Final answer:
Girl playgroups teach communication styles that can shape women's speech, emphasizing uncertainty and politeness. However, significant gender speech pattern differences are culturally taught and linked to societal expectations, with marked variations across different cultures.
Step-by-step explanation:
In girl playgroups and other gendered peer groups, certain communicative styles and behaviors are learned that may influence women's speech patterns. Inspired by the women's movement in the 1970s, researchers like Robin Lakoff theorized that women tend to use a communication style that exhibits uncertainty and politeness, characterized by features like hedges, emotional language, euphemisms, and tag questions. Boys and girls, however, did not show significant differences in their communication styles, as found by psychologist Janet Hyde, suggesting that culturally ingrained speech patterns emerge more strongly in adolescence and are reinforced by societal expectations rather than biology. Moreover, patterns of speech associated with gender can vary across cultures, as observed by anthropologists who found contrasting gender speech styles in places like Madagascar and New Guinea. Additionally, sociologists are interested in how the socialization of young girls to be overly concerned with appearance may affect their confidence and communicative behaviors.
Deborah Tannen's research generalized beyond speech patterns to describe two different communicative subcultures for American men and women. In these subcultures, men engage in conversation to assert status, while women seek to build social connections. This impacts how individuals interpret and deploy speech in conversations. Lisa Bloom has also highlighted the problematic social focus on young girls' appearances, which can impact a girl's self-esteem and social presence. Ultimately, language ideologies contribute to the way gender, power, and language interact within a culture, and how individuals perform their gender identities through speech and other cultural practices.