Tannen claims that from early childhood, women and men are socialized to live in two opposing cultures with two opposing sets of values, so they grow up to understand things differently. Not better or worse, just different. As a result, men’s goals when they talk are to communicate information, while women’s are to form connections. Another, more

We still crave labels. Linguists say that this has everything to do with the power of words to legitimize experiences, as if an idea only becomes valid once it’s christened with a title.

people have the genders that they do because of the way they talk and the feedback they receive from that talk. Language brings gender to life.

Deborah Cameron defines gender as “an extraordinarily intricate and multilayered phenomenon—unstable, contested, intimately bound up with other social divisions.” Her colleague Sally McConnell-Ginet, a linguist at Cornell, calls it “[a] complex system of cognitive, symbolic, behavioral, political, and social phenomena mediated by sorting of people

People don’t seem to care or even notice when men talk this way. Only when it comes from female mouths does it cause such an upset. This fact makes it clear that our culture’s aversion to vocal fry, uptalk, and like isn’t really about the speech qualities themselves.

“Language is not always about making an argument or conveying information in the cleanest, simplest way possible. It’s often about building relationships. It’s about making yourself understood and trying to understand someone else.”

* I put “preferred pronouns” in quotes because many nonbinary folks see it as a misnomer. The argument is that pronouns aren’t preferred or unpreferred—they’re either correct or incorrect. To a nonbinary person, being referred to with a gendered pronoun would be just as inaccurate as someone using the word he to describe my mom. It’s not a

What there is plenty of data to support, however, is the fact that gossip is a serviceable and goal-driven practice. Our linguist Deborah Cameron has explained that when you analyze it closely, gossip serves three main purposes: 1) to circulate personal information in order to keep members of a social group in the know; 2) to bond with one another

A 2017 study of body-camera footage revealed that police officers were 61 percent more likely to use low-respect language, such as informal titles like “my man,” with black drivers than they were with white drivers. Interactions like this are not a sign of affection or something the recipient should be flattered by. Because really, they’re just a