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Cultures where men and women don’t speak the same language (2017)
- smilespray 5y agoIt's true what they say. Men are from Omicron Persei 9 and women are from Omicron Persei 7.
- virtualritz 5y agoI have an Australian friend whose wife is Japanese. He learned speaking Japanese from her. When they lived in Japan for a while he was frequently the subject of jokes about how "he speaks like a woman" among male Japanese native speakers. See https://bondlingo.tv/blog/male-and-female-japanese-how-males-and-females-speak-differently-in-japanese/ https://bondlingo.tv/blog/male-and-female-japanese-how-males...
- rgrieselhuber 5y agoThis is very common in Japan, it is honestly very cringe-inducing to see Western males coming off this way, it seems needy and submissive more than anything.
- Muromec 5y ago>it seems needy and submissive more than anything. Never before did the idea of being reborn as a woman in Japan in a next life sound that bad.
- rgrieselhuber 5y agoThe funny thing is, Japanese women don't really come off that way, it's just how they talk and they are quite adept at achieving their goals with their "feminine" language. One gets the impression that many of the Western men who learn Japanese from their wives and girlfriends are actually trying to emulate this ability to manipulate their world through softer / more social language and achieve similar levels of success, but it doesn't really work for them and seems sociopathic instead. Hence, the cringe.
- teawrecks 5y agoInteresting. Would "simping" be a better term than sociopathic? Obviously that's not necessarily what's going on, but Japanese is already so contextual, I imagine it's difficult to separate/rationalize how someone speaks the way they do from the why.
- rgrieselhuber 5y agoThat’s not a bad way to describe it.
- QuadmasterXLII 5y agoEnglish actually has different languages for 12 year olds and adults. Vocabulary like “cringe” is fine for kids, but makes you come off as judgmental and unpleasant when used in a more formal context.
- lamontcg 5y agoI keep hoping that word will eventually eat itself.
- teawrecks 5y agoThe only way that will happen is if adults start using it. Next time you meet a 12 year old who says something is "cringe", tell them they are "cringe" for using the word "cringe".
- egypturnash 5y agoI wonder if this will continue to be a generational thing, I still have a smattering of eighties Valley-speak because that was pretty popular in my teen years. Maybe people who are in their early teens now will be as likely to call something they don't like "cringe" in their fifties as I am to call something "bogus".
- rgrieselhuber 5y agoFind a better word for that feeling you get when you hear fingernails on chalkboards and we can use that instead on this formal Hacker News setting.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago> Find a better word for that feeling you get when you hear fingernails on chalkboards Aroused?
- bckr 5y agoIt's fine to use the word "cringe", but it might be cringe to use the phrase "it's cringe".
- akyoan 5y agoI feel this in my own life, as an European grown up mostly around my mother, sister, and younger female cousins. My father lived abroad for long periods of time. Women nowadays keep assuming I'm gay due to my mannerisms.
- canadianfella 5y agoA European not “an”.
- eesmith 5y agohttps://notalwaysright.com/a-gender-fluid-household/157967/ https://notalwaysright.com/a-gender-fluid-household/157967/ . Short version: 11 year old living only with women picked up practices about how to wear at towel, what to shave, wearing mascara, etc. that his mother's boyfriend both supports and gently points out they are typically gendered.
- dahfizz 5y agoThis strikes me as very strange... How did the mom not realize that her kid was shaving his legs and wearing mascara? I guess it would be one thing if the kid was doing it with intention, but he clearly wasn't. How did she never talk to her son about that?
- eesmith 5y agoDon't forget bias error. The linked-to site gets contributions from around the world. There's 45 million mothers in the US, so source population of about 100 million mothers. If 0.1% of families have no other male presence that's 100K families. If 0.01% of these mothers don't notice [1], that's still 10 families. And it's the unusual which make it to sites like these. ("When dog bites man, it's not news. But when man bites dog, now that is news!") [1] Or it could be the mother didn't know how to bring it up, or thought she was being supportive of her son's choices.
