Gender and Language in Ethnographic and

Evolutionary Perspectives
WILLIAM A. FOLEY
Falk, Dean. 2009. Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants and the Origins of
Language. New York: Basic Books.
Goodwin, Marjorie Harkness. 2006. The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status
and Exclusion. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Hoffman, Katherine E. 2008. We Share Walls: Language, Land and Gender in Berber
Morocco. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Inoue, Miyako. 2006. Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in
Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Much research in the field of language and gender has been
hampered by unquestioned a priori dualistic assumptions about
contrasting gender roles for men and women. The works reviewed
here all demonstrate that simplistic dualistic beliefs about what are
typical male or female ways of speaking do not hold water. The
variables that determine speech styles are complex and mutually
interactive: place of residence, class, formality, age, and gender,
and others. Women are just as capable of directive speech as
men, and men, of hedged speech. Dualistic thinking about gender
serves only to reinforce current hegemonies.
KEYWORDS conversation, gender, language evolution,
language variation, linguistic ideology, sex
Address correspondence to William A. Foley, Linguistics F12, University of Sydney,
Sydney, NSW, 2006 Australia. E-mail: william.foley@sydney.edu.au
Reviews in Anthropology, 40:82106, 2011
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 online
DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2011.572460
82
INTRODUCTION: DUALISTIC IDEOLOGIES
OF GENDER AND TALK
Dualism is a very pervasive pattern in human thinking; to take some random
examples: the Manichean contrast of light and dark and the linked concepts
good versus evil; the Cartesian opposition of mind versus matter; the typical
Middle Sepik River social organization of two opposing moieties and their
totems, Sky versus Earth, and the ubiquitous cognitive organization of infor-
mation there into pairs denoted by a metaphorical appeal to older versus
younger sibling (Bateson 1958); and, finally, the perennial nature-nurture
debate in psychology and ethology.
But, undoubtedly the most salient dualistic contrast to human percep-
tion is that of sex, the contrasting body types of male versus female. Typically
the first question asked of a newborn baby is, is it a boy or a girl? What is
perhaps remarkable about this is that the body types of all newborn babies
are overwhelmingly similar, yet we focus on rather small anatomical differ-
ences in the genital region in order to classify them into mutually exclusive
opposing categories of male versus female sex, so salient is this contrast
for us.
When in the normal course of genetic mutations a baby is born who is
hard to classify into one or the other of these mutually exclusive and exhaus-
tive categories, we react with horror, and a surgeons skill is quickly resorted
to in order to resolve the ambiguity and redesign the newborns body so that
it conforms acceptably with one of our dual opposed categories. Intersexu-
ality flies in the face of our overweening demand for a tidy dualism in our
categorization of sex; we take it as an offence against the proper order of
things, the way the world must be ordered, and hence our quick appeal to
remedy this, but not all cultures react in this way. Geertz (1983), for instance,
mentions the case of the Pokot of Kenya, for whom an intersex child is just
like a poorly crafted pot, not well made, but certainly not the source of a hor-
rified reaction demanding the world be put right. Such facts suggest that the
seeming biological bedrock of sex, what is understood about the physiologi-
cal contrast between male and female bodies, is a cultural construct; different
societies construe and react to this in different ways. In our culture we brook
no blurring of this opposition, but others seem less fazed by cases of
ambiguity here.
Whatever may be said about the cultural basis of our understanding of
sex and its more or less obvious grounding in biology, there can be no doubt
that gender, what is made of this contrast into two types of bodies and what
significances are ascribed to it, is undoubtedly a cultural construction. The
physiological contrast in sex, male versus female body types, provides a
powerful basis for constructing opposing dual cultural categories of mascu-
line versus feminine. The content of these categories is not permanently
Gender and Language 83
set, but, rather, is built up in an ongoing fashion through the daily practices
of social interaction.
Gender is not something we have, but something we do. This is the per-
formative theory of gender, laid out in a number of pioneering works on this
topic, notably Butler (1990, 1993), Connell (1995), Fausto-Sterling (2000),
and Herdt (1996). Our gender is performed, learned, and reproduced in
the countless routines and rituals through which we live our lives: not just
our roles in copulation, but what restrooms we go to in a mall, how we walk,
what types of jewelry, if any, we wear, how we pitch our voices, etc. Gender
is based on erasing the overwhelming similarities, physiological and other-
wise, that men and women share and exaggerating the differences, enjoining
individuals to perform properly the cultural behavior mandated for persons
of their body type. The reasons for this erasure are cultural and ideological,
as the three ethnographies reviewed here illustrate, but also quite probably
rooted in asymmetrical parenting practices that go back deep in our evol-
utionary past, as Falks book argues. Of course, individuals can behave in
ways contrary to the norms expected of them, for example, men crying or
wearing pink jeans in some cultural settings, but they are commonly met with
disapproval for such infractions, although the severity of censure for gender
violations does vary from culture to culture.
Violations of expected gender roles in our culture and perhaps more
generally do seem to be less strictly condemned for women than men: girls
and womens wearing of prototypically male clothing like jeans and even
suits has now gained wide acceptance, whereas dresses have yet to catch
on with men, and certainly any man caught wearing one outside of liminal
institutions like drag shows will find themselves severely reproached. This
undoubtedly reflects the hegemonic position of the masculine gender; its
borders are heavily policed so as not to threaten its supremacy.
The performance theory of gender is resolutely anti-essentialist. The
gender role differences we find between men and women, even those
widely attested cross-culturally, do not reside in the genetic differences
between their respective body types, but result from how cultures construct
social roles around these body types and other things (see Butler 1993).
Hence, the performative theory of gender rejects a dualistic construal of gen-
der: gender is not a binary contrast of masculine and feminine, but a whole
panoply of roles through which actors can construct their gender identity by
adopting, mixing, or altering expected social roles for men and women. Such
an approach gives us much greater scope for enriching our concepts of
gender roles, inclusive of gay men, lesbians, transsexuals, intersexuals, trans-
vestites, and so on.
