3. The mhmm a women uses quite frequently means only ‘ I’m listening’, whereas the
mhmm a man uses, but much less frequenly, tends to mean ‘I’m agreeing’.
Consequently, men often believe that ‘women are always agreeing with them and
then conclude that it’s impossible to tell what a women really thinks,’ whereas
‘women get upset with men who never seem to be listening’.
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14. Phonological differences between men and women :
In Gros Ventre, an Amerindian language of the northest United State,
women have palatalized velar stops where men have palatalized
dental stops, e.g. female kjatsa ‘bread’ and male djatsa. It is
interesting that when a female speaker of Gros Ventre quotes a male,
she attributes female pronunciations to him, and when a male quotes
a female, he attributes male pronunciations to her.
In a northest Asian language, Yukaghir, both women and children
have /ts/ and /dz/ where men have /tj/ and /dj/.
Likewise, in a Siberian language, Chuchi, men but not women, often
drop /n/ and /t/ when they occur between vowels, e.g. female
nitvaganat and male nitvagaat.
15. In Kroasati, an Amerindian language spoken in southwestern
Lousiana, among other sex-linked differences, men often
pronounced an s at the end of verbs but women did not, e.g. male
lakaws ‘he is lifting it’ and female lakaw. What was interesting that
this kind of pronunciation appeared to be dying out, because younger
women and girls do not use these forms.
Brend (1975) claims, that the intonation patterns of men and women
vary somewhat, women using certain patterns associated with
surprise and politeness more often than men. In the same vein Lakoff
says that women may answer a question with a statement that
employs the rising intonation pattern associated with a question
rather than falling intonation pattern. According to Lakoff, women
do this because they are less sure about themselves and their
opinions than are men. For the same reason, she say s that women
oftn add tg question to statement, e.g. ‘They caught the robber last
week, didn’t they ?’.
16. In the area of morphology and vocabulary, many of the studies have
focused on English.
Lakoff (1973) claims, that women use color words like mauve,
beige, aquamarine, lavender, and magenta but most men do not.
She also mentains that adjectives such as adorable, charming,
sweet, and lovely are also commonly used by women but only very
rarely bt men. Women also have their own vocabulary for
emphasizing certain effects on them, words and expression such as
so good, such fun, exquisite, divine, precious, darling, and fantastic.
There certainly are sex differences in word choice in various
languages. Japanese women show they are women when they speak,
for example, by the use of a sentence-final particle ne. In Japanese,
too, a male speaker refers to himself as wasi or ore whereas a female
uses watasi or atasi.