- anotherman554 5y ago
- protomyth 5y agoIt happens in some of the plains tribal languages. One of my female bosses at a grant program learned to speak her native language from her uncles. Her female relatives tease her about speaking like a man.
- w0mbat 5y agoThe same thing happened to a friend of my dad. A long time ago, the friend was a British diplomat living somewhere like Singapore and he made friends with the two Japanese sisters in the next apartment. They used to have tea and chat and he helped them practice their English. Being good with languages he soon picked up a lot of Japanese from them. One day he got invited to an event at the Japanese Embassy and was excited to be able to show off his secret language skills. However, any Japanese man he spoke to would react strangely and it looked like they were trying hard not to laugh. He eventually got someone to explain that he was using “women’s words”, and the effect of a dignified English gentleman in a tuxedo talking like that was hilarious to them.
- moffkalast 5y agoGuy was trying to say "Greetings gentlemen, allow me to introduce myself" but all they heard was "Gweetings gentwemen, awwow me tuwu intwoduce mysewf".
- AlgorithmicTime 5y agoMy naammme is Biggus Dickus.
- readthenotes1 5y agoSince education in the classics is nearly non-existent: https://youtu.be/kx_G2a2hL6U https://youtu.be/kx_G2a2hL6U "Remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other men."
- numpad0 5y agoI guess more like “oh god this is terrible please no” vs “for god’s sake don’t fucking do that”
- amelius 5y agoWhat is curious about this, is that his wife didn't find it off-putting that her husband was speaking woman-lingo all this time.
- commandlinefan 5y agoGood point - my wife is hispanic and I've learned Spanish mostly from her. She's quick to correct me when I use a phrase that she uses all the time that men shouldn't (like "que feito", for example).
- ncpa-cpl 5y agoSpanish varies a lot depending on the country, but I've noticed this: My female Spanish speaking friends use: Holi, Porfi (Hi/Please) While the male ones use Hola and Porfa (Hi/Please)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pvaldes 5y agoThis is typical Flanders-tongue but are interesting. The goal is not sounding femenine, is sounding childish. Something that can be useful Porfa is used only when the context is casual. Porfi is extra-casual and childish but men can use it perfectly in the correct context. An example > Por favor (Please) let me eat cake. Not. > Porfa (pleaaase, more pleading and casual) ... No way, is for later. > Porfiiii... (please,please,please... big eyed Cat of Shrek mode) Well, okay... > (bingo!) In Spain using a childish tone by men is perfectly acceptable as long as you turn to the normal mode fast and you have a purpose. Can be used to express a very close relationship with your audience. As a cute effect. And much more important, can be used as comic relief. When mimicking a child you reduce your level of perceived menace to other. Is like saying "Just joking, hehe", therefore you are triggering a calming effect in your public. Holi is the worst offender, but a big tall man talking to an afraid children could use it without any problem to express "I don't want to hurt you". Saying directly "I don't want to hurt you" could sound threatening instead (There is an implicit "I don't want... but I could") An adult man will not need to calm other adult stranger normally, so in this context can do more harm than good. Never use it all the time, and never in business or formal context because you simply lose leverage.
- dustintrex 5y agoThis is a running joke among Japanese language learners, but less of an actual problem than you'd think. The really feminine words (atashi, kashira, ending sentences with wa etc) are trivially avoided, so you end up with neutral/excessively polite/gaijinkusai but not particularly feminine language. For what it's worth, few foreigners master Japanese to the level where they could convincingly sound like a tough male/gangster, but unless you actually are in the Yakuza, this ability is not particularly useful. Sonai yuun yattara ippen washi no chinpo shabutte miruka?
