Language and Gender

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,3, University of Erfurt, language: English, abstract: ¿It is not simply that women and men are seen to be different, but that this male-female difference is superimposed on so many aspects of the social world that a cultural connection is thereby forged between sex and virtually every other aspect of human experience.¿ With this quote I would like to introduce to the topic of language and gender. Gender is nowadays an international term and is a big field in science. In this paper, I would like to focus on how women and men use language differently. In order to do so, it is at first important to present a handy definition of what ¿gender¿ actually is and what the difference between ¿sex¿ and ¿gender¿ is. Based on this, it is necessary to give some information on how theories of gender and language have developed. The next step will be to analyze the relationship between gender and language through conversation analysis. Therefore, I will first explain shortly what conversation analysis is and then come to analyze gender in an excerpt from ¿Sex and the City¿.