Hertzler 1954).…”

Against Idealization: Some Speculations on the Theory of Linguistic Performance

“…When this distillation is done, the grammarian's choice seems to me still the classic one: does he describe a single prestige dialect, such as RP, or does he attempt to construct a framework which will include all alternatives in mutually comprehensible dialects (as Trager & Smith [1951] attempted with English vowels)? To take a single example: in many societies men's and women's speech is grammatically differentiated (see Haas, 1944: in Hymes, 1964b; to say, as I am sure Chomsky would, that this is a feature of performance and therefore irrelevant to a grammar, and that a grammar of Koasati should treat it as linguistically homogeneous, would be of no help at all to the descriptive linguist. Surely what is required is a grammar which will tell us, among other things, how it is that men and women speakers of Koasati are able, given adequate context and intelligence, to pair sounds and meanings in an infinite number of sentences in that language; and to do so when people of different sex are talking to one another?…”