In spite of these insights of gender as performed, dualistic thinking con-
tinues to be strongly evident in much contemporary research on gender and
gendered behavior. Consider two books on gender, highly influential within
84 W. A. Foley
the academy and without: Carol Gilligans (1982) In a Different Voice and
Deborah Tannens (1990) You Just Dont Understand (the latter developing
ideas originally proposed in a foundational paper by Maltz and Borker
[1982]). The reader should not deduce from the dates of publication of these
works that they are passe; they are still very influential and guide much
ongoing research, particularly cross-disciplinary work. Indeed, one of the
books discussed in this review is really a sustained attempt to refute them,
a fact that demonstrates their continued influence.
These books argue that there is a fundamental contrast (that is, a dual-
ism) in the way men and women accomplish interactional tasks. Gilligan
(1982) claims that boys are socialized into becoming men who value auto-
nomy and their individualized ability to wield power. Boys and men are
alleged to reason about fairness and justice by an appeal to abstract princi-
ples, while girls and women are said to reason contextually, through the
ongoing demands of the relationships they build. Girls and women are
claimed to reason concretely through specific cases, a mode of ethics based
on care and attachment in relationships rather than autonomous decisions
reached by abstract principles. Tannen (1990) and, earlier, Maltz and Borker
(1982) argue that men and women view the goal of conversations differently
and thereby conduct them appropriately. Men are said to be competitive and
hierarchical and hence view conversations as arenas of contest for status in
which their rank rises or falls. Women, on the other hand, are argued to
see conversations as ways to forge interpersonal relationships and build inti-
macies. Tannen (1990) does recognize that not all male or female speech
behavior conforms to such stereotypes. For example, she notes that it is
not the case that men interrupt women more often than women interrupt
men, but that power and class can play central roles in determining such
asymmetric speech behavior. Nevertheless, her overall thrust is to argue in
favor of a gendered dualism of speech behavior for men and women,
although clearly individuals can exemplify divergent behavior on occasion.
Maltz and Borker (1982) trace these differences to the styles boys and
girls adopt in childhood during play. Boys typically play in larger groups than
girls, and these groups are structured hierarchically according to status. Status
is relative and ever changing so the main point of boys play interactions is to
manipulate their peers to enhance their status. In these competitive attempts
to enhance status, speech has three roles:
1. to assert ones dominance
2. to attract and hold an audience, and
3. to assert oneself when others have the floor.
The styles of speech used will reflect these functions: orders, threats,
and ridicule (asserting ones dominance), boasting or other types of
display of verbal skills (attracting and holding an audience) and refusals to
Gender and Language 85
listen to others or interruptions of their turns (asserting oneself when others
have the floor).
The world of girls is utterly different in this account. Their playgroups
are smaller, often just pairs, and their games are cooperative and organized
in non-competitive ways. Differentiation among girls is not established in
terms of status differentials of power, but in terms of relative closeness.
Friendship is construed in terms of intimacy, commitment, and loyalty. The
goal of interaction is to reinforce these feelings of connection. To put it
baldly and oversimplistically in terms of Brown and Levinsons (1987) theory,
boys are more focused on their negative face, in that status gives them inde-
pendence and freedom to act, including coercing others to act as they want
(i.e., power), while girls are more concerned with positive face, the positive
evaluation they give each other through mutual closeness. Of course, conflict
necessarily arises sometimes in all human groups, even those exclusively
of girls.
Boys typically resolve conflict through displays of dominance, often
involving physical force, but in the more egalitarian cooperative groups of
girls this option is not easily available. Girls must learn to use interactive stra-
tegies, which attend to the positive face needs of the other, but at the same
time effectively criticize them for their behavior. Girls, then, are necessarily
more polite than boys. Speech for girls must serve both these ends:
1. to create and maintain relationships of equality and closeness, and
2. to criticize others effectively without rupturing a desired relationship.
Their typical styles of speech will emphasize offers rather than orders
and exhibit a high proportion of modalized constructions and emotional
terms (marking close, equal relationships) and be relatively polite and
indirect (acceptable criticism).
INDEXING GENDER IN CHILDHOOD CONVERSATIONS
The first of the books under review, Marjorie Harness Goodwins The Hidden
Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status and Exclusion (2006), is a direct attack
on the dualistic lines of thinking about gender roles epitomized by Gilligan
(1982), Tannen (1990), and Maltz and Borker (1982) summarized above.
The book is a careful ethnographic study of pre-teen girls in a few schools
in the United States, most importantly, a private elementary school in a
middle-class suburb of Los Angeles.
The methodological and theoretical framework that Goodwin employs
is conversational analysis (Sacks 1995; Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974;
Sidnell 2010; Silverman 1998), an approach that pays exact attention to
the details of what people say and how they say it, instead of obtaining
86 W. A. Foley
information in interviews or notes drawn from participant observation
relying on memory. Goodwin videotaped more than 80 hours of children
interacting on the playground or over lunch, and transcribed the con-
versations recorded using the conventions of conversational analysis
(presented in her Appendix A). Conversational analysis relies on transcrip-
tion of much more than just the words spoken; it captures as much as
possible of the oral communication, noting volume, pitch, length, speed,
in-breaths, laughter, interruptions, overlaps in speakers turns, and so on.
This type of minutely transcribed data is the lifeblood of Goodwins eth-
nography; the conclusions she is able to draw are strongly supported in
the transcribed conversations and available for any reader to peruse. This
is all to be lauded and a great improvement on many traditional ethno-
graphies, in which ethnographic conclusions are reported, but often the
details needed to evaluate the claims remain buried in the authors
unpublished fieldnotes.
Unfortunately, this strong point is also the cause of what in my view is a
shortcoming of the book: it produces a text that is often tedious to read.
Goodwin presents a transcribed conversation in her text and then follows
it with a paragraph or two of prose explaining the conversation. When the
conversation is opaque vis-a-vis the point being made, this is helpful, but
more often it is simply repetitive of what the reader has already gleaned from
reading through the conversation; hence this feeling of tedium sets in. Sug-
gesting a remedy is not easy, as having a close transcription of the primary
data is a valuable aspect of this monograph. A compromise may be to put
the transcribed conversations in appendices, cross-referenced to the places
in the text where the specific interactions are discussed and the ethnographic
conclusions drawn.
Chapter 1 sets the framework and provides an overview of the book.
Goodwin locates the work as an ethnography of pre-teen girls verbal
behavior that will challenge prevailing dualistic theories, for which she pro-
vides a critical summary. She presents her methodology and a synopsis of
conversational analysis, emphasizing the importance of practice approaches
to ethnography, those that take the ongoing situated activity of social actors
as the primary unit of analysis.
