Dialects Registers Language Variety

efforts than men to get attention for their topics; and in general, women conversationalists did not receive the same degree of verbal support as their male interlocutors. Holmes in Mesthrie, 2003: 229 states that women and men talk differently. Research in Britain, America and New Zealand reveal similar gender- based patterns of discourse. Women appear cooperative, facilitative participants, demonstrating in a variety of ways their concern for their conversational partners, while men tend to dominate the talking time, interrupt more often than women. Moreover, Lakoff in Mesthrie, 2003: 230 claims that women use a number of language features that, collectively, indicate uncertainty and hesitancy. These features deny women the opportunity to express themselves strongly, and make what they are talking about appear trivial. Interpretations in terms of power or dominance have been common among other researchers. In an analysis of conversations between couples, Pamela Fishman in Mesthrie, 2003: 231 found that women gave more conversational support than men. They express interest in their partner’s conversational topic, and made more frequent use of minimal responses such as mmh, yeah, and right, indicating their involvement. She also saw women’s conversational supportiveness as an expected characteristic of being female: women are expected to keep conversation going. However, she also related her interpretation to power. Power, she argued, is a human accomplishment, situated in everyday interaction. The British linguist Jennifer Coates in Mesthrie, 2003: 229 has also been concerned with differences in women’s and men’s speech. Her position is more explicitly a feminist one. S he argues that interpretations of women’s and men’s speech that relate this primarily to power and male dominance have given rise to rather negative view of female speaking styles. One of her aims has been to ‘revalue’ women’s talk. Furthermore, early work on women’s language had labelled it as ‘tentative’ or ‘powerless’. More recently, and in reaction to this, there ha s been a move to value women’s talk more positively, using terms such as ‘co-operative’. In addition, much of Coates’ work has focused on informal conversation in all female groups. Her account of women’s talk is highly positive. She found that the conversations she analysed were characterised by cooperation, with women concerned to support one another’s contributions rather than compete for the floor.

5. Gossip

The meaning of gossip itself is different for each linguist. Dunbar in Foster, 2004: 80 defines it as conversation about social and personal topics. In some feminist criticism, gossip is nearly synonymous with “women’s talk” in general or “girl talk”. Rysman in Foster, 2004: 80 also traced the etymology of the term as it refers specifically to women. Additionally, it has been suggested that ‘language evolved to allow us to gossip’ Dunbar, 1996: 79. Gossip has been defined as “a form of sociable interaction which depends upon the strategic management of information through the creation of others as ‘moral characters’ in talk” Yerkovich, 1977: 192. The other expert, Deborah