| February 3, 2001 A Woman’s Affect on Language The question is not whether a woman affects a language, as the Oaks article clearly exemplified that she does. The real question is how. While language is prone to change as time goes by, simply because of people moving to different areas and learning each other’s accents and languages, women were quickest to pick up on changes and implement them in every day use. The article’s examples of linguistic change took place hundreds of years ago. The place doesn’t really matter, for the social conditions of women were mostly the same across the world. The social conditions were, in fact, what encouraged this trend. Women were not simply the “catalysts through whom change was facilitated” (285); without them, the change would still have occurred. It just might have taken a lot longer. Women were influenced by the subtle changes in the language for two reasons. The first is that women usually lacked the same education that a man received. Without this formal education, they were unable to eliminate improper usage, knowing only as much as they heard around them. Thus when they wrote or spoke to people, they spoke colloquially, giving no thought to correct or incorrect grammar. The second reason explains how women heard these dialectal differences in the first place: women are more social and tend to be neighborly, disregarding another’s race or language to be friendly. Languages then could mix as two women learned to communicate to each other. Under these circumstances, a woman incorporated new words and word forms into her language. (Her husband probably did too, but being educated, knew better than to use the “slang” in writing.) Women did not make the new forms; they only used them. |