Chapter 2 documents disputes that arise in the course of girls interac-
tions in a typical childhood game, hopscotch. For this chapter in particular,
the author presents data from children from a wide variety of class and ethnic
backgrounds and from different regions of the country. She demonstrates
that contrary to dualistic views of gender concerning girls supposed cooper-
ative and caring stances and their preference for contextual rather than
abstract reasoning, disputes are common in these games, and further, girls
exhibit a clear sense of proper behavior as governed by rule. They show
great facility in arguing for positions within the game and in censuring
violations according to such rules.
Gender and Language 87
From chapter 3 onwards the ethnography is solely concerned with the
girls in a popular and leading clique in a private elementary school in an
upper-middle-class neighborhood of Los Angeles, although the girls in the
study group do reflect mixed class and ethnic backgrounds. This chapter
looks at how the girls construct their social group through conversation
and how they handle relationships with those outside of the clique,
especially boys. A focus is on relationships, which are asymmetrical in power
and status. Goodwin examines the means of asserting dominance and how
this dominance is resisted. A specific case involves a dispute between the
boys and the girls over access to the soccer field. Again, contrary to expected
dualistic claims, the girls directly confront the boys and their supportive male
school aides over their hogging of access to the field. The girls appeal to the
vice principal and notably make their case on the basis of fairness and natural
justice according to principle. Through their direct action, school policy is
overturned in favor of a rotating roster for use of the field.
Chapter 4 investigates how social interaction is organized in the game of
jump rope, by same sex groups of boys and girls and by mixed sex groups.
Goodwin demonstrates that while there is little difference in the language
employed by boys and girls in the mixed sex groups, in the same sex groups
significant disparities became apparent. An important factor in the organiza-
tion of the boys group was an emergent hierarchy, some support for at least
one plank of dualistic gender theory. One boy whose athletic skill in the
game was superior to that of the other boys clearly was the leader and
exercised power over the other boys. His directives were normally followed
without protest.
In the girls clique, leadership was diffused, and the ability to orchestrate
the activity more equally distributed; even the least skilled player was as
assertive as any other. Importantly, jump rope was a game in which the girls
at least initially had the greater expertise, and the boys recognized this. In the
early mixed sex games the girls assumed control, accepted or rejected the
boys requests to play, and dictated the ground rules, a role which the boys
accepted due to their recognition of the girls greater athletic skill in this
domain.
However, later in the year, after they had increased their skill, the boys,
particularly their leader, had considerably more say in the organization of a
mixed sex game. With increasing skill they felt they were no longer in a sub-
ordinate position (again the pervasive male concern with hierarchy) and
assumed the assertive directive style formerly the prerogative of the girls.
These data support the argument that claims of strict gender dichotomies
are misleading: depending on how they view their position in a given situ-
ation, both boys and girls can and will employ directive verbal means to
assert their wants.
Chapter 5 probes the language styles used by the girls to index their
social status. The author discusses the ways the girls of upper-middle-class
88 W. A. Foley
background signaled their status by stories about their activities and privi-
leges, particularly bragging about their access to valued consumer goods
and the leisure and travel associated with wealth. Girls in this age range were
already highly aware of the relative social value of goods and activities and
how these indicate the status of those who have access to them. They were
especially cognizant of the relative rank of the junior high schools they will
potentially be graduating to in a year or two.
Clearly, the girls were as aware of relative rank as boys and asserted
theirs at will, but there are some gender-related differences: the girls were less
prone to overt bragging than the boys. Boys bragged about their achieve-
ments and jousted for rank in their ongoing hierarchical games, with those
of lower rank recognizing this and acting accordingly. Girls claimed status dif-
ferences more indirectly through consumption patterns, and the meanings of
these were often in dispute. Girls commonly disparaged and applied sanc-
tions to other girls who too openly flaunted their perceived high status.
Chapter 6 deals with gossip, a verbal activity commonly but inaccurately
regarded as a predominantly female activity (see Cameron 1997 for an
example of male gossip). Gossip can be defined as speech in which the
behavior of normally absent others is assessed and typically criticized. Good-
wins earlier book (1990) dealt mainly with gossip and the offended partys
verbal defense against it among adolescent girls in an African-American
district in inner-city Philadelphia.
Gossip can function to build cohesion within a social group, but it can
also be used as a weapon to censure inappropriate behavior by a member of
the group. Goodwin here shows how the girls use gossip and especially ridi-
cule to impose norms on each other. Normative and valued behavior exploits
the status symbols of the wider consumerist culture, and this in turn creates
distinctions among the girls: some can enhance their status through stories
about their access to these and impose negative evaluations of others
through gossip and ridicule.
Chapter 7 further scrutinizes in detail how the girls in the clique use
gossip, ridicule, directives, and other verbal means to stigmatize, exclude,
and even victimize an unwanted peer. Dualistic theories of gender have
claimed that girls are socialized into a cooperative manner of speaking,
emphasizing networking and connection, polite avoidance rather than
confrontation (Holmes 1995).
The data in this chapter show such a broad universalizing claim to be
false. A girl marginal to the clique is regularly verbally degraded by its mem-
bers, that is, subjected to bullying, through insults, threats, bald orders, and
rumors. Threats, insults, and bald orders have been argued to be features of
boys groups and carried out by those higher in rank toward those lower. But
boys hierarchies are transient to the extent that they are established through
joint activities, typically sports, which provide opportunities to construct
alternative rankings. Girls gauge themselves according to the relationships
Gender and Language 89
they forge with others, and these tend to be longer lasting. Hence, such ver-
bal devices do not index relative status ranking for them, but actually police
the membership of the group. Girls use such confronting verbal means to vic-
timize and exclude those they do not wish to allow into their relationship
network. It is not the case that only boys are directly confrontational, aggres-
sive, and competitive, with girls normally cooperative and caring, restricting
their aggression to indirect means like gossip; girls are just as capable of
using the same confronting verbal means toward those they regard worthy
of exclusion.
