Cultures where men and women don’t speak the same language (2017)

Women nowadays keep assuming I'm gay due to my mannerisms.

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?

Fun fact, katakana (more sharp and right angled lines) used to be for men and hiragana for women (more round and swift).

That is probably why.

Ireland is special that they gender-segretated the Deaf children and the consequence is that women and men have different dialects.

Do you have any examples of this?

Not saying I don't believe you, but unless the text contains something very obvious (e.g. "my wife"), I often can't tell if the writer is a man or a woman.

It's much easier to tell in Italian, French or Spanish, for example, all languages where the gender of the speaker is baked into most sentences.

This kind of question reminds me of "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him"

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.

It's clear that many factors contribute to one's choice of language.

In the mid-1950s people studied the differences between the English spoken by the upper class ("U") and middle-class ("non-U") in the UK - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English .

In the US, a Black American may grow up with speaking African-American Vernacular English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_En...), and code switch to speak a more general American dialect.

My freshman year roommate spoke more "Southern" when on the phone to family than when talking to others in the dorm.

The language of a scientific monograph is quite different than the language of an HN comment, and being able to write in that style suggests an academic training.

So I'm not surprised that gender can also be a factor in word choice. Indeed, a friend of mine who reads romance novels claims a common difference between male and female authors is how they describe clothing.

If you want to describe all of those as different languages ... I've long given up trying to understand the differences between 'dialect' and 'language' (much less 'sociolect', 'ethnolect', 'stylistic register', etc) so go right ahead.

But I'm hesitant to believe that "Any significant text" predicts a specific author's gender "with considerable confidence."

I know of several cases where people tried and failed to guess an author's gender. Robert Silverberg, for example, found "something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing"; James Tiptree, Jr. was the male pseudonym of a female author. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tiptree_Jr.)

Searching Google Scholar, I find articles like https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2109/2109.13890.pdf saying:

> However, other gaps need to be addressed as well, including that no method of classifying age or gender—both of which are aspects of author profiling—that also considers the genre or nature of the analyzed text has been widely endorsed. Beyond that, to the best of our knowledge, no research has involved surveying or comparing the different approaches used in author profiling. In fact, current knowledge about the task is largely based on small-scale experiments conducted to find a reliable classification method with a near-zero error rate. In order to use forensic authorship profiling as admissible evidence in courts, the proposed methods must have about 100% accuracy. The average accuracy of good proposed methods are ranging from 70-85% [5]–[9]. However, the proposed methods still suffer from low accuracy.

That suggests that the "with considerable confidence" you refer to is on a population level, and not a per-person level. Rather like how, with considerable confidence, I can say that in general men are taller than women, even though many women are taller than many men.

Polish does this too.

Japanese does have gendered first-person pronouns, though the textbook standard one "watashi" is neutral. In Japanese, pronouns in general (including fp) are used less than English; they are only used when there is ambiguity, names are often preferred to pronouns, and in casual speech it is even OK to refer to yourself by your name (like Jimmy from Seinfeld.)

In the textbook, Japanese doesn't really have gendered patterns to verb conjugations. Verbs are rather conjugated based on level of formality, for example "itte-ru", "itte-imasu", "itte-orimasu" all mean "I am going" in ascending degree of politeness. There are also impolite/brash-sounding forms "iku-zo", "ikou-ze", "ike", etc. which tend to be said more by men (or teenage boys) but women can use them too, it's just not "lady-like".

That said--it is fair to observe that in film for example samurai and geishas speak essentially two different sounding languages, more so than a knight versus a princess. Men are expected to be rugged and use "rugged" words; women are expected to be beautiful and use "beautiful" words. There are definitely words, speech, and tonal patterns which are more masculine and feminine, but in anime for example these differences are exaggerated far beyond real-world conversational norms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iowh6UxahKs

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.

Similarly, in yeshiva communities in the US men and women typically pronounce certain Hebrew vowels differently. I'm not sure what the historical context here is, but this always fascinated me. In any case, women and men speak in noticeably different ways about religious concepts, to the point where adopting the opposite gender's pronunciation stands out as "weird".

In addition to pronunciation differences, using more Aramaic and certain Yiddish phrases is male-coded in this community.

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.

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

You could argue though that printing and schools are part of the human evolution.