Blackwell Reference Online

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The field of language and gender has witnessed several pivotal shifts in its interpretation of normative and non-normative gender identity. This review aims to expose these shifts in an examination of the ways in which scholars have supported theoretical claims about the interplay of language, gender, and society by referencing the speech patterns of “the linguistic deviant” – the speaker who fails to follow normative expectations of how men and women should speak. What immediately becomes apparent in an overview of the literature is that linguistic deviance takes as many forms as the field has theories. In foundational discussions of language and gender in the early 1900s (e.g. Jespersen 1922 ) the linguistic deviant is the “woman” herself, whose speaking patterns are peculiarly divergent from more normative (in this era of scholarship, male) ways of speaking. In early feminist work by those arguing for what has been termed a dominance model of language and gender (e.g. Lakoff 1975 ), which theorizes women's divergent speech patterns as a byproduct of male dominance, the linguistic deviant is multiplied in some texts to include all speakers who are in some way disenfranchised from institutionalized male power – women, hippies, homosexuals, and even academic men. When the field shifted in the 1980s to a difference or two-cultures model of language and gender (e.g. Maltz ... log in or subscribe to read full text