- earthboundkid 5y agoI disagree. Yes, it's trivial to avoid saying Atashi and ending sentence in wa, but feminine language differences are a lot more pervasive than that. There's a ton of subtle stuff, and you end up sounding strange if you aren't really careful. To just give one example, there are a ton of places you can choose to throw in an o- or not, just like in English, you can choose to say "the" or not. As in English, it's about pattern matching and getting used to the subtle frequencies for this stuff. Just like French people sound silly when they use "the" in the wrong places, a man sounds silly when using o- in the wrong places.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> To just give one example, there are a ton of places you can choose to throw in an o- or not, just like in English, you can choose to say "the" or not. Definiteness marking is certainly an area where speakers of languages that don't do that get confused. But I'm not comfortable saying that there are a ton of places in English where you can choose to say "the" or not. In most cases, there's only one correct choice. Going back over the nouns in my previous paragraph: (marking area[0] speakers[1] languages[2] I ton[0] places English you cases choice[1] [there]) [0] rival article already marked [1] "the" permissible; presence and absence are both fine [2] "the" possible; presence may raise eyebrows
- rendaw 5y agoI think GP was talking about honorific/humble o not the object marker o, and chose a poor metaphor. Because honorific/humble o is often a signal for feminine language... there was a trending tiktok video about prefixing "toilet" with "o" for example.
- redis_mlc 5y agoWomen say, "ohayo gozaimasu", and men can just say in a bass voice, "osu." :)
- TeeMassive 5y agoI'm learning Japanese (very slowly and more of a hobby) and being a caricature of a "gaijin who speaks like a woman" has always been a fear of mine haha. Fun fact, katakana (more sharp and right angled lines) used to be for men and hiragana for women (more round and swift).
- spacechild1 5y agoI speak “female“ Kansai dialect because that's what I hear all the time from my wife. When I speak to other Japanese people they find it pretty hilarious.
- karmasimida 5y agoJapanese is gendered That is probably why.
- dkdk8283 5y agoI think I am missing the punchline.
- wrp 5y agoThe persistence of this phenomenon has puzzled me for decades. From the 1980s, I have asked Japanese women who are married to foreigners, "Since you care about how your husband is perceived in Japanese society, why don't you correct him away from overtly female speech habits?" The usual reaction is to be simply dumbfounded at the question. I've never talked to a Japanese woman who reacted like, "Hey, that's a good idea."
- alignItems 5y agoIn NYC, Hasidic men speak in Yiddish while the women speak in English. They both can use the other language of course, but as a second language and with different accents.
- arrow7000 5y agoWas going to bring up this example. To add to this: hasidic men will often use Hebrew/Aramaic phrases used in the Talmud or its commentaries, whereas women, who are not permitted to study these materials, don't.
- ars 5y agoThey are permitted to, they just usually don't bother. They would learn it as kids in school, and like kids everywhere they aren't volunteering for extra classes. Some women will choose to do so as adults, but at that point it doesn't become part of the vocabulary.
- names_are_hard 5y agoIf you mean that in your opinion (or according to your interpretation of Jewish law) they are permitted to...well, that's just, like, your opinion, man. If you mean that they believe themselves to be permitted to, this is definitely not the case. Talmud (ie Mishna/Gemara) outside of "agadata" is considered off-limits to women by all Haredi communities I'm aware of. In the past all Torah study was considered forbidden, but in the last few hundred years leniencies were found to enable some amount of Jewish religious education for girls. This was quite an innovation and was not taken lightly. Today, in some communities the original texts are all forbidden, but in most the Written Law (Tanach) is permitted why the Oral Law (Talmud) is not. Halacha (practical law) is usually allowed, as is theology, philosophy and ethics (Mussar, Chassidus, Rambam's "Shmoneh Prakim", etc) Bottom line: women don't use scholarly jargon because they are intentionally and expressly excluded from such activities.
- arrow7000 5y agoThis is simple false. In hasidic communities women learn mostly Tanach (the Old Testament), Halacha (practical laws) and Mussar (roughly: ethics). They absolutely do not learn the Talmud or its commentaries. In hasidic circles learning the Talmud – or any kind of in-depth abstract study – is said to lead women to "lightheadedness" aka promiscuity.
