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Deborah Tannen

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New Yorkers seem to think the best thing two people can do is talk. - Deborah Tannen

The contrasting focus on connection versus hierarchy also sheds light on innumerable adult conversations - and frustrations. Say a woman tells another about a personal problem and hears in response, 'I know how you feel' or 'the same thing happens to me.' The resulting 'troubles talk' reinforces the connection between them. - Deborah Tannen

The word 'sister' evokes an ideal of connection and support, like the friendships that made Rebecca Wells's 'Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood' and Ann Brashares's 'The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants' into best-selling novels and successful films. - Deborah Tannen

I am the youngest of three girls. My first linguistics book was a study of 'New York Jewish conversational style'. That was my dissertation. - Deborah Tannen

I think of myself as a writer as much as I think of myself as a linguist and an academic. I really enjoy writing - playing with language and getting just the right metaphor. - Deborah Tannen

Sister relationships span a huge range, from best friends to worst enemies. From 'I adore her; I talk to her five times a day' to 'I decided to cut her out of my life.' For most women, it's in between. - Deborah Tannen

We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups. - Deborah Tannen

Women as mothers grapple with corresponding contradictions. The adoration they feel for their grown daughters, mixed with the sense of responsibility for their well-being, can be overwhelming, matched only by the hurt they feel when their attempts to help or just stay connected are rebuffed or even excoriated as criticism or devilish interference. - Deborah Tannen

#Responsibility

There is probably no such thing as a level playing field in political campaigns. - Deborah Tannen

Where the daughter sees power, the mother feels powerless. Daughters and mothers, I found, both overestimate the other's power - and underestimate their own. - Deborah Tannen

All of us aspire to be powerful, and we all want to connect with others. - Deborah Tannen

The long history of conversations that family members share contributes not only to how listeners interpret words but also to how speakers choose them. - Deborah Tannen

Mothers subject their daughters to a level of scrutiny people usually reserve for themselves. A mother's gaze is like a magnifying glass held between the sun's rays and kindling. It concentrates the rays of imperfection on her daughter's yearning for approval. The result can be a conflagration - whoosh. - Deborah Tannen

My writing is about connecting ways of talking to human relationships. My purpose is to show that linguistics has something to offer in understanding and improving relationships. - Deborah Tannen

When daughters react with annoyance or even anger at the smallest, seemingly innocent remarks, mothers get the feeling that talking to their daughters can be like walking on eggshells: they have to watch every word. - Deborah Tannen

In some ways, siblings, and especially sisters, are more influential in your childhood than your parents. - Deborah Tannen

An assumption underlying almost all comments on interruptions is that they are aggressive, but the line between what's perceived as assertiveness or aggressiveness almost certainly shifts with an interrupter's gender. - Deborah Tannen

I'm a linguist. I study how people talk to each other and how the ways we talk affect our relationships. - Deborah Tannen

For girls and women, talk is the glue that holds a relationship together - and the explosive that can blow it apart. That's why you can think you're having a perfectly amiable chat, then suddenly find yourself wounded by the shrapnel from an exploded conversation. - Deborah Tannen

Our ways of relating to each other become like habits. - Deborah Tannen

There's the bond of a connection and the bond of bondage... When you are connected to somebody, everything each one does affects the other, and it's a kind of bondage. You're not as free as you would be if that person wasn't in your life. - Deborah Tannen

I can't tell you how many times I heard from younger sisters that their older sisters were bossy and judgmental. - Deborah Tannen

I've long believed that if you understand how conversational styles work, you can make adjustments in conversations to get what you want in your relationships. - Deborah Tannen

'Right' and 'wrong' aren't words a linguist uses. - Deborah Tannen

#Right And Wrong

My job is to analyze conversations and discover why communications fail. - Deborah Tannen

In my own writing, I avoid 'female' and try to say 'woman' because I feel that the word 'female' has connotations of not just biology but also non-human mammals. The idea of 'female' to me is more appropriate for a female animal. - Deborah Tannen

I believe the switch from 'lady' to 'woman' was part of the women's movement. 'Lady' was a euphemism for 'woman,' and that was one reason that we wanted to move away from it. - Deborah Tannen

The meanings of words and the uses of words come from practice from the way people in a given culture use those words. - Deborah Tannen

I would say 'woman' used to be a noun, and now it is a noun and also an adjective. And words change their functions in that way. It's one of the most common phenomena about words. They start as one thing, and they end up as something else. - Deborah Tannen

Many mothers or daughters assume that words only mean one thing. 'If I feel criticised, that has to be the whole story', and 'if I feel I am being helpful, that has to be the whole story'. - Deborah Tannen

My mother cared a lot about clothes. It was a point of friction because when I was a teenager, and I only wanted to wear my father's shirts, and I never wanted to wear makeup, she would say: 'Put on lipstick.' That was her thing. - Deborah Tannen

The dynamic of fathers and sons seems to be more around competition regarding things such as knowledge, accomplishments, expertise. - Deborah Tannen

Now I am married to a man who is a partner and friend. We come from similar backgrounds and share values and interests. It is a continual source of pleasure to talk to him. - Deborah Tannen

