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Many languages have distinct sets of enunciation and/or of writing, dependent on whether the speaker or writer be a man or a woman. In such situations, the language may be said to exhibit (at least) two genderlects.
Many genderlects arise from gender-specific social practices. For example:
In other cases, a genderlect may indicate class- and gender-mediated linguistic conservatism. For example:
Some natural languages have intricate systems of gender-specific vocabulary.
Garifuna has a vocabulary split between terms used only by men and terms used only by women. This does not however affect the entire vocabulary but when it does, the terms used by men generally come from Carib and those used by women come from Arawak. Crawley summarizes the situation as: "the earliest observation of a difference between the language of men and that of women was apparently that of Raymond Breton ... in Guadéloupe and Dominica. ... it seems that the island Carib have two distinct vocabularies, and used by men and by women when speaking to men, and the other used by women when speaking to each other, and by men when repeating in oratio obliqua some saying of the women." [8]
Crawley in fact noted extensive examples amongst indigenous American languages. "In the language of the Abipones some words varied according to sex." [8] "Of the Guaycurus of the Gran Chaco ... "... the speech of the men is wholly, or at least in certain words, different from that of the men." The Karaya have a special women’s dialect ... . The Eskimo women of the Mackenzie Delta have a special expressions, words, and terminations which the men do not use." [9] In the Lesser Antilles, "words special to one or the other sex are found most frequently in the names of the various degrees of kinship ; thus, ... for maternal uncle, son (elder son, younger son), brother-in-law, wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, cousin all of these are different according as a man or a woman is speaking. It is the same with the names of some though far from all, of the different parts of the body". [10] "Similar gender-associated languages" include Yanomama. [11]
Other natural languages may have mutually intelligible genderlects, but with certain words pronounced differently.
Jespersen writes that "In France, about 1700, women were inclined to pronounce e instead of o ... . ... in the sixteenth century in France there was a tendency to leave off the trilling and even to go further than to the present English untrilled point r by pronouncing [z] instead, but some of the old grammarians mention this pronunciation as characteristic of women". [12] Likewise, for "the English sound system we have express statements by old grammarians that women had a more advanced pronunciation than men, and characteristically enough these statements refer to the raising of the vowels in the direction of [i]". [13]
The indigenous Australian language Yanyuwa has separate dialects for men and women. [14]
In eastern Siberia, "Chukchi women's language differs from the Chukchi men's variety in a number of synchronically unpredictable ways, particularly with respect to an alternation between r and c/č. ... this alternation is nonarbitrary, originating from the asymmetric collapse of three cognate sets into two, such that in men's Chukchi *r and *d > r and *c > č, whereas in women's Chukchi *r > r and *d and *c > c." [15]
In the Lakota language, a small number of enclitics (approximately eight) differ in form based on the gender of the speaker. While many native speakers and linguists agree that certain enclitics are associated with particular genders, such usage may not be exclusive. That is, individual men sometimes use enclitics associated with women, and vice versa. [16] "With the Chiquitos in Bolivia, ... men indicate by the addition of -tii that a male person is spoken about, while the women do not use this suffix and thus make no distinction between 'he' and 'she,' 'his' and 'her.' ... To many substantives the men prefix a vowel which the women do not employ. [17] {Cf. the difference between Yoruba of Nigeria and Fǫn of Dahomey, in that Yoruba prefixes to many substantives a vowel which Fǫn does not employ.}
"The robes of buffalo hide on which a great deal of picture writing was done were all wrought by women, and ... among the Plains Indians the women have a picture language unknown to the men." [18]
Famously, Nüshu was a Chinese script used solely by women.