- jrochkind1 5y ago> Native Tongue [published 1984] is a feminist science fiction novel by American writer Suzette Haden Elgin, the first book in her series of the same name. The trilogy is centered in a future dystopian American society where the 19th Amendment was repealed in 1991[1] and women have been stripped of civil rights. A group of women, part of a worldwide group of linguists who facilitate human communication with alien races, create a new language for women as an act of resistance. Elgin created that language, Láadan, and instructional materials are available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Tongue_(Elgin_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Tongue_(Elgin_novel)
- kortex 5y agoMy favorite feature of Láadan is grammatical evidentiality, which I believe is based on real features of certain Native American languages. This is where you state how you know something, did you see it with your own eyes, hear it from a close friend, or just through the grapevine. There's even a particle for having dreamed it. How is this different than English? For one, English relies heavily on the copula (is/to be) for statements of fact ("it is raining" vs "I see rain"), and secondly it's baked into the grammar. Stating something without evidence would sound just as wrong as "Me fail English? That's unpossible!" The one exception might be the "uncertainty suffix" -ish. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality
- bmmayer1 5y agoOne example here that's missed but I know from personal experience[0]: the Venda language of South Africa has two different words for "Hello" -- men say "Nda" which literally means "I am a lion," and women say "Aah" which as far as I learned doesn't mean anything in particular. [0]https://brianmayer.com/2012/06/saying-hello-in-limpopo/ https://brianmayer.com/2012/06/saying-hello-in-limpopo/
- bradrn 5y agoThey’ve missed at least one prominent example, namely the South American language Karajá [0]. Ribeiro’s grammar spends a whole chapter talking about the difference between female and male speech, which include: • Men can drop k, often causing vowel fusion and modification • Men drop d/n in the two words dõ ‘a’ and adõ ‘something’ • Various irregular vocabulary differences For instance, female dɪkarə̃ kadɪɗakakre corresponds to male dɪarə̃ adɪɗakakre ‘I will take it off’. [0] Ribeiro, Eduardo Rivail. 2012. A grammar of Karajá. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago; x+291pp.)
- FabHK 5y agoRelated phenomenon: Mother-in-law-speech, where the language you use changes when you speak to your in-laws. There's an Australian language that has clicks, but only when talking to the mother in law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_speech
- 29athrowaway 5y agoIn Dance with wolves, all men incorrectly speak the dialect used for women.
- temptemptemp111 5y agoAll cultures
- pmjones 5y agoInsert obligatory "isn't that all cultures?" joke here.
- simonebrunozzi 5y agoA pidgin language is described in the article. I've heard about pidgin [0] in 2003, in the context of Hawaii, and I found the concept really fascinating. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin
- cestith 5y agoPidgins and creoles have always fascinated me.
- kgeist 5y agoIn Slavic languages (i.e half Europe) the choice of past tense forms depends on the gender: "I said" is translated differently depending on whether "I" is male or female. I wouldn't say it's a totally different language, but translators often have to assume the gender when translating from a language which doesn't have such a feature.
- Muromec 5y agoIt's not even unique to Slavic languages -- past tense is also formed through an adjective (and is subject to all gender agreement things) in French, so it may be something from PIE.
- selimthegrim 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dative_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dative_construction
- Muromec 5y agoI'm not sure it's that one. There isn't anything going on with the subject, it's still in nominative case, while the verb is doing funny things.
- lloda 5y agoBut those forms depend on the gender of the subject, not on the gender of the speaker. It's just grammatical gender.
- xdennis 5y ago> In Slavic languages (i.e half Europe) I'm not sure that's quite right. Europe is typically divided in 3: Slavic, Germanic and Romance. By my count the population of Slavic countries adds up to 280 million of Europe's 750 million people.
