gender-specific speech?

[xBlackWolfx]

it's a phenomenon i've stumbled upon in a few languages, such as japanese and supposedly the native languages of the amazon.

i'm contemplating doing something like that in my own conlang, just to add flavor to it. what i'd like to know is how and why does gender-specific speech come about? as in one gender will use certain words or constructions that the other gender does not (as in japanese) or they'll pronounce the words differently from the opposite gender (amazonian women supposedly pronounce their words alot more precisely than the men, who often slur their words into monosyllables, and you sortof see this in french where masculine words are often identical to their feminine counterparts with the only different being that for the masculine, the final consonant is silent, such as in the words chat and chatte, meaning cat).

and is there any real pattern to what constitutents male and female speech? as in are there characteristics of speech that are considered gender-specific across several cultures, or at least does the male and female speech within a language actually follow a certain theme or recurring pattern? i've noticed in japanese that male-specific speech tends to feature alot of voiced plosives (boku and ze) while feminine speech uses words made mostly of approximants and vowels (using 'wa' at the end of a word and atashi instead of watashi). of course, those examples are sorta moot. boku is now considered more gender-neutral than in the past (with the once gender-neutral watashi becoming more masculine), and atashi is very very rare. japanese pronouns are highly unstable and are constantly changing from one year to the next, to the extreme that children always refer to themselves in the third person until they can get a hold of japanese's complex and ever changing pronoun system.

[Thakowsaizmu]

Were you drunk while typing that?

[Ossicone]

I wish I typed that well when drunk...

[xBlackWolfx]

Were you drunk while typing that?

no i was not. i've never done anysort of drug in my entire life. and what could there be in that post that could possibly be interpreted as me being drunk?

[Tanni]

Were you drunk while typing that?

no i was not. i've never done anysort of drug in my entire life.

Yes!

... and what could there be in that post that could possibly be interpreted as me being drunk?

Hush! There's something called orthography, even in English!

Chukchi

Tsjoektsjisch:

Een merkwaardig verschijnsel in het Tsjoektsjisch is een uitspraakverschil tussen mannen en vrouwen: in de vrouwentaal ontbreekt de klank r: ervoor in de plaats spreken vrouwen een ts uit.

Tschuktschische:

Eine Besonderheit ist die unterschiedliche Aussprache des Konsonanten /r/ bzw. der Kombination /rk/ bei Männern und Frauen. Während die Männer /r/ bzw. /rk/ sprechen, sprechen die Frauen in beiden Fällen /ts/. So heißt das „Walross“ bei den Männern rərkə, bei den Frauen aber tsətsə.

CHUKCHEE HOMEPAGE

chapter1:

Women's speech is said to differ from men's speech, principally in the pronunciation of 'r' (which is pronounced /ts/ by women).

Tschuktscho-kamtschadalische Sprachen:

Eine kuriose Besonderheit einiger tschuktscho-kamtschadalischer Sprachen ist die geschlechtsspezifische Aussprache mancher Phoneme. So wird im Tschuktschischen in Frauensprache der r-Laut in bestimmten Positionen gern als /ts/ gesprochen. Diese Ausspracheform ist jedoch eher eine geschlechtsspezifische Attitüde als eine durchgehende Regel. Im Aliutor entspricht männliches /l/ oder /s/ in weiblicher Aussprache dem /ts/, z.B. plaku gegenüber ptsaku (Schuhwerk).

So, Alyutor also seems to have gender-specific pronunciation.

Aliutors:

As with the Chukchi language, there are regular pronunciation differences in men's and women's usages. Women say ts where men have l or s (e.g. plaku versus ptsaku 'footwear'). Men's usage is considered improper for women and vice versa.

[Xing]

and you sortof see this in french where masculine words are often identical to their feminine counterparts with the only different being that for the masculine, the final consonant is silent, such as in the words chat and chatte, meaning cat).

This is not a case of gender-specific speech. It is different grammatical genders.

[Thakowsaizmu]

Were you drunk while typing that?

no i was not. i've never done anysort of drug in my entire life. and what could there be in that post that could possibly be interpreted as me being drunk?

Probably the lack of coherency.

[Micamo]

Well, I can say for sure a few languages have a mandatory distinction between male and female first-person pronouns.

[eldin raigmore]

Diuxi Mixtec's 2nd and 3rd person pronouns encode not only the sex of the referent but also the sex of the speaker.

Yuchi's 3rd person pronouns encode number (SG/PL), gender (both of the referent and of the speaker), kin relationship between speaker and referent (and if affine, then also whether in ascending or descending generation), and ethnic identity (Yuchi vs. other)

Yana inflects the great majority of nouns, pronouns, and verbs for sex of the speaker (and, in the case of male forms, also of the addressee)

Ket has different forms of the verb 'to say' depending on the sex of the person whose speaking is reported.

Tocharian A and Thai have gender contrast in personal pronouns in 1st person singular