Dominance

• Dominance Approach - men's language dominates women's.
• Edwin and Shirley Ardner (1975): women's conversational behaviour is less assertive and less confident than that of men precisely because they occupy a less powerful position in society than men.
• Zimmerman and West (1975) observed that in same-sex conversations that interruptions were fairly overly distributed by that in mixed-sex conversations the majority of the interruptions were carried out by men.
• Pamela Fishman - Conversational Shitwork (1983): women have to do the majority of the 'conversational shitwork' when interacting with men, because men, in their more dominant role, are less concerned to do so.
• For Fishman the differences in male and female conversational behaviour are explained in terms of expectations - men are more dominant linguistically because that is what society expects.
• Dale Spender - Man-made Language (1980): men not only control women, but also the language system itself.
• Spender stated that language helps form the limits of our reality. It is our means of ordering, classifying and manipulating the world.
• Spender stated that it is through language that we become members of a human community, that the world becomes comprehensible and meaningful, that we bring into existence the world in which we live.
• Spender suggested that men block women's meanings from the language by stopping them from speaking: ignoring women's contributions, silencing them, permitting them to talk only in forms that are acceptable to men.
• O'Barr and Atkins (1980) could challenge the dominance approach as they state that language differences are situation specific, relying on who has the authority and power in a conversation rather than the gender.
• Geoffrey Beattie (1982) could challenge the dominance approach as he challenged the concept of interruptions only signifying dominance.