- yosito 5y agoHey, don't leave out the Uralic languages. Hungary and Finland would not be pleased.
- juancn 5y agoThey missed Japanese! It has two completely different structures for males and females.
- coldtea 5y agoSo, in a manner, all of them?
- me_me_mu_mu 5y agoWhy/how people find ways to add unnecessary complexities always blows my mind.
- snvzz 5y agoI prefer to see it as richness of culture.
- me_me_mu_mu 5y agoI was more speaking to some of the rather oppressive ones. I don’t find those that “rich” and my own culture has so many needlessly complex things in it that stem from not so rich backgrounds.
- xhevahir 5y agoThere are some societies where men or women have a separate language--actually, "register" may be a better term--for ceremonies that are specific to that gender, like circumcision rituals and so on. Nigel Barley's memoir Ceremony tells about one of these, which has a Wikipedia entry here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La%27bi_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La%27bi_language
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoI, male, mostly grew up with my single mom and for some reason people found it funny that I referred to my underwear as panties.
- jbaber 5y agoNushu script: https://omniglot.com/writing/nushu.htm https://omniglot.com/writing/nushu.htm
- retrac 5y agoWhile e.g. Nüshu (a secret women's only writing system) is a rather extreme example, Japanese with its various first-person pronouns and gendered patterns to verb conjugations is not that odd. Many languages are like that. Possibly all languages, to some degree. It's a continuum, probably, between slightly to moderately gendered with most languages. English is definitely on that continuum, by the way. Any significant text (just a few paragraphs) has enough clues to predict a speaker or writer's gender with considerable confidence. This shows up most dramatically with statistical models (including deep learning) but trends with particular grammatical constructs and word choices were noted long ago.
- Metacelsus 5y ago>gendered patterns to verb conjugations Polish does this too.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoThis seems to be conflating grammatical gender - which includes differences in pronouns, adjectives, sometimes verbs, and pronunciation, but is still based on relatively minor variations in a common vocabulary - with full dialects, which can have very distinct vocabularies and may include words with unique meanings. English is at the de-grammarised end of the spectrum. There are gendered clues in English, but they're (mostly) not baked into the grammar. The differences are more about specific idioms and expressions that one gender is more likely to use, and they're really a kind of variation on other subgroup slangs - like teen slang, other age-related indicators. Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions. The Romance languages have obvious gender in the grammar, but it's... just there. It doesn't do much except to indicate that the subject or object is male or female. Beyond that, there are some rather random associations of gender to specific nouns. Fully distinct dialects/languages are incredibly rare and are often artificial and/or more likely to be created by a subculture than as a direct result of gender differences. Example: English has Polari, which was entertainer/street slang and often used in gay subcultures. It also has Cockney, Estuary, Northern, Scottish, Urban, and others - all differentiated by culture.
- 5y ago
- gadders 5y agoDidn't women in Ancient Greece (specifically Athens) speak a different dialect of Greek to the men?
- fionnoh 5y agoDeaf Irish men and women who went to school in the mid 20th century would have learned different sign languages. "The fact that the Catholic schools are segregated on the basis of gender led to the development of a gendered-generational variant of Irish Sign Language that is still evident (albeit to a lesser degree) today." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Sign_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Sign_Language
- paxcoder 5y agoThe two Dublin schools (not far from each other) adopted different approaches to the sign language as it was being developed. That's unfortunate
- thoraway66 5y agoOh no, cultural diversity! Everything should be McDs and Starbucks
- _nalply 5y agoIt's very typical for Signed Languages to have multiple centers usually the schools for Deaf. Swiss German Sign Language for example has five centers for Bern, Basel, Zürich, Luzern and St. Gallen. People say today that Swiss German Sign Language has five dialects and this usually wows people, even the Alemannic Swiss who themselves have many variants in their Alemannic dialect. Ireland is special that they gender-segretated the Deaf children and the consequence is that women and men have different dialects.
