LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
2.3 GENDERED LANGUAGE USE
2.3.2 Studies of Gender and Multilingual Situations
they survive in the post-colonial generations, especially since Mama (2001) claims that there is no word for 'identity' in African languages.
Bakare-Yusuf (2002), in response to Oyewumi's critique of the conceptualisation of gender, argues that to reject outright any attempt to assign a particular conceptual category as belonging only to the 'West' and as therefore inapplicable to the African situation is to "violate the order of knowledge" (2002:11). She argues that, because for centuries, Africa has been in contact with Europe and Europe with Africa, from this relationship a whole series of borrowed traditions have continually spread and been adopted. She sees the denial of this cultural exchange as a denial of inter- cultural exchange between Africa and Europe.
Members of the groups on which I shall focus, and on which my research is based, though for the most part of African origins, come from a diversity of national, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. No essentialising sense of what is 'Africa' is appropriate to their behaviour or their expectations of each other. For this reason, my research, in dealing with their encounters, is based on 'difference' and not on some purported 'similarity' between all Africans.
of the first collections of papers to deal with the experiences of bilingual women in different situations of language contact. It appears that women are often regarded as the guardians of minority languages and by implication, of ethnic identity. They are held responsible for imparting and sustaining the mother tongue in the midst of the many other languages with which the community comes into contact. The book gave insights into complexity of gender in bilingual communities; through their investigations, the authors revealed the role of women in creating understanding and cooperation between people. At the same time, several papers in the volume document the refusal by women to take on this role.
In their investigation of Georgian women in the former USSR, Chinchaladze and Dragadze (1994) argue that women are traditionally seen as the "guardians of literacy" in Georgian villages. The men have access to Russian by virtue of movement and service in the army, and thus need to use Russian, while the women who remain in the district in which they were born are restricted to their home language. When Georgian was recognised as the national language and the language of education, this worked to the women's advantage. Women as home educators in the Georgian language are key instruments in the preservation of national identity and are committed and loyal to the cause. Georgian women are said to be more enthusiastic about the Georgian language as the medium of education, and their enthusiasm is in conformity with Georgian nationalist sentiments.
MacDonald (1994), basing his claims on his investigation of women and their linguistic conservatism in Brittany (France), also reveals that women play a critical role in the survival or death of minority language, such as Breton. This is evident in the activities of the Breton nationalist movement. MacDonald (1994) argues that although Breton is generally conceptualised as feminine, in opposition to French culture, and is the mother tongue of the Breton nationalist movement, the women of the village of Kerguz associate Breton with a hard and deprived way of life, and associate French with femininity, refinement and sophistication. The women of
Kerguz have ended up speaking predominantly French at women's gatherings, and refusing to transmit Breton to their children, and this has led to the death of the language in the area. Loyalty to a language, when the cultural baggage with which it is associated is disagreeable to a particular group, is certainly not automatic; we shall see that young Zulu women at the University of Natal have reacted against their mother tongue in a way comparable to the women of Kerguz.
Recent studies of gender and second language learning depict women as guardians of the home language and culture, and sometimes as rebels (Pavlenko and Piller 2001). Women are portrayed by studies as slower learners of second language, for a number of reasons, which include restricted access or symbolic resistance to mainstream culture. Blackledge (2001) describes how working-class immigrants' mothers from Bangladesh, now living in Britain, and who are literate both Bengali and Arabic, are constructed as illiterate, incompetent caregivers in their interactions with their children's teachers. Even though these women may have other accomplishments which allow them to support their children's learning of Bengali and Arabic, their lack of competence in English and in the rules of 'middle-class culture' causes them to be undervalued by British educators. Goldstein (2001) investigates the language choices of Portuguese immigrant women in Canada and argues that the women are faced with a choice between speaking Portuguese or English in the workplace. The choice of English would automatically offer them access to better employment opportunities. Yet the women stick to Portuguese for motives of solidarity with fellow Portuguese, even though it could cost them the chance of a more skilled and better paid job, which they are willing to trade for solidarity, support and companionship.
Despite the diversity of issues discussed in Chinchaladze and Dragadze (1994;
Blackledge (2001) and Goldstein (2001), the common focus is on the role of gendered social and discursive practices in the production and reproduction of identities and social inequalities in multilingual communities. However, the focus of
these studies is mainly on women, and little or nothing is known about the role men play in the communities with regard to their language choices and usage. The present research attempts to bridge this gap by investigating exchanges between men and women. Some other studies present women as cultural brokers, sensitive to the demand of the linguistic marketplace. Fast learners of L2 languages and culture can arm themselves with language varieties which are prestigious in the society (Gal
1978). This contradicts the images of women as custodians of the home language discussed above, and further confirms that it is dangerous to generalise about the meaning of gender identities, especially in a multilingual situation.
