Gender Differences In Conversational Style: A Study On The Speaking Community Of Chinese College Students

Sociolinguistic studies on language and gender have been greatly improved by the second wave of feminism that launched in America during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Lakoff's Language and Women's Place is a good example of this and serves as a milestone for gender and language study. Universal gender studies can be put into three categories:(1) sexual discrimination of language used by and about women, (2) differences between males' and females' language, and (3) factors that lead to sexual discrimination and explanations regarding these categories. This study focuses on gender differences in male and female college students' conversational styles and explores the reasons for these distinctions within the speaking community of Chinese college students of Qingdao University with the purpose of testing and enriching the study of language and gender conducted by Lakoff and other sociolinguists like D. Zimmerman, C. West, P. Fishman and D. Tannen.College students are at the stage of self-identification and maturity, so they are open-minded to new variations of language. Their speech patterns reflect present and future social interactions in society. This study investigates the male and female college students' conversational styles regarding the aspects of topic selection, amount of talk and conversational strategies based on statistics that have been collected through questionnaires and tape-recorded conversations within the Chinese speaking community of college students.The results of this study both affirm and contradict the arguments and findings of Lakoff and other sociolinguists (such as Zimmerman and West, P. Fishman and Deborah Tannen). The study conducted by Zimmerman and West in 1975 found that in cross-gender communications males are self-centered and more competitive and aggressive than their female peers. However, in this study male college students were somewhat passive and noncompetitive, and their conversational topic was not only focused on themselves but also on common interests with their friends, especially when communicating with their female friends. Early studies on language and gender considered the conversational style of women notable for its uncertainty and weakness (Lakoff 1975). However, this study found females to be very independent and confident in their daily communications, and to pay less attention to family and personal emotions when they spoke with peers of the opposite gender. Previous studies show that the motive for questioning is different for men than for women in that men asked questions to gain information, but women asked questions solely to maintain communication. However, this study demonstrates that female students ask more questions and give more minimal responses in cross-gender communication, but their interpretation of these two types of speech are identical to that of their male peers, because both male and female students indicate that questioning stands for personal interest in a topic and a minimal response means "politeness."The author interprets the results from two aspects, the internal impact and the external impact. The former refers to biological, psychological and cognitive effects while the latter indicates social and cultural influences. Through the analysis, this paper intends to explore the effects of gender as a social variable on the conversational style of Chinese college students. The findings of this investigation shed light on the examination of complicated relationships between language and gender, and serve as a complement for studies of language and gender.