Chapter 8, the conclusion, summarizes the findings of the ethnography
and points to the importance of going beyond simplistic dualistic under-
standings in the study of gender and social interaction. The author notes that
her findings really call into question monolithic claims about girls and
womens speech being prosocial (Macoby 1990, 1998), cooperative (Coates
1998), or polite (Holmes 1995). Such generalizations simply do not hold
water when carefully investigated. Strikingly, girls seem just as capable ver-
bally as boys in bullying and victimizing a perceived social inferior, a finding
of great practical importance, given the now worldwide epidemic in bullying
witnessed in schools (Sanders 2004).
Like previous dualisms such as nature and nurture, this book shows it is
time to retire the presuppositions that come with a simple binary contrast of
two types of persons according to their gender and investigate carefully on
the ground the kinds of verbal routines both males and females use in
diverse social situations to construct and perform their gendered identities.
Counterattacks to dualistic thinking about gender like Goodwins are not
new. Such thinking has came under sustained criticism and refutation since
it was first proposed in the 1980s, and a summary of such research can be
found in Cameron (2007); but what is most surprising is how entrenched it
seems to remain, not only in the popular imagination, with slogans of the
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus type, but in academic circles
as well. The fundamental ethnographic question to ask here is why do such
stereotypes of dualistic gendered speech behavior persist, and strikingly con-
tinue to do so in academic circles in spite of sustained scholarly refutations of
them over two decades? How did they first arise and what and whose pur-
poses are being served by their perpetuation? What is the ideology of linguis-
tic practices that maintains them? To explore these questions we need to
cross the Pacific to another cultural setting.
STANDARDIZING WOMEN AND STANDARDIZING
LANGUAGE IN JAPAN
Miyako Inoues Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in
Japan (2006), is a brilliant book, wonderfully erudite and compellingly
90 W. A. Foley
written. It exemplifies the best in linguistic anthropology. It includes insight-
ful ethnography and painstaking documentary work embedded in a rich
descriptive framework forged by a synthesis of cutting edge theory, that is,
the political economy of language (Friedrich 1989; Gal 1989), linguistic ideol-
ogy (Irvine and Gal 2000), and semiotic indexicality (Silverstein 1979, 2003).
This work is so dense and rich with insights that I can only hope to skim the
surface here; the reader is invited to plumb its depths.
Inoue approaches the question of dualistic thinking in gender from a
different direction than Goodwin. It is a commonplace of Japanese folk
linguistic ideology that Japanese men and women speak differently; there
was no need for a bestseller like Tannen (1990) to popularize this notion
there. There has been much recent lament in the popular press about the
demise of this contrast, as women are claimed to be speaking increasingly
like men, an indication of cultural decay (Gagne 2008; Miller 1989, 2004;
Okamoto 1995).
Inoue is concerned with showing how this womens language arose in
Japan and to demonstrate its close link to cultural change brought about by
modernization in the post-Meiji Restoration period. While growing up in a
rural area of Japan, Inoue was struck by how this womens language
was not her language, but what was what she heard on radio and television,
the refined speech of sophisticated middle-class, urbanized Tokyo women.
Because this prescribed sharp contrast of mens versus womens speech
did not apply to her everyday experience, as it generally does not to rural
or working class women, Inoue (2006:3) wanted to know:
Why then does it make sense to talk about how men and women speak
differently? Why is womens language a national obsession? . . . Why are
the densely heterogeneous linguistic practices of people in Japan so
radically reduced to one single binary, that is, gendermale and
femaleand to a single set of speech forms?
In essence, then, what are the social, political, and economic conditions
that have so powerfully constrained the Japanese public to articulate and
defend this radically dualistic view concerning appropriate gendered lan-
guage behavior in the face of multiple dimensions of language variation by
class, age, residence, and gender. Inoue (2006:14) defines womens lan-
guage in just such terms: a network of cultural practices of objectifying
femaleness=femininity and mapping a reified gender binary onto the sounds,
figures, manners and organizations of talk.
Chapter 1 deals with the historical period in the late 19th century in
which the linguistic features now labeled as womens language first arose
and received public comment. Surprisingly, in this early period these innova-
tions were universally condemned in the press. They occurred in a social
group labeled schoolgirls, who were girls and young women from elite
Gender and Language 91
families attending same-sex secondary schools, themselves a result of mod-
ernization following the Meiji Restoration. These linguistic innovations were
overheard by male intellectuals of the period and cited by them as vulgar and
low-class speech, a fact now completely erased from the nations collective
consciousness. These male intellectuals disapprovingly quoted schoolgirl
speech, in their writings, newspaper columns, and novels, as emblematic
of the undesirable effects of modernization and the abandonment of Japans
traditional values. This schoolgirls speech was unpleasant to the ears
precisely because it disrupted their symbolic dualistic alignment between
modern versus traditional and men versus women. These speakers were
women and modern, and, as such, an illegitimate and undesirable output
of social change.
Chapter 2 investigates the interrelationship between the movement to
establish and prescribe a standardized Japanese language in the early 20th
century, language modernization, and the appearance of womens lan-
guage. This was the period when centralization of the Japanese state and
capitalist industrialization, with consequent social class restructuring, was
taking off, especially after the defeat of Russia in the War of 1905. The goal
of this language modernization was to create a Japanese language that
expressed a modern subjectivity, one that represented reality as faithfully
as possible, for instance, through reported speech (Bakhtin 1981). This sub-
jectivity was male, an objective and reliable reporter of the reality that he
perceived. Under the gaze of the objective male reporter of the new moder-
nizing nation state, schoolgirl speech, which had been previously been con-
sidered vulgar, was now a sign of the newly empowered modern Japanese
woman. Contrary to Japanese popular opinion, womens language is any-
thing but a continuation of a pristine Japanese tradition where it indexed
female gentleness and poise, but rather a wholly modern invention.
In Chapter 3, Inoue looks at womens magazines, particularly their
advertisements, between the 1890s and 1930s. These were the first arena
in which women actually observed womens language, and Inoue traces
how its indexical value gradually shifted. These magazines were a major con-
duit through which middle-class, literate women were enculturated into
becoming bourgeois consumers.