In a related study of the relationship between performance and perceptions of gendered and linguistic identity in an informal setting like the family, Piller (2001) investigates the linguistic practices of married couples, of whom one is German and the other English. Piller argues that women are disadvantaged in two ways: they are often denied the status of natives in their national communities when they have married a foreigner, and they may be refused acceptance as part of their husbands' communities. As a result, the women become marginalised both in their birth and marital communities and must learn to inhabit the borderlands and forge new multicultural, post-national identities for themselves. Although Piller's study is of married couples, it explores the language choices of men and women and their impact on their identities. The findings of the study indicate the need to interrogate the languages and identities of both females and males in multilingual communities.
In her conclusion, Piller (2001:223) suggests the need to further investigate "the question to what extent fluency, be it native fluency, near-native fluency, or second language fluency, is a matter of perception rather than performance".
In another recent study of language and gender in a bilingual context, Pujolar (2001) studied youth culture in Spain, focussing on the ways in which young people speak and how they construct their identities when they get together, away from the controlling power of parents, teachers and priests. Using discourse analysis (2001)
she argues that the development of particular speech styles in the contexts of bilingual young people's leisure activities is strongly connected with struggles over gender, ethnic and class relations. Pujolar's study indicates that gender, ethnicity and class are important categories of social identity in a bilingual context. Her study is an important contribution to the new literature on hilingualism and multilingualism which is beginning to emerge.
Although this review has shown that there is a growing interest in gender and language among scholars, the ways in which language is gendered in Africa are under-researched in comparison to the USA and Eiurope. Most of the multilingual and gender researchers are located in European bilingual or multilingual societies, where for the most part the focus is on European languages. Certainly the linguistic dynamics of European diversity and African diversity are not the same. Because Africa is home to larger numbers of languages, complex interactions are more likely to occur in African contexts. My research will attempt to address this existing gap in multilingual and gender studies.
The main focus of work on language and gender in South Africa has been on the 'powerless' language use of African women. Some of the early works on gender and language use include the study of "hlonipa" - the 'language of respect'. Hlonipa is a traditional language practice among Xhosa and 2'ulu people of South Africa. To show respect, a Zulu or Xhosa woman must avoid using the syllables in the name of her father in-law or brother in-law in speech. Zungu (1985) demonstrates this with a Zulu example: where a brother in-law's name is Kwazi (Knowledge) she must avoid the zi or azi syllables, whereby "angazi" (I don't know) will become angagci.
Finlayson, (1995), Zungu (1985) and Dowling (1988) argue that, traditionally, Zulu and Xhosa married women practice "hlonipa" more than their male counterparts.
The studies of "hlonipa" stress the fact that men's and women's languages differ in such societies, and present women as weaker than men, and as users of language forms which suggest that they belong to a subordinate group. These findings reinforce Lakoff's (1975) concept of genderlect. In other words, they reflect the status ascribed to women in these communities. As Dowling (1988) points out, the historical existence of "hlonipa" as an obligation on women has influenced the ways in which men have marginalised women in social, economic and political arenas in such communities.
De Klerk (1997), one of the few researchers exploring language and gender issues in South Africa, investigates the gendered use of expletives (extreme forms of slang, usually seen as amounting at least in intention to an assertion of the speaker's masculinity) among young South Africans. She argues that, contrary to the social norm, which regards the use of slang and expletives as a display of masculine identity in the eyes of their listeners, females have encroached on the "masculine language" space and thus are closing up the gap between the two gender groups in terms of taboos (1997:145). De Klerk (1997) further argues that conventional sex role theory can no longer account for the use of expletives by either males or females, since expletives were previously used to display masculinity. I must however observe that I have never encountered the use of expletives by young Zulu women students.
More recent research has consciously sought to create an awareness of language and gender as an important research topic in South Africa. The Journal of Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies published in 2002 a first slender Special Issue on language and gender, a reflection of emerging interest in this topic.
Among the four articles in this volume, Appalraju and de Kadt (2002) investigate the relationship between gender and bilingualism in South Africa, and Ige and de Kadt (2002) explore gender and politeness and discover that attitudes towards cultural identity not only vary between men and women, but also vary between individuals.