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‘Let’s ask her ‘do you have any bottles?’.’ ‘Give me that. After this,
after you chop’em, give’em to me.’ ‘Maybe we can slice them like that.’
‘Try to give me medicine.’

Pre-school children spoke all these lines. According to Deborah Tannen,
two utterances are typical of boys while two are typical of girls. Can you
tell which sentence belongs to which sex?

Tannen is professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. For more
than 40 weeks, her book You Just Don’t Understand Me has been in the American
best seller lists. It is a study, based on the analysis of conversations,
of why men and women so often fail to understand each other. Virago has
recently published the book in Britain. It will be interesting to see if
it does as well in our less psychological culture.

Tannen argues that each sex does not just have its preferred topics
– boys talk about things while girls talk about feelings – but its own conversational
style. Provocatively, she suggests that talk between men and women ought
to be studied as a form of cross-cultural communication. There is as much
chance of men and women understanding each other automatically as there
was of the Victorian British understanding the ‘darkest tribes of Africa’.

Tannen claims that the examples of boys’ and girls’ speech quoted above
show how styles of talking start very young. Women use conversations to
establish intimacy and connection. The girls are always saying ‘Let’s do
something’ which will include others. It is girls who use ‘maybe’ often.
The boys are more definite and suppress doubts. They use conversations to
establish status. They like to stand alone so they give orders or take them.
Tannen argues that men can show sympathy with one another and, indeed, with
women, but they do it in a very different way.

All this sounds like the stuff of agony aunts. But Tannen insists that
these mismatches of communication can be studied scientifically. She is
careful to insist that while she is a feminist, she is not doing feminist
linguistics. She does not blame men for having a different style of communicating.
‘Science is not about blaming,’ she says.

Tannen has been analysing conversations, often her own, for a long time.
She did her doctoral dissertation on a Thanksgiving dinner. Round the table
were three New York Jews, two Californians and a Briton. They hailed from
different linguistic universes. Tannen identified two distinct conversational
styles. The first style she calls High Involvement and it is typical of
the New York Jews. They speak with passion and enthusiam. It is normal to
talk personally. Diffidence is out. They can interrupt and ride roughshod
over interruptions. They can argue and still be friends.

In her academic book Conversational Styles (published by Ablex) Tannen
contrasted High Involvement with The High Consideratedness style. No passion
here, please. It would be considered embarrassing. It is normal (not to
say polite) to listen to what other people say. You make sure someone has
finished before you ‘venture’ your own opinion. Stories should not be too
personal. Rows are the end. You would never dream of imposing your point
of view or intruding by asking personal questions. Interruptions are considered
bad manners. Tannen’s doctoral thesis found that the Briton at the dinner
table was the most Highly Considerate of all. Should we be proud of this?

Tannen is a New York Jew. As a person, she feels more in sympathy with
the High Involvement style. In her thesis, however, she stressed that one
style was not better than the other. The styles reflected different cultures.
To a Highly Considerate speaker, High Involvement speakers seem aggressive
show-offs. But, then to the Highly Involved, the Highly Considerate don’t
seem very considerate at all but aloof, unfriendly and cold.

Tannen told me that she was always interested in making her findings
accessible. On the basis of her thesis, she wrote a more popular book called
That’s Not What I Meant. She included a chapter on gender differences and
got more letters about that chapter than about anything else. It convinced
her that gender differences in conversation would be a rich area to study.
She was also inspired by a colleague’s videos of 7-year-old boys and girls
talking to their best friends. ‘I looked and I was totally staggered by
what I saw,’ Tannen says.

She saw that these children were already speaking as if they belonged
to different cultures. They were as far apart as the New York Jew and the
stiff upper lipped Briton. She was seeing differences in these children
that mirrored the classic differences between the way that men and women
speak, differences that women frequently complain about. ‘I understand the
female style instinctively but I couldn’t say as a scientist that one way
was better than another.’

The psychology and politics of speech has been a growth area in the
past few years. Feminist psychologists and sociologists, such as the Australian
researcher Dale Spender, have argued that the ways men and women speak to
each other show how men like to dominate. Men talk more and interrupt more.
Men use talking to hog attention. Tannen has a number of nice anecdotes
about how men often take centre stage in asking questions after she has
given a lecture. The first question usually comes from a man; the question
that really is an excuse to make a speech comes from a man. All too often
men complain bitterly and interminably that women never give poor put-upon
men the chance to speak. One man harped on this point until his audience
started to fidget from annoyance.

Despite such persuasive anecdotes, Tannen is unwilling to dismiss men
as selfish and self-centred. She argues that it is crucial that such scenes
take place in public at a lecture. Men are comfortable with public speech.
She calls this report-talk and contrasts it neatly with rapport-talk. Rapport-talk
happens in private when two people either are or are trying to get close.

In private, women are not necessarily dominated. They often speak quite
as much as men, but they use speech differently. For them, talk is a way
of finding out how close and intimate they are. For men talk is a way of
establishing who is in control and has the power. Tannen likes to give many
examples of such mismatches. She asked me what I thought of this exchange:

WOMAN : How can you do this when it’s hurting me?

MAN : How can you try to limit my freedom?

WOMAN : But it makes me feel awful.

MAN : You are trying to manipulate me.

Tannen argues that men often complain that their wives nag them because
they feel that any attempt to give them advice is an attempt to put them
at a disadvantage. Only the weak need advice. She claims that this one reason
why men hate asking questions. When you ask a question, you don’t know the
answer. To be ignorant is to admit that you are at a loss.