Inoue focuses on the kind of language cited in these magazines and
demonstrates how schoolgirl speech shifted from being the language of
the object, a way of speaking commented on and consumed, to the language
of the empowered consumer-subject for communicating her desires and
thoughts. It became the generic feminine speech style, representative of an
idealized modern Japanese middle-class woman as a canny consumer, loyal
citizen, and dutiful wife and mother. Unlike the male, but ideologically
hegemonic and hence neutered, standard Japanese, womens language
assumes an indexical value of the legitimate aesthetic of femininity
gentleness, hesitancy, and nurturingso that all factors in its historical
92 W. A. Foley
origins and its original links to a urbanized, privileged, middle-class are
erased in a dualism of prescribed gender roles.
Chapter 4 moves on to the late 1980s and early 1990s, the era of the bub-
ble economy and its aftermath. At this time the popular press was obsessed
with a perceived decay in the use of womens language. In a hundred years
we have come full circle: whereas in the 1890s, commentators on schoolgirl
speech, the forerunner of womens language, deplored it as vulgar. In the
1990s, newspapers and other media outlets again commented on the speech
of contemporary schoolgirls and lamented its vulgarity and lack of refine-
ment because they eschewed the prescribed womens language. In the bub-
ble economy of this period, there was a massive entry of women into the
employment market and a surge in their power as consumers. Gender rela-
tions were seen to be altering, and new laws came into force in an attempt
(mostly unsuccessful) to create equal opportunities for both genders in the
workplace.
The increased economic visibility of women in the public eye triggered
a commensurate anxiety about a collapse in traditional roles, and particularly
that of women as home-based wives and mothers. This led to a flurry of pub-
lic commentaries on the decline of womens language, the salient index of
proper femininity, and the moral decline of the nation, all of this in the con-
text of unprecedented economic growth. The salience of womens language
was also tied to the nations ideological project of being uniquely Japanese
and modern, nihonjinron Japaneseness (Befu 2001). The possible loss
of womens language rekindled a fear that modernism in Japan would result
in a cutting loose of all traditional moorings and produce a nation state which
is at best an imitation of the West, and at worst a substandard one at that.
Chapters 5 and 6 are the ethnographic heart of the book. Inoue under-
took fieldwork for about 18 months in a medium-sized pharmaceutical
company, a subsidiary of a foreign multinational. She interviewed and
observed the speech of a number of women working there. Chapter 5 dis-
cusses a middle manager at the firm. This woman was quiet and unassuming,
wore no bright colored flashy clothes or striking makeup; she was the least
spectacular of the nine female managers at the firm.
Her speech style is well summarized by her own aphorism: just stay in
the middle, a motto highly iconic of her rank in the firm. She eschews the
more elaborate honorific forms associated with womens language and its
gendered hesitancy marking particles, but she regularly uses the polite verb
endingsmasu=-desu. These indicate deference to the addressee, but do not
either honor him or her or humble the speaker. Her speech style was
described as flat. She does not violate the norm of womens language to
be politeshe is being politeusing masu=-desubut her speech is not
overtly gendered because she does not employ the forms prototypically asso-
ciated with womens language. She stays in the middle by refusing to partici-
pate in a gendered dualism of language forms in Japanese; her speech is not
Gender and Language 93
overtly marked as mens or womens language, but she does not violate the
norms of the latter either. Aware of her position as both a manager in this
hierarchical organization (overwhelmingly a mans position) and a woman,
a situation that defies the gender presuppositions in this society, she navi-
gates and rises above any dualistic expectations in language use.
Chapter 6 considers an assortment of other female workers at the firm
and their practices of womens language. Inoue demonstrates that they per-
form it for a wide range of reasons, and, interestingly, not typically to invoke
an identity of an idealized female citizen-consumer. For instance, the women
often used it mockingly to comment critically on women of the comfortable
leisure class housewives, who are believed to speak like this, and contrast
them with us, the working women of the firm. Notably, the woman who
most closely approached the ideal of use of womens language came, like
Inoue herself, from a rural region and only learned it following her move
to Tokyo for university and employment. For her, womens language which
she labeled as beautiful and elegant, and was emblematic of the tran-
sition to her current valued identity, and she regarded her prior rural speech
as rough and crude.
These differences among the women at the firm, in their appropriation
of the resources of womens language, again lays bare the contradiction in
the dualistic claim of normative gendered ways of speaking. Womens lan-
guage is a resource that some educated, urbanized women can employ or
decline to use for a wide variety of situated communicative tasks. There is
no decline in womens language in Japan, nor in the United States or
Australia for that matter, because the hegemonic forces which promulgate
this are as much or more class-aligned as gendered, a fact that people repre-
senting industrialized capital and the nation state wish to erase (Irvine and
Gal 2000). It is much easier to focus attention on and attempt to regulate a
dualism of gender roles than to admit to the multiplex social asymmetries
of class (Ortner 1990, 1998), and this is the nub of the ethnographic question
that needs to be investigated in language and gender research.
I regard this work as one of the most valuable monographs in linguistic
anthropology to appear in the last two decades. Its importance goes well
beyond its apparent specialized topic. The erudition of the author is spell-
binding; she moves across the disciplines of the social sciences, Japanese
studies, and philosophy with a deftness and confidence that one might
expect of a much more senior scholar. It is a work to give to our Ph.D.
students to read for inspiration.
TALK AND TOIL IN RURAL MOROCCO
Katherine Hoffmans We Share Walls: Language, Land and Gender in Berber
Morocco (2008), is the most conventional ethnography among the four books
94 W. A. Foley
reviewed here. It is beautifully, even poetically, written. Again, the book is so
rich and dense in ethnographic description that I can only hope to summar-
ize and comment on the main points here. The title sums it up well: this
monograph investigates the semiotics of language repertoires among a min-
ority Berber-speaking group and how these are changing. It examines the
interrelationship between a parallel set of pervasive cultural dualisms: male
versus female; urban versus rural; plains versus mountains; modern versus
backwards; and, most importantly, the national language, Moroccan Arabic,
versus the regional vernacular, the Berber language, Tashelhit. Kulick (1992)
reported a similar constellation of oppositions for the semiotics of language
choice in Gapun village in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. Hoffmans
work is similarly rich in ethnographic detail, but in contrast to Kulick (1992),
she focuses on the role of women as the locus around which this cluster of
dualisms is articulated and reproduced.
