folk linguistic beliefs

1.  NAME: KARISHMA IQBAL
 CLASS NO: 3
 SUBJECT: LANGUAGE AND GENDER
 ASSIGNMENT TOPIC: FOLK LINGUISTIC BELEIFS
 SUBMITTED TO: MA’AM AYESHA
 DEPARTMENT: BS ENGLISH
 DATE:21ST JULY, 2020

2.  Folk linguistics is the study of speaker’s opinions,
beliefs about language ,language varieties and
language usage and it is also called perceptual
dialectology.
 Schiffman(2006) claims that speakers bring cultural
baggage to their dealing with language including
ideas, values, beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, myths,
religious strictures. This sum of baggage can and
indeed be seen as including folk linguistic beliefs.
 He makes the relevance of folk linguistic knowledge
to sociolinguistics when he discusses the impacts of
myths which may be disregarded as unempirical but
nonetheless constitutes local truths.

3.  According Preston(2011) the term folk in folk
linguistics refers to all persons except academic
linguists and do not just refer to rural, marginalized,
less educated or romanticized(quaint) groups but he
says that we all are folk when we step into the world
of traditional knowledge and ways of behaving.
 Academics and scholars are as much the product of
the time they live in as are non-academics, and their
work on language can be subject to prejudice and
preconception as are the comments of lay people.
 So, the scholarly comments on gender differences in
language reflect the ideas of their time which in some
cases led to startling contradictions which can be
accounted for assuming a general rule called
androcentric rule.

4. According to this Androcentric Rule: ‘Men will be seen
to behave linguistically in a way that fits writer’s view
of what is desirable or admirable; women on the other
hand will be blamed for any linguistic state or
development which is regarded by the writer as
negative or reprehensible’.
According to Montgomery and Beal ‘’ Non-linguistic
beliefs have been discounted by many linguists as
unimportant as rising from a lack of education or
knowledge and therefore invalid as legitimate areas of
investigation’’.
There are some linguistic features about which there
are folk linguistic beliefs such as vocabulary, swearing,
taboo words, verbosity, grammar and pronunciation.

5.  ‘’Women recite laments in the company of other
women only’’(caraveli, Anna.1986:The Bitter
Wounding)
 This proverb shows that women talk personal
issues and relationships more with the other
women as compared to men in doing this with
their male friends as men usually talk about
politics and their professional works.
 ‘’Never listen to a women’s words’’.(China)
 This shows that the content which the women
have in their talks usually exhibits
disconfirmation or their content met with
conversational rebuttals and a woman can be
easily beaten in the response .

6.  Folk linguistics have advanced the claim that
women’s speech differs from men’s in several
significant ways that serve to reflect and
reinforce the lower status of women in society.
 ‘’The tongue is the sword of a woman and she
never lets it become rusty’’.(China)
 This proverb attributes not noise, as in other
proverbs women’s talk is considered noisy and
downgraded to the level of meaningless noise of
birds, but rather power to the women spreaker.

7.  In the public contexts such as seminar and debates, when
women and men are deliberately given an equal amount
of the highly valued talking time. There is often a
perception that they are getting more than their fair
share.
 Dale Spender explains this as follows: ‘’The talkativeness
of women has been ganged in comparison not with women
but with silence. Women have not judged on the grounds
of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they
talk more than silent women’’.
 It means that if women talk at all, this may be perceived as
‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent.
 In 1922 Otto Jesperson stated that women much more
often than men break off without finishing their sentences
because they start talking without having thought out what
they are going to say.

8.  ‘’ A women’s tongue is often warned against as
a powerful and dangerous part of her
body’’.(Schipper, 2010)
 In this above proverb the dimensions and
dangers of a woman’s tongue and talking are
expressed in an exaggerated terms and it also
provides insights into the social practices and
accepted cultural wisdom about women’s
verbosity and the assumption that women uses
her language as a weapon.
 ‘’A quarrelsome wife is as annoying as constant
dripping on a rainy day’’. Proverb 27:15(NLT)

9.  The rise of Standard English created interest in the lexical
and grammatical structures of the language.
 Commentary on gender differences in vocabulary is quite
widespread in the18th century writings because gentleman
of that time grappling with the problem of linguistic
change.
 The passage written by Cambridge for World of 12
December1754, implies that the ephemeral nature of
women’s vocabulary is associated with the unimportant of
what they say.
 Otto Jesperson asserts that it is men rather than women
introduce ‘new and fresh expressions’ and thus men who
are ‘the chief renovators of language’.
 So in the 18th century women were held to be culprits or
accused for introducing ephemeral words and credited
men with introducing new words to the lexicon.

10.  Language is defined by these 18th century
writers in terms of male language; the way man
talk is seen as the norm while women’s language
is deviant.
 The androcentric bis is still present in 20th
century as Jesperson asserted in his book that
‘’the vocabulary of a women as a rule is much
less extensive than that of a man’’, he supported
this by an experiment in which male college
students used a greater variety of words than
female college students.
 He also says that women differ from men in their
extensive use of certain adjectives such as pretty
and nice.

11.  Robin Lakoff noted in her work Language and
Women’s place that 20th century linguistic interest
was in gender differences specifically ‘’empty’’
adjectives like divine, charming , cute… as typical of
what she calls women's language.
 According to Jesperson that women differ from men
even in the use of adverbs and she says that ‘‘this
little adverb is a great favourite with ladies, in
conjunction with an adjectives’’and she also gives
examples such as ‘it is so lovely’, ‘thank you so
much’, ‘he is so charming’.She gives explanation for
this gender preferential usage is that women much
more often than men break off without finishing their
sentences because they start talking without having
thought out what they are going to say.

12.  REFERENCES:
 www.wikipedia.com
 Coates,J.(2013).Women, Men and Languge.
New York.Routledge Taylor and Francis Group