You Just Don T Understand Deborah Tannen Summary

What is the role of language in creating and reinforcing social distinctions, such as class, ethnicity and gender?

Are there essential linguistic differences between male and females?

Language can be defined as sounds and symbols that represent the world and capture thoughts and experiences. Language can be transformed and shaped and it can be used to transform and shape thoughts. Language is how people connect with each other and how they relate to each other. There have been many studies and claims that say that language differences between men and women exist. On the other hand people have made counterclaims that say there is no real differences between men and women. These claims also give us some insight into whether language creates

and supports distinctions like gender. If such differences do exist then they create distinct groups which can be identified by their language use. These differences may also cause miscommunication between the genders. If these differences do not exist then that would be like saying that men and women think the same way, because language is a way to express and capture each others thoughts. There are many ways of knowing and language fall under one of them.

There are many claims that reinforce the idea of language differences existing between different genders.

Deborah Tannen is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington D.C, she came with the theory of Genderlect, which basically says that men and women belong to different cultures and the communication between them is cross-cultural and miscommunication occurs because men and women don’t realize that cross-cultural communication is going on. Her famous book You Just Don’t Understand made this idea gain a lot of popularity. In this book Tannen uses anecdotes to demonstrate her ideas. These anecdotes mainly come from her own experiences or her friends experiences. Here, Tannen uses personal experiences to justify her claims. She also went out and listened to conversations and noticed differences. Her claims can be believed and trusted because these come from her and her friends experiences, she is also a professor and has given many lectures at Princeton University. These things make her a credible source as she clearly has done research in this field and has seen these differences for herself. The observations that she made were mainly qualitative and she didn’t really have a very large sample, but she had a variety of people in her book. This also makes it more believable and we can trust her research and her sources. Simma Lieberman is a consultant and works with people and organizations to create a better working environment. She specializes in gender

communication and she also claims to have noticed many differences in the way men and women speak. Both Tannen and Lieberman said that women build connections while men don’t, women don't speak out in public while men do, and women are more expressive while men aren't. Lieberman has used experiences to see these differences in the workplace, she has also done surveys and has found out that there are indeed linguistic differences between men and women. Although Lieberman has based most of her claims on the personal experiences she has also done a scientific study and has praised Tannen’s theory. Her claims are also credible since she has been working with different people and had a large sample to base these claims on. She has noticed in all of her personal experiences that there were many language differences. Her way of knowing or gaining this information is better since there was some sign of her doing extra scientific research, like the survey. Another example is the article Gender Benders by Dianna Booher. Dianna Booher is the CEO of Booher Consultants, which is a communications firm. Booher has used a scientific method to the differences in language between the genders. She says that there are differences between both the genders and she has used studies and research to show this. Her claims are credible since she has used research and a scientific method which means that we can believe her results. Most ideas in the world are credible and a part of big theories because a scientific method was used to validate them.

The other side of the argument states that there aren't linguistic differences in the language of men and women.

These claims that are made basically say that the way men and women speak has no differences and that all the other theories that say there are differences are mainly based on experiences and that the scientific research that they have done says otherwise. One of these claims in made by Deborah Cameron who is a language professor at Oxford University. In her article, What Language Barrier? She goes against the theory that was put up by Simon Baron-Cohen, which says that there are two kinds of brains that exist, the female brain which is made for nurturing and the male brain which specializes in creativity and mechanical work. Cameron argues that these claims have been made by looking at the fact that most men have jobs that require those skills and most women have jobs that require nurturing. She says that these generalizations are not based on scientific study or research. She also counters another claim which says that women talk more than men. She said that people used statistics to make that claim but when Mark Liberman, a professor of phonetics, looked at these statistics, he did some other research and found out that these numbers and statistics were not backed up by any research and there was nothing that was there to support this theory. This information was not credible. This meta-analysis by Cameron used statistics and pointed out the flaws and

discredibility of the other opposing claims that were made. The information that she gives us is believable and can be trusted since it consists of various scientific research done by many other people. They have all concluded that there aren't significant differences between men and women. This meta-analysis is credible and should be trusted.

Language is the one of the things that makes us human. Humans connect with each other and form the world we live in. Language makes it possible for us to survive with each other and understand each other. Language can create distinct groups like genders and can cause a distinction, which allows us to differentiate from each of these groups. Both the arguments had shown that they were credible, but the thing that makes arguments and claims plausible is the scientific method. The scientific method gives us reasons and statistics that allow us to carry out experiments ourselves and to see that whatever was being said is true. Although personal experiences can also be trusted, the scientific method is more credible and has a wider range of data that can be processed and that can be concluded from.