According to the North American linguist Deborah Tannen, girls tend to speak at length on the same topic , while boys jump from one topic to another, and are able to address more than fifty different topics in the time that their peers dedicate to just one . On the other hand, Tannen distinguishes between affective conversations , which emphasize showing similarities and sharing experiences, more frequent between women, and informative conversations , focused on telling stories and typical of the masculine gender.
For her part, linguist Lunette Hirschman has observed that women frequently make sounds while speaking to them ("mmm", "aha", "yeah") . However, men often listen in silence. Women can interpret this silence as inattention. And they perceive that their companions do not shut up because they are impatient while they listen to them.
There are other more anecdotal differences in the way you use language. For example, females often initiate conversations with "hey" or "you know what?" To ensure the attention of their interlocutor, they use diminutives and indirect formulas more than men ("what if we were passing?" instead of "we're leaving"), and they use more precise terms in the emotional and sensory , like the names of colors. On the other hand, the eschatological register is reserved almost exclusively for the masculine gender.
