- 'What language barrier?'
- 'It is a truism that men and women do not communicate in the same way. But is there really any evidence to support this Mars-and-Venus theory? Oxford language professor Deborah Cameron investigates in the first of three extracts from her new book'
- 'The most successful exponents of this formula - Deborah Tannen, author of You Just Don't Understand, and John Gray, author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.'
- 'The idea that men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate is a myth in the everyday sense: a widespread but false belief.'
- 'Baron-Cohen is careful to talk about -"people with the female/male brain" rather than "men and women". He stresses that there are men with female brains, women with male brains, and individuals of both sexes with "balanced" brains. He refers to the major brain types as "male" and "female", however, because the tendency is for males to have male brains and females to have female brains.'
- 'In 2005, an article appeared in the journal American Psychologist with the title The Gender Similarities Hypothesis. This title stood out as unusual, because, as we have seen, the aim of most research studies is to find differences rather than similarities between men and women. Yet, as the article's author Janet S Hyde pointed out, on closer inspection, the results of these studies very often show more similarity than difference.'
- 'In almost every case, the overall difference made by gender is either small or close to zero.'
- "substantially more similarities than men...and whether there are differences they are down to contextual factors e.g. age, occupation etc."
- communication Accommodation theory (CAT)- Giles where we adapt our language to suit others e.g. supportive language with a baby, direct language on a battlefield, regardless of gender
- supported by O'Barr and Atkins - research in courtrooms - social status rather than gender - Lackoff's uncertainty features are 'poweless' rather than 'women's'
- Contrasts Lackoff, Zimmerman and West
Accent and dialect
opinion piece - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6927109/British-regional-accents-still-thriving.html
- 'British regional accents 'still thriving''
- 'Britian's regional accents are becoming more widespread despite the increasingly homogenous nature of society, according to academic studies'
- 'Experts have identified eight to 10 of these likely to predominate within the next 40 years. They include estuary English, the burr of the southwest and separate accents in the West Midlands, Yorkshire and north and south Wales. '
- “People want to protect their identity,” Dominic Watt, a lecturer in forensic speech science at York University, told a newspaper.
- “You could be parachuted into pretty much any British city and the shops look the same, people dress the same and have similar pastimes and interests. What still makes these places separate and distinct is the dialect and accent.”
- "Studies have found that some Scouse features, such as where the “k” sound is pronounced “kh” in words such as back, are becoming more prominent and widespread. The effect has even spread into north Wales. "
- “Liverpool and Manchester are only half an hour apart but the accents remain rock solid. There must be a lot of commuting between the two cities but they are not merging.”
