From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWhorter and this week, you know what we're going to do?

Something I've wanted to focus on for a long time.

We dance around it in various episodes, but it's time to come back to it because it's

been a while since I've done an episode really about this.

I want to do women's language.

How do women talk?

How does it differ from the way men talk?

And why?

It's a multifarious subject.

And let's just jump right in.

I say, well, how do women talk as opposed to how men talk?

And notice how if we're coming from English, then it's a question that I ask and you might

start scratching your chin.

You think that women tend to have higher voices than men tend to have lower voices, but

beyond that, which frankly is not very interesting, is there such thing as women's speech versus

men's speech?

What truth is, if you're dealing with English or really with most of the languages of Western

Europe, what some linguists have sometimes half jokingly called standard average European,

then it seems like kind of an abstract question, but really, once you go beyond that, there

are stark differences.

Speakers, if I would venture to say most of the world's languages wouldn't have to scratch

...