Robin Lakoff, a linguist who analyzed what she considered the unique ways women speak and argued that language enforces the power imbalance between the sexes — an insight that inspired an entire academic field, the study of language and gender — died on Aug. 5 in Walnut Creek, Calif. She was 82.
Her son, Andrew, said she died in a hospital from complications of a fall that led to respiratory failure.
Dr. Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1972 to 2012, maintained that women and men communicate differently, and that women are brought up to speak in a way that triggers their powerlessness.
“‘Woman’s language’ has as foundation the attitude that women are marginal to the serious concerns of life, which are pre-empted by men,” she wrote in 1973 in a groundbreaking paper, “Language and Woman’s Place,” which was expanded into a 1975 book.
Dr. Lakoff’s thesis that women are raised to accept a secondary role in the world, one enforced partly by the speech they are taught, sets off academic arguments to this day.
Her 1973 paper “created a huge fuss,” the linguists Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet wrote in 2012. “Thus was launched the study of language and gender.”
Dr. Lakoff observed that women’s speech was marked by hedging phrases (“like,” “y’know”), which convey that the speaker is uncertain; empty adjectives like “adorable” and “lovely,” which trivialize statements; so-called tag questions at the end of sentences, like “John is here, isn’t he?,” which convey hesitancy; overly polite phrases like “Won’t you please close the door?,” which suggest submissiveness; and a habit of ending declarative statements with a rising tone of voice that saps them of force.
She also observed that women are less likely to tell jokes than men, less likely to use vulgarity, more likely to use hyper-correct grammar and to speak with exaggerated politeness, and more likely to “speak in italics” — that is, stressing words because the speaker fears she is not being listened to.
She acknowledged that men also sometimes use these speech patterns, and that not all women employ them to the same degree. (She herself had a well-developed sense of humor; she began a book chapter about Hillary Clinton with Clinton jokes.)
“But,” she wrote, “it happens that, as a result of natural gender, a woman tends to have, and certainly tends to feel she has, little real-world power compared with a man; so generally a woman will be more apt to have these uses than a man will.”
Early in her academic career, Dr. Lakoff developed an interest in an emerging area of study: sociolinguistics, “a way to talk about how language makes us who we are, how language creates personal and social identity,” as she explained in a 2023 oral history for Berkeley.
Her arguments kicked off a burst of research and debate. Other linguists recorded and analyzed men’s and women’s speech to test her claims, while critics sought to rebut her notions that men and women speak differently, and that any differences enforce a power imbalance.
“There was a period where every article on language and gender would start by attacking Lakoff,” said Deborah Tannen, a former graduate student of Dr. Lakoff’s who popularized some of her ideas in the 1990 blockbuster “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation,” which spent nearly four years on The New York Times’s best-seller list.
As a student in the Berkeley linguistics department in the 1970s, Dr. Tannen once asked Dr. Lakoff why she didn’t attend academic conferences. Her answer, she said, was “I don’t need to go and sit there while everybody tears my work apart.”
Dr. Lakoff was primarily vilified in her male-dominated field for saying there were differences between men’s speech and women’s. “They didn’t like the implications,” Dr. Tannen said.
Nevertheless, she added, Dr. Lakoff “was a towering figure” whose “influence was enormous.”
Robin Beth Tolmach was born on Nov. 27, 1942, in Brooklyn, and grew up in the Stuyvesant Town area of Lower Manhattan. Her father, Samuel Tolmach, was a high school social studies teacher, and her mother, Beatrice (Bressler) Tolmach, taught elementary school.
Her parents, democratic socialists who were active in union organizing in New York’s public schools, were members of Three Arrows, a communitarian summer colony in Putnam Valley, N.Y.
She attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan and graduated from Radcliffe College with a bachelor’s degree in classics.
In her sophomore year, she met George Lakoff, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was taking a class with the famous linguist Noam Chomsky, who believed that the underlying structure of language was inborn in human beings. She also began to attend the class.
“Linguistics at M.I.T. during that period was a cult in all but name,” Dr. Lakoff recalled in the oral history.
She and Mr. Lakoff, who received a Ph.D. in linguistics from Indiana University, married in 1964. She earned an M.A. in linguistics there and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. In 1968, M.I.T. published her dissertation on Latin subjunctives. (“Went right to the top of the best-seller list,” she once wryly noted.)
After a year as a postdoctoral scholar at M.I.T., she taught with her husband at the University of Michigan. In 1972, they were both hired by Berkeley.
The marriage ended in 1975. Besides her son, she is survived by a sister, Martha Bauer; a brother, Philip Tolmach; and two grandchildren.
Dr. Lakoff moved away from teaching in the Chomskyan school of linguistics, which involved analyzing rules of grammatical syntax, and became an influential figure in the evolving field of sociolinguistics, the study of how language is shaped by culture and social groups.
But after kick-starting the field of language and gender, Dr. Lakoff did little academic work in that area; instead, she wrote more often as a cultural critic.
Her 2000 book, “The Language War,” was a collection of essays on the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, the O.J. Simpson trial, Hillary Rodham Clinton as first lady and other cultural minefields of the 1990s.
Dr. Lakoff wrote “more as a lefty pundit and media critic than a linguist,” a review in Salon noted.
Similarly, in an essay for Time on the eve of the 2016 presidential election, Dr. Lakoff seethed over the attacks on Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server, while nodding just slightly at the topic of speech.
“But here’s Hillary Rodham Clinton,” she wrote, “the very public stand-in for all bossy, uppity and ambitious women. Here are her emails. And since it’s a woman, doing what decent women should never do — engaging in high-level public communication — well, there must be something wrong with that, even if we can’t quite find that something.
Her other books included “Face Value: The Politics of Beauty,” with Raquel L. Scherr (1984), and “Talking Power: The Politics of Language” (1990).
In the Berkeley oral history, looking back on her early years of teaching as the only woman on the linguistics faculty, Dr. Lakoff drew some parallels with female candidates in the 2020 presidential primaries.
“How to be a woman in a man’s place?” she said. “You get criticized for being schoolmarmish or overbearing or a scold. And only women are criticized for that. A woman using a public voice is in trouble.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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