American popular culture, like individuals in daily life, tends to either romanticize or demonize mothers. We ricochet between 'Everything I ever accomplished I owe to my mother' and 'Every problem I have in my life is my mother's fault.' - Deborah Tannen

Mothers and daughters find in each other the source of great comfort but also of great pain. We talk to each other in better and worse ways than we talk to anyone else. - Deborah Tannen

A sister is someone who owns part of what you own: a house, perhaps, or a less tangible legacy, like memories of your childhood and the experience of your family. - Deborah Tannen

The Pavlovian view of women voters - 'plug the words in, and they will respond' - sends a chill down my spine because it sounds like an adaptation of something I have written about communication between the sexes: When a woman tells a man about a problem, she doesn't want him to fix it; she just wants him to listen and let her know he understands. - Deborah Tannen

Much of my work over the years has developed the premise that women's styles of friendship and conversation aren't inherently better than men's, simply different. - Deborah Tannen

We tend to assume that we have a baseline of speech that's going to be normal in all contexts, but the truth is, we all change our ways of speaking depending on who we're talking to. And so I think it's kind of a gesture of politeness to the people you're speaking to to try to say something in their own idiom. - Deborah Tannen

Conversations with sisters can spark extremes of anger or extremes of love. Everything said between sisters carries meaning not only from what was just said but from all the conversations that came before - and 'before' can span a lifetime. The layers of meaning combine profound connection with equally profound competition. - Deborah Tannen

One of the first studies in the field of gender and language, by Don H. Zimmerman and Candace West in 1975, found that in casual conversations between women and men, women were interrupted far more often. - Deborah Tannen

It's an interesting point about sisters not getting the same attention as parents and children, and even brothers. I suspect it's just because women didn't count that much and weren't the ones writing the accounts. - Deborah Tannen

Everything you say in a family carries meaning from all that was said before. So with friends, there is less likelihood of a few words triggering associations from childhood, where our deepest emotions often are rooted. - Deborah Tannen

I wouldn't say that it's hard for sisters to treat each other with respect. Many do. - Deborah Tannen

Everything we say has metamessages indicating how our words are to be interpreted: Is this a serious statement or a joke? Does it show annoyance or goodwill? Most of the time, metamessages are communicated and interpreted without notice because, as far as anyone can tell, the speaker and the hearer agree on their meaning. - Deborah Tannen

My interest in the linguistic differences between women and men grew from research I conducted early in my career on conversations between speakers of different ethnic and regional backgrounds. - Deborah Tannen

Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations. - Deborah Tannen

I was one of those daughters who saw my mother as my enemy when I was a teen. - Deborah Tannen

Each underestimates her own power and overestimates the other's. - Deborah Tannen

In a world of status, independence is key, because a primary means of establishing status is to tell others what to do, and taking orders is a marker of low status. Though all humans need both intimacy and independence, women tend to focus on the first and men on the second. It is as if their lifeblood ran in different directions. - Deborah Tannen

As a sociolinguist, I want to know how cultural differences affect the ways people talk and listen. My research method, inspired by the work of Robin Lakoff and John Gumperz of the University of California at Berkeley, is sociolinguistic microanalysis. I tape-record and transcribe naturally occurring conversations. - Deborah Tannen

One of the nice things about the United States is that, wherever you go, people speak the same language. So native New Yorkers can move to San Francisco, Houston, or Milwaukee and still understand and be understood by everyone they meet. Right? Well, not exactly. Or, as a native New Yorker might put it, 'Wrong!' - Deborah Tannen

In this world, conversations are negotiations for closeness in which people try to seek and give confirmation and support, and to reach consensus. They try to protect themselves from others' attempts to push them away. - Deborah Tannen

Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women. - Deborah Tannen

For many women, and a fair number of men, saying 'I'm sorry' isn't literally an apology; it's a ritual way of restoring balance to a conversation. - Deborah Tannen

Why don't men like to stop and ask directions? This question, which I first addressed in my 1990 book 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation', garnered perhaps the most attention of any issue or insight in that book. - Deborah Tannen

When women told me they'd always wished they had a sister, they were thinking of this ideal of mutual encouragement and support. Many of those who have sisters also yearn for this ideal because their relationships with their sisters don't always live up to it. - Deborah Tannen

The study of gender and language might seem at first to be a narrowly focused field, but it is actually as interdisciplinary as they come. - Deborah Tannen

The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation - or a relationship. - Deborah Tannen

A double bind is far worse than a straightforward damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't dilemma. It requires you to obey two mutually exclusive commands: Anything you do to fulfill one violates the other. - Deborah Tannen

#Straightforward

For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships. - Deborah Tannen

If women talk in ways expected of them or project a feminine demeanor, it's seen as weak. But if they talk in ways associated with men or bosses, then they're seen as too aggressive. Whatever they do violates one or the other expectation: either you're not talking as you should as a woman or as boss. - Deborah Tannen

A sister is like yourself in a different movie, a movie that stars you in a different life. - Deborah Tannen

We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has. - Deborah Tannen

Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone. - Deborah Tannen

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