Ninio And Snow Cultural Analysis

2.3.3 Culture:

Ninio and Snow (1996) confirmed in their investigation that differences in language use are strictly connected with cultural context. Moreover, they also think that differences in listening skills are cultural based. It means that bearing in mind the cultural patterns a listener may have different expectations while hearing an utterance. She/he may understand the message in various ways, which depend on what pattern their culture imposes on them. Culture also dictates connotations related to the particular subject. For example culture may elicit connotations related to what is called women’s work or men’s work, which will be described later in that paper. Based on Western culture, one hearing that a person is a carpenter or a

McElhinny’s ones also concerned working environment. She conducted an investigation based on women working class but the professions of women from her experiment were popularly classified as male’s workplaces. Gender should be measured taking into account who the individual is and the whole set of individual traits (contrary to the belief that gender is based on what job one does). McElhinny claimed that reversed social roles, including job practices, may contribute to the changes in language patterns of one gender. For example women working as police officers may repossess police jargon, which was initially attributed to male police officers. For example the word policemen can be now adjusted to women needs, so women who work as police officers could be called policewomen. That grammatical diversification and gender-denotation help avoid discrimination of one gender. On the other hand, McElhinny stated that female police officers cannot fully get through that still men-dominated environment because of biological reason: women are physically weaker than men. However, women still are able to find the space for themselves in male’s work environment and at the same time abolish the view that the workplace is hegemonic and attributed to one gender

So did R. Lakoff, whose works are the most significant ones for ethnographic and language development studies. In her work (first published in 1975), she described what according to her, as an observer and a female, are the characteristic features of American middle-class women speech. Lakoff suggested that by what is called ‘women’s language’, women are restricted and refused the right to express themselves. These factors contribute to the social view on females as an object but never a serious person with individual