Robin Lakoff


Robin Beth Tolmach Lakoff was an American linguist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Her 1975 book Language and Woman's Place is often credited with making language and gender a major subfield focus in linguistics and other disciplines.

Life and career

Lakoff was born Robin Beth Tolmach on November 27, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York, and was brought up in Manhattan. She earned a B.A. at Radcliffe College, a M.A. from Indiana University Bloomington, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from Harvard University, with a dissertation on Latin syntax under a Generative grammar framework. She was married to linguist George Lakoff from 1964 until they divorced in 1975; the couple had a son. Lakoff taught at University of California, Berkeley from 1972 until her retirement in 2012.
While an undergraduate at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Lakoff audited Noam Chomsky's classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thus developing connections in the MIT Linguistics Department. During this time, as Chomsky and his students were creating Transformational Generative Grammar, Lakoff and others explored ways in which outside context entered the structure of language.
Lakoff was a regular contributor to the Huffington Post. She received national attention in 2016 for an opinion piece in TIME titled "Hillary Clinton's Emailgate Is an Attack on Women".
On August 5, 2025, Lakoff died at a hospital in Walnut Creek, California, from respiratory failure following a fall. She was 82.

''Language and Woman's Place''

Lakoff's influential work Language and Woman's Place introduces to the field of sociolinguistics many ideas about women's language that are now often commonplace. It has inspired many different strategies for studying language and gender, across national borders as well as across class and race lines.
Her work is noted for its attention to class, power, and social justice in addition to gender.
Lakoff proposed that women's speech can be distinguished from that of men in a number of ways, including:
  1. Hedges: Phrases like "sort of", "kind of", "it seems like"
  2. Empty adjectives: "divine", "adorable", "gorgeous"
  3. Super-polite forms: "Would you mind..." "...if it's not too much to ask" "Is it okay if...?"
  4. Apologize more: "I'm sorry, but I think that..."
  5. Speak less frequently
  6. Avoid curse language or expletives
  7. Tag questions: "You don't mind eating this, do you?".
  8. Hyper-correct grammar and pronunciation: Use of prestige grammar and clear articulation
  9. Indirect requests: "Wow, I'm so thirsty." – really asking for a drink
  10. Speak in italics: Use tone to emphasise certain words, e.g., "so", "very", "quite"
Lakoff developed the "Politeness Principle," in which she devised three maxims that are usually followed in interaction. These are: Don't impose, give the receiver options, and make the receiver feel good. She stated that these are paramount in good interaction.

''The Language War''

Lakoff's The Language War performs a linguistic analysis of discourse on contemporary issues. She covers topics including the Hill–Thomas hearings, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Lewinsky scandal, and the political correctness phenomenon. Lakoff discusses each topic while arguing a general thesis that language itself constitutes a political battleground.
In The Language War, Lakoff introduced the idea that frames create meanings. She quotes that language and experiences is a “body of knowledge that is evoked in order to provide an inferential base for the understanding of an utterance.”
Frames are ideas that shape expectations and create focuses that are to be seen as truth and common sense. When someone decides to adopt a frame, that person will believe everything within the frame is genuine, and that what she or he learns within the frame becomes what she or he believes is common sense. For example, in the 19th century, people believed women should wear corsets and bind their waists. No one thought about women wearing clothes without a corset underneath because it was common sense that corsets are a must-have fashion item.
However, if someone decides to look at the same situation outside of the frame— which rarely happens because people are always convinced that common sense does not require justification— that person will have a completely different understanding of what is in the frame, and feel that common sense no longer makes sense. Continuing the corset example, in our present time it is common sense that corsets are unhealthy and will do more harm than good to a female body. This is why the majority of women these days don't wear corsets. And when we look back to the old frame from the 19th century, we think that fashion sense of that time is strange. This is the outcome of shifted frames.

Selected works

  • 1972: "Language in Context." Language 48:4 : pages 907–27.
  • 1973: The logic of politeness; or, minding your P's and Q's. In: Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, ed. C. Corum, T. Cedric Smith-Stark, A. Weiser, pages 292–305. Chicago: Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago
  • 1975: Language and Woman's Place.
  • 1977: What you can do with words: Politeness, pragmatics and performatives. In: , ed. R. Rogers, R. Wall & J. Murphy, pages 79–106. Arlington, Va.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
  • 1985: When talk is not cheap. With Mandy Aftel. Warner
  • 1990: Talking Power. Basic Books.
  • 1993: Father knows best: the use and abuse of therapy in Freud's case of Dora. With J. Coyne. Teachers College Press.
  • 2000: The Language War. University of California Press.
  • 2006: "Identity à la carte: you are what you eat." In: Discourse and Identity, ed. Anna DeFina, Deborah Schiffrin and Michael Bamberg. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.