ABSTRACT
Sexism in language, discussed in the last chapter, was one of two original concerns of the gender and language ®eld. The other issue was the question of whether women and men use language in different ways. An interest in sex differences in language use, like that in sexist language, has a history that predates the attention drawn to it by feminists in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, Bodine (1975) cited anthropological studies conducted by European scholars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that reported differences between women's and men's speech in `exotic' cultures (e.g. Asian, African and Paci®c). It was not until the twentieth century that sex differences in the speech of Europeans were considered. One of the earliest discussions of sex differences in language as an everyday, rather than a remarkable, feature was a study by Jespersen (1922) who, in Language: its nature, development and origin, discussed both sex differences in verbal ability and female/male variation in language use. Psychological studies dating from the 1930s and 1940s began to chart the emergence of sex differences in children's language (see Maccoby and Jacklin, 1974).
