Chapter two : literature review

2. Literature review
2.1. Introduction to language and gender
The relationship between language and gender has not been of great interest within sociolinguistics until the early 20th century when studies in linguistics has established and for the first time looked at differences between women’s and men’s speech across many languages. A countless and multitude number of studies on language and gender have been interested in identifying and trying to account for the differences in speech styles of men and women. One major difference is that women are more polite than men and use polite language very often. The term gender was first originated in linguistics when Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher, first separated between gender categories and classified them into masculine, feminine and neuter in order to classify nouns, this was the first theory of gender introduced into grammar namely gender as a grammatical category. Later in time, language was a particular feature and target of a fairly important movement of the 60’s and 70’s called women’s feminist movements. Since 1970, the study of language and gender has greatly developed due to the massive contribution of noticeable feminist scholars namely: Deborah Cameron, Penelope Eckert, Janet Holmes, Deborah Tannen, and others. Among the pioneers during this feminist movement was Robin Lakoff. In a paper written by Lakoff (1975) called language and women’s place, she