Tannen gives revealing examples of this male need for certainties. For
instance, she tells of an instance in a medical school where a female student
who asked many questions got bad marks. Her male professors saw asking questions
not as a sign of curiosity but as proof of the fact that she didn’t know
what she was supposed to know. Or consider the case of ‘Martha’. Martha
bought a computer and needed to learn to use it. The manual did not tell
her all she needed to know so she returned to the shop where she had bought
it. The man assigned to help her made her feel incredibly stupid. He deluged
her with technical terms. His tone was patronising. Its ‘metamessage’, as
Tannen puts it, was that everything baffling her was obvious to him. A week
later, still confused and ‘dreading the interaction’, Martha returned to
the shop. This time she talked to a woman assistant. The woman avoided using
technical terms and often asked Martha if she understood what she was saying.
Her tone never suggested that Martha was foolish for not understanding.
Also, the woman often made Martha do things rather than demonstrating how
an expert did it.

These two experiences were utterly different. The man left Martha feeling
humiliated; the woman ‘enabled’ her. Tannen argues that her analysis of
talk makes it possible to understand the context of these conversations.
The man was showing that he had the knowledge and the upper hand. The woman
was showing that she wanted to connect, to make it possible for Martha to
share her problems. Tannen does not believe that women are altruists. It
is just that they feel powerful when they can help.

Tannen argues that her training as a linguist is crucial. She snipes
at some of the ways in which psychologists and sociologists study the use
of language. They are too crude, even perhaps too political. Tannen records
real conversations which she then analyses and interprets. She also plays
back conversations to groups of men and women to see how they interpret
them. Usually, the interpretations are very different.

‘I feel that a lot of the people have been too unsophisticated in their
analyses of conversation,’ she says. They count up the number of times the
man interrupts, for example, ‘and leave it at that’. Tannen claims that
this is not enough. ‘Such an approach makes it easy to miss very subtle
interactions.’ Here, Tannen demonstrates that women often lean forward empathically
and mumble to encourage their partner to speak more. This is not an interruption
at all but a kind of prompt to encourage more talk and more intimacy. Unless
you are subtle in your interpretations, you may score this wrongly as an
interruption. The transcript shows the effect but not the intention. In
Tannen’s linguistics, it is the intention that matters.

She admits that some feminist scientists have criticised her because
she does not blame men for having a different conversational style but,
she adds, ‘this has been very much a minority response’. Tannen’s view is
intriguing because she does not claim that men are more powerful. Instead,
she says men talk and perceive relationships more in terms of power. The
distinction is crucial because many men often feel themselves to be weak
– only too aware of the power others have over them.

Perhaps because she is aware that many men do not feel powerful, Tannen
does not seem to want to change the sexes drastically. She sees no future,
for example, in teaching men to be more like women. In the 1970s, liberal
American psychologists preached the virtues of psychological androgyny.
If you could teach men to behave more like women and women to behave more
like men, we would soon reach unisexual bliss. Tannen rejects this view,
but hopes that her analysis will help men and women to understand why they
often feel so frustrated with one another. One of her teachers was John
Gomperz, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, who studied
the ways Indians and Britons failed to communicate across the colonial divide.
She hopes to provide insights into why men and women often fail to understand
one another.

The reactions of British linguists and psycholinguists to Tannen’s work
is ambivalent. Few academics have actually read her latest book, but Tannen
does not provoke the envy or outrage endured by many academics who get on
the best seller lists. Yet my research (and not everyone wanted to be quoted)
left me feeling that, in Britain at least, a slight air of disapproval surrounds
her work.

Nonetheless, several linguists and psychologists I talked to agreed
that Tannen had done interesting work. The consensus is that her earlier,
more academic book, Conversational Style, opened up useful areas.

Few quarrelled with her method of studying real-life conversations.
Michael Garman, a linguist at the University of Reading and author of Psycholinguistics
(published by Cambridge University Press), says that there had been a swing
away from controlled, ‘perhaps artefactual’ laboratory studies that scrutinise
a tiny piece of text or speech. Garman was sympathetic to her work especially
because he feels linguists have failed to establish ‘norms’ for adult speech.
‘We know a good deal about how chlldren develop their language skills but
once they get to school, our knowledge becomes much less.’ Tannen’s work
has helped to show how, when, and by what stages, children come to speak
like adults.

Despite welcoming Tannen probing into an unprobed area, Garman was quite
critical. ‘There isn’t enough meat in Tannen’s work.’ He prefaced this by
saying, ‘It’s a question of taste. I’m not particularly excited by analyses
which are too global’ – too all encompassing. Garman is not particularly
curious about the kinds of problems that seem to excite the public, such
as opening gambits in conversations or what sort of nonlinguistic signals
are being sent. He is much more interested in the fact that people do not
talk in sentences, although we are all meant to, yet we seem to think in
something like sentences.

But whatever its scientific merits, Tannen’s book has stirred the popular
imagination. She has had scores of letters from women who say ‘now I understand’
and, also scores of letters from men. She judges her success partly through
that.

There is one puzzle, though. Developmental psychology suggests that
though the brain may be ‘wired’ for language, children learn the patterns
and rhythms of how to speak from their parents. Most infants and toddlers
spend most time with their mothers, who repeat words and phrases, and pause
to teach infants the art of taking turns to speak. Women teach the species
how to speak. How and when, then, do boys learn to speak in the male style
– and how is the influence of mothers erased? The answer may not yield a
best seller but would be interesting to know.

David Cohen is editor of Psychology News.