- 3np 5y agoIm surprised they mention Japanese and not Thai, were the difference between gender dialects is more distinct.
- yorwba 5y agoJapanese has greater cultural clout. There are probably more English speakers who know "konnichiwa" and vaguely recall hearing that men and women speak differently in Japanese, than English speakers who can recognize "sawatdee krap/ka" as a Thai greeting, let alone tell you which ending is used by female speakers and which by male ones.
- hawk_ 5y agoNot an exhaustive list there by any means. For example Hindi and many other languages from the subcontinent are spoken differently based in the speaker's gender, although not as pronounced a difference as to call them separate "dialects".
- moffkalast 5y agoI'm surprised nobody has so far mentioned how blatantly sexist the whole thing is, in the age of feminists endlessly arguing about the smallest pointless thing.
- 3np 5y agoVlogpost on same subject https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5b0zeCfW7hM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5b0zeCfW7hM
- closeneough 5y agoIsn't this true for every culture?
- emsy 5y agoThis was probably meant as a joke but it rings true to some degree.
- rgoulter 5y agoDeborah Tannen's "You Just Don't Understand" discusses this idea. I found it pretty interesting. Roughly, its thesis is that men typically interact with others in a competitive way, as if interactions are about status in a hierarchy; whereas typically women would prefer to interact in a cooperative way, where interactions are about belonging/intimacy. -- The different perspectives lend themselves to framing the same sets of actions in different ways. -- The preface makes an interesting point: to the extent that differences in cultural attitudes leads to misunderstanding/conflict, it's worth trying to understand what those cultural differences are.
- psyc 5y agoHer: We’ve been dating for six months and I’m all for taking it slow, but you haven’t even brought up the idea of moving in together? Like just to have the conversation? Like what am I to you? Me: pulls up Google Translate
- ben_w 5y agoIf there’s a women’s-only language in the U.K. I’ve never heard of it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. I do however think the U.K. has different linguistic patterns for aristocracy vs. everyone else, both with the echo of Anglo-Saxon vs. Norman (cow/beef, sheep/mutton etc.); and also with the specific posh accent, formal modes of address that most people don’t bother with, and random use of Latin, Greek, and French.
- mrhektor 5y agoThis reminds me of the book Speaker for the Dead, which is book 2 in the Ender's game series. The creatures found on the new planet had different languages for men and women. I wonder if Orson Scott Card took inspiration from some of these cultures in building the narrative for the book!
- mwcampbell 5y agoCame here to say the same thing. I wouldn't be surprised if he did take inspiration from those cultures; he was a missionary (for the LDS church) in Brazil.
- janandonly 5y agoI think the ancient Sumerian language also had a dialect for women that was apart from the standard (male) dialect...
- Pinegulf 5y agoThis idea seems like a bad idea. At least from the natural-selection view: All of presented ones are obscure and on the verge of dying out.
- rvense 5y agoLanguage death has nothing to do with fitness, and these languages are not being "selected against" by the presence (or absence) of some linguistic characteristic. Languages die out because the groups that speak them assimilate into other groups, taking on their language and culture.
- renewiltord 5y agoThat's memetic selection, right? Like, the assimilation is going one way.
- rvense 5y agoBut it's selection based on non-linguistic criteria, like who's better at violence and economics. So it affects language, but it is not based in language, and thus GP's insinuation that this linguistic feature is a "bad idea from a natural selection point of view" and this is somehow related to those languages' so-called obscurity does not make sense.
- renewiltord 5y agoThat makes sense. There is low evidence that having this characteristic affects the assimilation. Okay, colour me convinced.
- rvense 5y agoFor it to make sense, language replacement (which is an observable phenomenon) would have to happen by communities learning a bunch of different languages and picking the one that they liked best. That's just not how it goes. You learn a new language to speak with new people that you're interested in, regardless of how weird and hard to learn their language is.