Abstract:
Up to the present day dominant in linguistics and in critical cultural/feminist theory remains the so called ‘gender deficient model’ of women’s language, originally proposed in 1975 by Robin Lakoff (2004). In the present article this model is represented and critically appraised. Additional registers of women’s language that are based on data from Bulgarian and Russian are presented, especially as far as the possibility of female jargon (as compared to male one) is taken into account, as well as of eloquent gender specific discourse. In conclusion the question of universals vs. cultural specificity of women’s language is discussed.