Chapter 1 introduces us to the ethnographic field site in Morocco, the
Anti-Atlas Mountains in the countrys southwest, an isolated rural area where
the indigenous language Tashelhit stills holds out against the advances of
Moroccan Arabic emanating from the cities. With the massive rural to urban
migration of the 20th century, overwhelmingly involving men, the area is
now mainly occupied by women, who bear the responsibility of tending
the land and the Tashelhit language that symbolically goes with it. Through
this symbolic linkage women are viewed as the crucial lynchpin; they repro-
duce not only their families, but also the entire ethnolinguistic group.
The women themselves are ambivalent about this role, often bemoan-
ing their Tashelhit monolingualism and Arabic illiteracy as entrapment in
contrast to the mens mobility. Arabic speakers regard speaking Tashelhit
as backward, as hindering social and economic progress, and, indeed, under
the previous kings rule, as threatening the integrity of the nation itself. From
the national point of view, Tashelhit marks the womens low socioeconomic
status, yet within the local ideology, it is exactly their monolingual guar-
dianship of the language that is cherished. The women bear the moral
responsibility, especially valued by the absent men, of being the uncontami-
nated agents of the transmission of the language and culture to the next
generation.
Chapter 2 is a short chapter describing the authors fieldwork experi-
ences and methods. Hoffman is competent in both Moroccan Arabic and
Tashelhit and was able to follow most daily verbal interactions. She was
not permitted by her consultants to record informal conversations in most
cases, as they felt that such conversations did not present good Tashelhit.
Rather, she was instructed to focus on the language of songs in preference.
This approach had the happy result of generating much meta-talk during
performances about the language and its usage; this dialogue provides
productive insights into local linguistic ideology and the political economy
of language practices in the region (Gal 1989).
Gender and Language 95
Chapter 3 deals with constructions of authenticity in representing
Ashelhi culture (that of speakers of Tashelhit). With the rise in awareness
of indigenous rights under the present king, Berber languages and heritage
are now being taught as subjects in schools, typically male and town domains
associated with progress and modernization. Such developments directly
challenge understandings of the languages indexicality of women in back-
ward rural lands. These developments threaten further marginalization of
the rural women who have been the moral custodians of the language.
Tashelhit may be at risk from Moroccan Arabic in many areas where it
earlier dominated, because emigrants commonly switch to the latter within
one generation, but now even the previously pure female Tashelhit of
the rural Anti-Atlas Mountains faces challenge from a new purified standard
imposed by reformist male political elites based in the cities. The Tashelhit
language has been maintained for a few generations now by gendered spa-
tial practices, keeping illiterate, monolingual women in poor rural areas
where they subsist by disdained manual labor, while men migrate to the cit-
ies, speak Arabic, and hope for upward mobility to clerical jobs. Is the price
worth it? (See Hill 2002 on this question.)
Chapter 4 takes us into the daily village life of the Anti-Atlas Mountains.
Life is physically hard; the dry barren mountains do not provide an easy
livelihood, and this fact is the major cause for the extremely high emigration.
Villages contain few male inhabitants beyond boyhood. Emigrant men remit
funds to support the family (often sporadically) and typically return no more
than once a year for a short spell. Such emigrant men harbor nostalgia for
their mountain hamlets, but the resident women do not: for them it is a place
of hard labor and daily struggle. But for both it was still seen as a moral place
carrying on pure Ashelhi culture, in contrast to the corruption of the ethni-
cally mixed cities (Williams 1973). A system of mutually dependent dualisms
has been forged: emigrant men are symbolically dependent on the moral
foundation of Ashelhi authenticity provided by women resident in the pure
rural heartland, while resident women are materially dependent upon the
resources remitted by emigrant men in the ethnically mixed urban centers.
Chapter 5 deals with how these male and female understandings are
mediated through Tashelhit song and conversation. For male emigrants it
is the traditional practices, dress, language, song, and distance from urban
centers with difficult access that mark a village as authentic Ashelhi. Move-
ment away from these prototypes signals moral decline, not unlike the public
reaction to a perceived reduction in the use of Japanese womens language
discussed above. The resident women, on the other hand, locate Ashelhi
culture in the people in the village, their interrelations, labor, and shared
activities in cooking, weaving, and talking.
Men have valued crafts and speaking skills too, but those are what one
needs to survive in the city and are not authentic Ashelhi. Song is typically
associated with times of play, parties, and weddings, all of these usually
96 W. A. Foley
times of return of the men, in contrast to the daily grind of hard labor. Village
community is a common topic of songs, but again men and women provide
different viewpoints on this topic. Womens songs typically describe move-
ment and relocations of people, such as in marriages, and emphasize the
articulation of a communitys borders. Their songs often require considerable
skill with rural and agricultural terminology, and this puts the men at a dis-
advantage. In contrast, mens songs tend to idealize the village as a moral
community and describe them more abstractly as places for contemplating
and grounding authentic states of being. It is interesting how these differ-
ences both somewhat dovetail with some claims of Gilligan (1982) and
Tannen (1990), but they also not surprisingly exhibit cultural specificities
as well.
Chapter 6 turns our view away from the high barren mountains to the
fertile Sous plain below. It describes the socioeconomic transformations in
this area over the last century. While historically the plains had also been
an Ashelhi stronghold, since they were irrigated and became fertile they have
been heavily Arabized, so that most of the Tashelhit-speaking communities
there are bilingual, with Arabic a prominent feature of their linguistic reper-
toire, a resource which provides greater access to economic and symbolic
capital. Given the pervasive linguistic ideology which links the mountains
with pure Tashelhit, the plains speakers are viewed as peripheral to this
speech community in spite of their socioeconomic advancement. The plains
are a liminal place between the coastal cities and the mountainous heartland,
so that discourse about authenticity gives way here to a concern with things
Arab and urban. In contrast to the mountains, here the men work the land,
while woman handle livestock and do domestic chores, a pattern typical
of Arab communities.
Further, the tribal consciousness central to the Ashelhi identity con-
structed in the mountains yields here to social groupings along the lines of
class. The plains Ashelhi are well aware of their ambivalent status and conse-
quently have adapted many of their cultural practices to Arab norms,
although they are not regarded as Arabs either by themselves or their Arab
neighbors because they continue to use Tashelhit as their everyday vernacu-
lar (an echo here of the contrast between the Mountain Arapesh described by
Mead [1938] and the Plains Arapesh described by Tuzin [1976]).
Chapter 7 looks at musical productions by young women on the plains.
