From the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, writers and grammarians measured women's language against men's. They called women's vocabulary poor, their grammar faulty, and their talk excessive, but praised their pronunciation. Male speech was the norm, and these views say more about the status of women at the time than about how women actually spoke.
An earlier article showed that women and men do talk differently. Before looking at how the speech of women and men differs today, this article looks at the past: what grammarians, writers, anthropologists, and dialectologists, among others, said about it from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century.
The focus is on how male and female speakers used language, not on the ways language was used to discriminate against a group of speakers.
Vocabulary
From the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, written sources show a common belief that women were to blame for fashionable, short-lived words that soon disappeared. Men, on the other hand, were seen as the ones who added lasting new words to the language and its dictionaries. Both beliefs reflect the lower status of women at the time.
Male writers in the early twentieth century also complained about women's "excessive" use of adverbs such as amazingly. Words like frightful and flirtation were linked with female speakers, and so were adjectives like pretty and nice. Overall, women's vocabulary was seen as restricted, poorer than a man's, and empty of meaning, and some writers even called it harmful to the language.
Grammar
Unlike most grammars today, the grammars of that time did not describe how people actually spoke. They set out rules that everyone was supposed to follow. Writers in the eighteenth century claimed that women did not follow these rules and often used grammar incorrectly.
For example, it was seen as superior to build complex sentences, joining clauses with words like after and because, and this was called a male way of speaking. Women, it was said, simply put one sentence after another, linking them with commas in writing or with words like and.
The grammars of the time also laid down rules on word order ("my father and my mother", not the other way round) and told writers to use the pronoun he whenever the gender of a person was unknown.
Pronunciation
Pronunciation is the one area in which the general view was positive. Women were thought to have a more refined and desirable pronunciation than men. Their way of speaking was seen as more "domestic", and therefore more polite.
Swear words
When it comes to swear words and other taboo expressions, it is hard to tell what women actually said from what people thought they should say. Women were said to use fewer swear words and less rough language than men, because a polite and friendly way of speaking was seen as a key virtue in a woman.
Talkativeness
The idea that women talk too much is an old prejudice, and it is still around. It can be found in the fifteenth century, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in the early twentieth century. Then as now, it rested on sexism rather than on real evidence. As with swear words, silence was seen as a virtue in a woman, while men were encouraged to state their opinions.
Literacy
Literacy is closely tied to the status of women in the eighteenth century and later. Only women from the middle and upper classes had a chance of an education, and even theirs differed from the one men received. As a result, women were seen as far less literate than men, across all social classes.
Women in language research
Most of the statements above came from writers and grammarians of the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, who looked mostly, sometimes only, at written texts. This began to change with the study of dialects. Dialects live in speech rather than in writing, so dialectologists had to listen to people speaking, and some of them noticed differences between the speech of women and men. Even so, many dialect surveys preferred older men from the countryside as their typical speakers.
Women became a regular part of language research only in the second half of the twentieth century, when researchers began to include female speakers as informants and as participants in questionnaire studies. The third part of this series looks at these sociolinguistic approaches.