Language and Gender in the Military: Honorifics, Narrative, and I ...

By understanding the nation’s investment in the military in terms of both its financial burden to Americans and the number of citizens who serve or have served, one can see why the military is generally widely studied by historians, sociologists, economists, national-security specialists, and various other scholars and researchers. However, linguistic research is rare in the military environment, probably due to problems of access. Despite being a very public institution with representation in most states, the military is still a very circumscribed and closed society.

From a sociolinguistic perspective, the large number of people who serve or have served flags the significant social influence military service brings to personal, regional, and national identities. Further, the predominance of males facilitates sociolinguistic interest in the military milieu: significantly, 96 percent of the 26 million living American veterans are male. As a more finite example of the importance of military service to American identity, consider the fact that in the buildup to the 2004 presidential election, much was made of the military-service records of candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry, and going into the 2008 election, that of John McCain. As candidates, their military records were measured against the national memory of Vietnam in the context of what some have metaphorically termed “another Vietnam” in Iraq. Indeed, in generations that came of age during periods in which compulsory military service was enacted (the first peacetime draft being enacted in 1940 and the most recent draft ending in 1973), time in active military service was a formative experience for American men. Linguistically, however, the military experience has gone relatively unexamined. For the moment, I shall say that one of my aims is, in the spirit of the work of sociologist Erving Goffman, to begin to closely examine the underlying assumptions of even the seemingly mundane social constructs of military discourse.

Whether the compulsory service of previous generations, or voluntary service as has been in place since 1973, military service draws young people from all over the country, from different backgrounds, speech communities, and social classes, and links them through the training, experience, and language norms of the military environment.