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The strands of language, gender identity, social norms, and power structures have been so tightly interwoven that attempting to extricate one from the other for the purpose of research in language and gender has long proven difficult. However, the military hierarchy provides a relatively clear delineation of a speaker’s place in the power structure, whether male or female, therefore perhaps a method of aligning gender-related findings with clear indications of power-related dynamics.
Wary that a predisposition to a certain finding can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, I set about this study with the intention of recording military women and men of comparable rank, in comparable settings. I wanted to see what sociolinguistic cues floated out of the data itself. This strategy was my primary motivation for focusing upon language as it is used by members of Air Force communities to accomplish their mutual endeavors. Interactional sociolinguistic (IS) analysis of the language used to accomplish a task keeps the analyst from focusing on and searching for gender differences and allows the analyst to ask: In using language to accomplish the task, what difference does gender make, if any? Using this technique, these data showed that, more often than not, there are not conspicuous gender differences in how language is used in the pursuit of an institutional endeavor; however, there are frequently gendered nuances.
Using personal contacts, I solicited volunteers, all Air Force officers, at three different Air Force bases in the eastern and midwestern United States. The Air Force’s system of ranks and duty titles made it relatively easy to find women and men who would be conducting similar tasks at similar levels of responsibility so that valid comparisons could be made. In all, I collected nearly thirty hours of audiotaped interactions from six Air Force officers: a female and male wing commander, a female and male squadron commander, and a female and male flight commander. I also intentionally engaged with informants in both non-combat-oriented jobs, and combat-related jobs.
As I listened to the recordings, it quickly became apparent that two of the most gender-relevant linguistic variables in these data were also two of the most seemingly mundane lexical items in military usage: “ma’am” and “sir.”