Linguistics is one of my favourite topics. The key thing about some of the first links is that it's trying to teach you how to write men rather than recognise male speech patterns. Really, writing is about maintaining an illusion of reality rather than reflecting reality. We "all know" that women talk about shoe shopping and weight loss while men talk about football and sex, but if we listen carefully we find out it's not always case. Writing is about selling those gender (and race/class/etc) stereotypes so that when we introduce the dragon on page two it's perfectly normal.

So. The rest of the links then. I'm a bit dubious about the one that presented the gendered Japanese because (as far as I know), it wasn't true. There are gendered words in Japanese, but those weren't examples of them unless they were speaking historically. Some of them had slightly differing levels of politeness -- we could say men are more likely to be casual, but these words are about as gender-neutral as they come in Japanese, although I can't say the same for 'ohiya' -- I've never heard anyone actually say that, male or female. In any case, many people consciously ignore gendered language these days too. I know middle-aged women who use 'boku' (I -- young, masc.) as their personal pronoun of choice, for example. Every textbook/dictionary will tell you this Just Doesn't Happen. Of course, there is code-switching in Japanese as well as English. I use 'boku' casually, 'watashi' (I -- gender neutral, polite) at work and 'ore' (I -- alpha male) when drunk. :P

(No one should ever mention Japanese and linguistics within earshot of me. Seriously. I will talk at you for hours.)

The link you picked out as being interesting was probably the best. Personally, I do tend to apologise for things a lot, but this has a lot to do with being British in combination with speaking Japanese all day, plus a few other factors. This topic is probably summed up as being more about power and status rather than gender.

This is an interesting topic, but we need MOAR NUMBERS (sorry...). There have been studies that counted the number of times certain features of speech popped up in conversation. It's said that women's speech has more examples of overlapping speech, whereas men are more likely to interrupt. Think about that last one. XD

--KP.