The way that language is shaped by the facts of biological sex is a rich subject. (The way that biological sex is framed, and sometimes refuses to be shaped, by language is perhaps one for another day.) Some languages have evolved forms which are distinctly those of male or female users. Japanese has speech patterns described as male or female, such as (male) the informal use of da instead of desu. There are scripts used exclusively among women, such as the syllabic Nüshu in Hunan, China. Many languages have gendered grammatical forms in ways that are not just metaphorical. Nouns such as ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ are masculine and feminine in French, but ‘girl’ is neuter in German. Some have masculine and feminine forms of adjectives and other parts of speech. English, on the other hand, has fewer sexed grammatical forms, largely restricted to pronouns such as ‘he’ and ‘she’. Other languages don’t even go that far. Bengali doesn’t have different pronouns for men and women at all, and Bengali learners of English often find it initially difficult to distinguish between ‘I gave it to her’ or ‘to him’ when referring to a man.

Those are the formal, enshrined distinctions where sex difference may be observed. There are more elusive ones, where social pressures may make themselves felt and where current anxieties start to show themselves. German, for instance, has until recently been much stricter than English about indicating whether a student or colleague is male or female. I’m informed that, comically, hipsters in Spain can’t simply declare themselves to be ‘non-binary’; they have to be non-binario or non-binaria, rendering their efforts null and void. In English, we might describe a man as a ‘bitch’ or a ‘tart’ with the intention of breaking sexual convention, but we are much less likely to be consciously aware of how rare it is to describe anyone other than a woman as ‘feisty’, say.

There is, too, the larger question of whether there are distinct ways of speaking characteristic of men or women. This may be an unfashionable topic among linguists for extra-linguistic reasons, but plenty of observant novelists have thought it worth investigating. The conventional portrait of a garrulous woman, from Tabitha Bramble to Miss Bates to Flora Finching and onwards, must have some basis in observed reality, as must the very characteristic masculine speech omitting the first-person pronoun.

Two wonderful observers, who were friends of each other, are worth quoting here. Kingsley Amis, in a bookshop, considers the titles of poems written by men and women:

Like all strangers, they divide by sex
Landscape Near Parma
Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,
So does Rilke and Buddha.

‘I travel, you see’, ‘I think’ and ‘I can read’
These titles seem to say;
But I Remember You, Love Is My Creed,
Poem for J.,

The ladies’ choice, discountenance my patter
For several seconds…

Elizabeth Taylor let a character mark the distinction in typically acerbic terms:

The reason, they say, that women novelists can’t write about men is because they don’t know what they’re like when they’re alone together. But I can’t think why they don’t know. I seem to hear them booming away all the time.

Sex is a key factor in language formation, as well as an important subject for language to describe, and perhaps we now need to look at it more carefully than ever.

Jenni Nuttall has written a book full of interesting observations about semantic change and etymological development. Her field is the large body of words in English used to describe specifically female topics and experiences, such as menstruation, women’s work, childbirth, motherhood and sexual relations. There are some unexpected omissions. An investigation of the words for female family members would have been interesting, which in English are often ancient and comparatively blunt. We don’t distinguish in the way Bengali does, for instance, between a father’s sister, father’s brother’s wife, mother’s sister and mother’s brother’s wife – they are all simply ‘aunt’. The book is dedicated ‘to my daughter’, and a discussion both of the ancestry of ‘daughter’ and some peculiar etymological speculation in the past would have been good. Scholarship in less enlightened times has connected ‘daughter’ with the Sanskrit duhitr, which appears to mean something close to ‘milkmaid’.

Nevertheless, Nuttall’s investigations yield much interesting history, and give rise to some general thoughts. A lot of the vocabulary for women’s experiences and quite ordinary facts emerge from euphemisms, or from the decent obscurity of learned languages. Most body parts are very ancient words – ‘neck’, ‘arm’, ‘foot’ and ‘hand’ are Old English. There do seem to have been a few Old English words for women’s private parts, but the meaning of cwith is unspecific, and it died out long ago. What replaced it were frank obscenities, which have often remained obscene, and learned Latin words such as ‘vagina’. Evidently these were always things which were not meant to be named. Much the same could be said about menstruation, except that here a large body of fairly jocular terms has been recorded over time. In a book which is inevitably concerned with the way men, and the authorities in general, labelled women’s lives, this area by contrast often suggests women talking to each other in private, and making jokes about it.

How many people understood the formal medical words is a good question. There’s evidence from a lawsuit early last century that the word ‘clitoris’ was unfamiliar to the majority of ordinary people, and the same must have been true of some recondite sexual vocabulary – I doubt whether ‘gamahuche’ was ever widely understood. This evidently matters much more when we start talking about facts such as pregnancy and childbirth – the arcane words must have been a disaster for simple people needing to understand what would happen to them.

This is an entertaining and an interesting book, though it might have benefited from being more clearly defined. Since it is about words, it would perhaps have been better to have cast it in the form of a dictionary, exploring individual verbal histories, like Raymond Williams’s Keywords. The narrative structure tempts Nutall into discussions of more general women’s issues, which are certainly deeply felt but which don’t add to the focus. I sometimes felt that a word she was exploring was not primarily female-orientated. I strongly associate ‘dandle’, for instance, not with mothers but with rather avuncular behaviour. There is, too, the point that individual items of vocabulary will only take one so far. Is there, in fact, a characteristic female or male discourse, affecting, among other things, syntactic choices? It would be bold to dismiss the belief of centuries out of hand.

The subject, of course, has taken on a new urgency, and Nuttall ends with the way ordinary, well-understood words, such as ‘woman’ itself, have undergone a process of attempted taboo. The question of how to define ‘woman’ seemed straightforward a few years ago. Now it has apparently travelled beyond the realms of dictionary-makers and linguistic scholars. Books like Nuttall’s are a good place to start to understand what the proponents of semantic change for political purposes are trying to do away with.