Collusion in Subordination: Revisiting Language and Gender

Since the publication of the highly influential work by Robin Lakoff, Language and Woman's Place (1975), the question of the relationship between language and gender has become the subject of a large body of literature. Women language, as it is often referred to, is defined as the kind of language specific to women and characterised by a number of segmental and prosodic features that are said to be used only by women. Although this construct has been received with much acceptance in the literature, a great deal of criticism has been levelled at it. This paper attempts to question one of the basic arguments in Lakoff's work, namely the fact that women "collude in their own subordination" by using the type of language with which they have become associated. This paper has elicited the views of a group of women in the city of Marrakech towards their use of some of the linguistic features of Moroccan Arabic, which are known to characterise women language. This paper has concluded that the claim that the use of these linguistic features by women results in their feeling of subordination is not always valid.