These women draw upon both Tashelhit and Arabic linguistic resources,
code switching (Romaine 1995) for semantic effect: Tashelhit the language
of solidarity (Hill and Hill 1986) and Arabic that of public formality. Among
Ashelhi villagers good language practices generally require a facility to adapt
to ones interlocutors and to be skillful in using language arts like metaphor,
rhyme, allusion, etc. The use of Arabic in mixed language contexts or formal
ceremonies is in keeping with this ideology. But singing in Arabic indexes a
plains identity for Ashelhi and is disapproved of by their co-ethnics in the
Gender and Language 97
mountains as giving in to the Arabs and a departure from authentic Ashelhi
culture. From the plains Ashelhi point of view it is valued accommodation to
their Arabic-speaking neighbors with whom they share territory, cultural
features, and history. These plains Ashelhi are Ashelhi by definition: they
speak Tashelhit as their everyday vernacular. But culturally, economically,
and historically they share much with their Arab neighbors, and bilingualism
in Arabic is a necessity. Speaking whichever everyday vernacular, Tashelhit
or Arabic, does define ethnicity in the consciousness of plains dwellers,
but singing through code switching in both signals a wider plains identity
which blurs this division.
Chapter 8 describes language practices on the local Tashelhit radio.
Radio programming is a contested site for what is authentic Tashelhit. The
language of radio invokes a theme of nostalgia for the Ashelhi heritage,
but strikingly it does not do this through the medium of the pure Tashelhit
of the rural mountain heartland. Instead, it advocates a purified Modern
Standard Tashelhit analogous to the Modern Standard Arabic of educated
urban elites. This register of the language is typified by extensive neologisms
modeled on Modern Standard Arabic or French and rurally inspired meta-
phors. The task of radio is viewed as acknowledging regional cultural and
linguistic diversity in the nation without compromising its integrity. This is
accomplished by shifting allegiance from a place where one resides to a lan-
guage which one speaks. Being Ashelhi is decentralized and available to all
who speak Tashelhit regardless of residence. Dialect differentiation thereby
needs to be erased in favor of a standardized Tashelhit available to all with
a claimed Ashelhi identity.
The language of radio also exhibits a strong tendency toward purism.
After many centuries of sustained contact, Tashelhit and Moroccan Arabic have
considerable overlap in lexicon and phrasing, but the reigning ideology man-
dates purging the Modern Standard Tashelhit, used on radio, of Arabic loans.
Such a move requires many linguistic innovations to compensate for the
rejected items, and many of these substitutions are opaque to speakers in
the mountains. Modern Standard Tashelhit then becomes an index of an urban
professional elite and a register removed from the everyday Tashelhit of the
rural heartland, with a consequent additional marginalization of its residents.
The conclusion in chapter 9 is a short overview of the wider implica-
tions of the monograph and in particular of the role of language in construct-
ing identity. It poses a crucial moral question about minority languages and
language endangerment, a currently hot topic, as projections are such that up
to 90 percent of the worlds languages could cease to be spoken by the turn
of the next century. Hoffmans own prose is typically eloquent, so I will just
quote it (Hoffman 2008:232):
. . . the methodological and human rights dilemma I am proposing is how
activists and anthropologists alike can ethically encourage the same
98 W. A. Foley
language practices and ideologies that, while helping perpetuate an
endangered language, also gender space, restrict womens movements,
and confine women to lives of hard labor. Social and geographical mar-
ginality of some groups may be the surest safeguards against language
shift for the collective, but it is difficult to advocate that some groups
be denied equal access to resources.
Questions for linguists to ponder indeed.
DID NAKED MOTHERS SPEAK FIRST?
Dean Falks Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants and the Origins of
Language (2009) is the odd book out among these four. Rather than being
an ethnographic study of some aspects of gendered language use in a given
culture, it is a quest for the origins of human language in some gendered
practices of child rearing in our prehistory. This short book is a
monograph-length development of an article that Falk published in Beha-
vioral and Brain Sciences, the foremost journal in the field of cognitive
science, in which she first proposed the putting the baby down hypoth-
esis (Falk 2004). Falk has had a long and stellar career in the field of brain
evolution; her earlier work on the radiator theory (Falk 1990) and sub-
sequent publications (Falk 1992, 1993) have been very influential. Because
this book is essentially an elaboration of a hypothesis first advanced in a
journal article rather than an extended, dense empirical case study, I will
be briefer. Also, much of the discussion within this monograph, while very
valuable in the wider context of understanding brain evolution, does not
focus specifically on gender issues, and so I will limit myself to addressing
those that do.
Most current theories of language evolution are gender-neutral or lean
heavily on the need to coordinate activities typically undertaken by men such
as hunting and warfare (Christiansen and Chater 2008; Deacon 1997; Dunbar
1996; Tomasello 2008). Falks hypothesis is strikingly different in that it
emphasizes the bond between mother and child, the key female responsi-
bility, as the crucial sphere in which this innovation appeared. The picking
up the baby hypothesis in a nutshell is this: as the hominid line was selected
for hairlessness, bipedalism, and ever increasing brain size, there was a con-
vergent loss of the ability of infants to cling to their mothers body. The
trauma of physical separation caused the infants to cry, just as separated baby
monkeys and apes do. But rather than necessarily running to their infants to
pick them up, hominid mothers began to interact with them through sooth-
ing sounds, a Proto-Motherese, the ultimate source of human language. The
monograph is an extended argument to support this thesis and draws
evidence from linguistics, prehistory, archaeology, music, and primatology
a tour de force of data synthesis.
Gender and Language 99
Given such a wide canvas, we should not be surprised that occasional
inaccuracies or questionable claims have crept in. Linguists will note a few
infelicities in the discussion of linguistic features, for instance, but this is to
be expected in the case of a non-specialist drawing and interpreting data
from an unfamiliar field. But the overall impression of the book is of high
imagination married to solid research that provides the reader with things
to mull over in every chapter, even if they remain unconvinced of the main
hypothesis.
Falk starts supporting her hypothesis by describing female parenting
behavior among chimpanzees, a probable close analog of that of our
common ancestors. She notes that chimp mothers and infants are rarely phy-
sically separated; the infants grasp the hairy coat of their mothers and literally
hold on for dear life; and they do so largely in silence: only when separated
do the distressed infants cry out.
