Language and language practices
LANGUAGE AND GENDER
There appears to be a permanent tension in all linguistic-driven studies of language between change and stability, between variation and stasis, between difference and sameness, the individual and the group. In general we can suggest that it is on the change aspect that the linguist focuses while the applied linguist is more concerned with the sameness aspect. Thus the linguist has traditionally been interested in the diachronic characteristic of language (much as the biologist is primarily concerned with species evolution), while the applied linguist takes greater account of the synchronic. Of course the linguist deals in grammatical rules and in lexical entries but these are always to be seen as somehow temporary, open to question and primarily belonging to one idiolect or another. This is why the effort to standardize a language is not a primary linguistic activity: when linguists concern themselves, as they do, with standardizing (or language engineering as it has somewhat dismissively been called) then they shift into an applied mode. This is also the case for dictionary writing, and even more clearly for language-teaching textbook writing. But for applied linguists these stabilizing projects are the very stuff of their professional activity since they see their professional responsibility as that of providing more efficient uses of language by society, now.
This change–stability difference we see clearly in the extensive work on language and gender in recent years. We should note in passing that gender here does not refer to the traditional gender of grammatical analyses where it stood for a distinction many languages make among word classes. To some extent grammatical gender does coincide with biological sex, but only partially. A useful distinction contrasts male/female for sex with masculine/feminine for grammatical gender.
The distinction is sometimes made in sociolinguistics between the influence of society on language (‘society in language’) and the influence of language on society (‘language in society’): by society in language is meant the systematic influence of social forces on language (e.g. a language variety unique to a social class such as the royal court or the adoption of a new phonetic or prosodic feature such as the high rise tone, which we discuss below); by language in society is meant the influence of language on various social institutions (e.g. language planning for education, the choices made by the media – newspapers, broadcasting, television, or the internet or which languages to use in various settings), the role of language in religion (e.g. the connection between the written holy text and the spoken vernacular). And given the primary concern of linguistics in language-in-itself, which, we have argued, means language in flux, it is inevitable that of the two ways of relating language and society, the focus of the linguist’s attention should be on the first, on the impact of society on language and on the ways in which social forces cause language to change. In the same way, the applied linguist’s concern for stable states means that he or she is more likely to focus on the influence of language on society and on the extent to which that influence can be gauged and controlled so as to facilitate human interaction through language.
A similar reciprocal distinction may be made between gender in language and language in gender. (This is hardly surprising since the language–gender relationship is often treated as a subcategory of sociolinguistics.) Gender in language therefore is more the concern of the linguist, while language in gender more that of the applied linguist. As we shall see, their concerns are not discrete: linguists do become involved in applied work when, for example, they advocate the use of ‘inclusive language’ (on which more below). Similarly, the applied linguist may well, out of interest or as part of necessary ongoing research, get involved in the study of gender influence on language change over time. But we should also recognize that if the applied linguist does become involved in such ‘change’ research, his or her purpose is not to address the linguist’s central concern with language change. While recognizing the overlap, let us proceed by examining the two concerns at their polarities.
