ABSTRACT
More specifically, this chapter aims to: make some general remarks about how attitudes and politics influence gender-related language development in Africa, create an understanding of how women and men converse in reality, create an awareness of gender-based language and communication, create an awareness of differences in gendered speech and suggest some conclusions and recommendations regarding gendered speech. Makoni and Makoni suggest that professional identity in precolonial Africa may have been more pronounced than gender identity, and that these binary constructions came with Western influence. While there is a strong consciousness and awareness developing in English regarding the use of gender-neutral terminology, this has yet to become entrenched in African languages, which are ironically gender neutral in form as there is no pronoun for 'he' and 'she' in languages such as isiXhosa. It looks at the differences in the ways men and women speak.