Human babies, of course, also cry when separated from their mothers.
But natural selection has dealt them a cruel hand in this regard. First of all,
humans have lost the thick body hair that chimp infants cling to; and, sec-
ondly, bipedalism and the ever increasing size of the brain have caused
human infants to be born at earlier stages of development with much weaker
grasping skills. Bipedalism on its own completely wiped out in humans the
ability to grasp with toes so salient in baby chimps.
Hominin mothers from at least the time of Homo erectus, but probably
earlier, had to carry their infants with them in their arms or in slings. For a
ground foraging species this clearly created problems. Falk hypothesizes that
long before baby slings were invented, hominin mothers would have had
occasionally to put their babies down on the ground as they went about for-
aging. The infant would of course cry in distress at the separation, an
unhappy development for a defenseless animal in open country teeming
with hungry predators. Evolution would clearly have selected in such a scen-
ario for those pairings which could obviate the threat. Falk believes that
hominin mothers innovated, using soothing vocal signals to maintain contact
with and reassure their infants. Such a speech register in contemporary
cultures is called Motherese and is claimed to be universal.
Falk makes a reasonable case against claims to the contrary such as
Ochs and Scheffelins (1984). Motherese is slower and more repetitious than
speech used among adults, with a musical type of prosody of high pitch and
singsong intonations. For Falk, a Proto-Motherese of our hominid female
ancestors was the crucible of all human language, and even music and art.
Of course, a speech register akin to Motherese is not restricted to mothers.
Men use similar registers with a range of interlocutors, but clearly it is most
prominently associated with child care, and this task falls heavily upon
women and mothers.
While Falks arguments to this point are strong and relatively convinc-
ing, as she has been mainly presenting evidence from her own areas of
100 W. A. Foley
expertise: primatology, physical anthropology, and neuroscience. Once she
moves beyond these, the book becomes more speculative and less persuas-
ive. Linguists will find it hard to accept the hypothesis that a Proto-Motherese
could develop into the rich, intricately structured systems of full human lan-
guages. It is possible, but possibility is not proof, and no real evidence is
offered to support it. Falks treatment here is more like wishes being pre-
sented as facts. I personally am very skeptical of a single prime mover
explanation for the origins of language. There is nothing in Falks hypothesis
that is actually in contradiction with Dunbars (1996) gossip theory; both
mechanisms and many others besides could have been operative in the ori-
gin of language. The complexity, diversity, and flexibility of human language
strongly suggest that its origins lie in multiple causes, with both neuropsy-
chological and social factors co-implicating each other through ongoing
evolutionary processes. Perhaps Falk does not intend to claim Proto-
Motherese as a sole prime mover, but this is not made clear in the book.
I have similar reactions to her claims for the origins of music in the
melodies of Proto-Motherese, and art in the gestures linked to it. All three
of these are complex semiotic systems unique to humans. While they may
have precursors in ancestral hominin behavior, it is highly unlikely that
any had a single origin. Proto-Motherese may have played some sort of role
in their evolution, but not as a privileged prime mover. Demonstrating that
would require much more convincing evidence than that provided here,
and it is unlikely that such evidence would ever be forthcoming.
CONCLUSION
A great deal of research in putative differences in the understandings and
uses of language by men and women has unfortunately been hampered
by some unquestioned a priori assumptions about gender roles generally.
Sadly, often the research presented is not much more than a rephrasing of
truisms of the men are from Mars, women are from Venus variety. While
there has been sustained scholarly research criticizing such dualistic thinking
in the field of gender and language since it was first proposed in the 1980s,
seemingly to little avail especially in the popular press, scant careful
long-term ethnographic work investigating these questions has been done,
either in urban Western societies or elsewhere. Eckert (1989) is a major
exception, but even here gender was only one factor among several in a
study of the patterns of language variation among adolescents of varied
social backgrounds. Kulick (1992) is another important source, but again
gender is secondary to a concern with linguistic ideology, bilingualism,
and language death.
The ethnographic works discussed here directly target gender as the key
issue and provide a new rigor in addressing questions of how women and
Gender and Language 101
girls use language to construct their identities, negotiate their social position,
and wield power in their communities. The womens lives that emerge from
these works show that the dualism so pervasive in thinking about gender,
both in cultural folk beliefs and scientific writings, is highly misleading. It
is surprising that dualistic thinking has continued to hold such a powerful
grip here, even in scientific treatments of the subject in the light of the dissol-
ution of dualistic oppositions in favor of modularity in most other areas of the
social and cognitive sciences. Dualistic theories of gender in fact serve more
to reinforce continuing male hegemony than to enlighten us much about
female uses of language. Falks work provides us with a window as to
how these stereotypes about female caring and non-hierarchical cooperative
speech could have evolved, as Motherese is a speech register which neces-
sarily has exactly such features and, further, is an index of social liminality
and hence weakness and emotional vulnerability (not unlike the type of
language used to address foreigners with poor language competence).
The expertise of men in political oratory, which again has been claimed
to have evolutionary precursors (Rosaldo 1974), provided a basis for the
ideological associations of male speech with competition and hierarchy.
But dualisms are not necessarily good to think with (Levi-Strauss 1966),
for they oversimplify what is commonly a phenomenon with complex
dimensions to a linear contrast and thereby obscure those dimensions and
provide a false certainty. Such certainty favors the dominance of whatever
hegemonic forces obtain in the domain under scrutiny. Dualistic theories
of gender have invariably favored men (Rosaldo 1974, 1980), and, while
the findings of a few academic works on gender performance are unlikely
to threaten this hegemony, given the powerful global social and economic
forces that prop it up, they do provide robust testimony that such views
are empirically false.
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WILLIAM A. FOLEY is University Professor of Linguistics at the University of
Sydney. He is the co-author of Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar
and author of The Papuan Languages of New Guinea, The Yimas
Language of New Guinea, and Anthropological Linguistics: An Introduc-
tion, and many book chapters and journal articles. His research interests
include the description of the Papuan languages of New Guinea, especially
those of the Sepik region, grammatical theory and typology, and linguistic
relativity. He has carried extensive fieldwork in the Sepik region over many
years and to a lesser extent in other areas of island Southeast Asia and the
Pacific.
106 W. A. Foley
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