If you’ve been thinking about language and gender during your A-levels, you probably already know about Robin Lakoff. Her 1975 book Language and Woman’s Place is a foundational text in sociolinguistics, and one of the first major linguistic studies to explore the relationship between language and gender. The book is an expansion of her 1973 article in the journal Language and Society, which you can read for free here.

Reading through, you might find yourself familiar with many of Lakoff’s key observations. She is concerned with describing gendered styles of speaking, and develops a notion of ‘woman’s language’ which is marked its expressions deference, uncertainty and focus on trivial topics. She argues that these reflect both patterns in the ways women speak, and social expectations around how women ‘should’ speak.

In combination with observations of power asymmetry in language concerning gendered description (e.g. the connotations of ‘master’ versus ‘mistress’), this forms the basis of her argument that language and social movements are closely linked. In order to understand how women use and are described in language, linguists need to understand the way society views and treats women. Societal imbalances are therefore reflected in differences in gendered language use and descriptions of men and women.

But Lakoff’s work is now almost half a century old. Since its publication, the study of language and gender has exploded into a rich sub-discipline of sociolinguistics, with dedicated journals and edited collections showcasing an ever-expanding field of study.

With this in mind, should Lakoff’s original work really still serve as the basis of instruction for A-level English language teaching on language and gender? Are A-level students being effectively equipped to discuss language and gender at an undergraduate level? Or is it time for an update?

Current Conversations

These questions were the subject of a recent discussion between Oxford University’s Professor Debbie Cameron and the hosts of the Lexis podcast. Exploring the impact of Lakoff’s work on both academic research and contemporary teaching at A-level, this wide-ranging conversation gives a fantastic overview of some of the concerns academics have about the way students sometimes come to rely on Lakoff’s work as a definitive approach to the relationship between language and gender.

You can listen to Part 1 and Part 2 of this discussion using the links, or through most podcast apps via the Lexis podcast feed.

While Lakoff’s work provides an important starting point for analysing and critiquing the relationship between language and gender, it’s important to recognize its limitations. As is noted in the Lexis podcast, Lakoff writes as if her findings are generalisable to all women’s language, but it’s important to note that her data is largely anecdotal. Her observations come from noting the way women in her social circles speak, an approach she acknowledges and justifies in her original 1973 paper: ‘is the educated, white, middle-class group that the writer of [this] paper identifies with less worthy of study than any other’?

Of course, there’s no reason any one group would be less worthy of study than another. But the influence of Lakoff’s paper means that observations of this group (already over-represented in academic research) have been taken as universal. In the five decades since, extensive sociolinguistic research across a much wider range of social groups has found that the features of ‘women’s language’ identified are not necessarily applicable to all women.

At Warwick and Beyond

When we introduce the topic of language and gender during our first year course, ET119 Language in Society, start by acknowledging Lakoff’s work as a familiar reference point for many of our students. But we’re also quick to contextualise it, and think about how the discipline of sociolinguistics – as well as our understanding of gender identity – has evolved in the decades since the publication of Language and Woman’s Place.

To see the kinds of research we now work with, Meyerhoff and Ehrlich’s 2019 open access review of literature across language, gender, and sexuality provides a thorough account of the history of approaches to the topic, as well as recommendations for contemporary reading. If your library has a copy, the Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality (edited by Jo Angouri – one of the lecturers on our Language in Society course!) showcases an excellent range of current methods and topics used to study gender within linguistics.