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• hypothesis
• deficient
• status
• genderlects
• norm
• subordinate
• society
• Powerless
• inherently

In 1975 Robin Lakoff identified a "women's register", which she argued served to maintain women's (inferior) role in . Lakoff argued that women tend to use linguistic forms that reflect and reinforce a role. These include tag questions, question intonation, and "weak" directives, among others .

Studies such as Lakoff's have been labelled the "deficit approach", since they posit that one gender is in terms of the other. Descriptions of women's speech as deficient can actually be dated as far back as Otto Jespersen's "The Woman", a chapter in his 1922 book Language: Its Nature and Development. Jespersen's idea that women's speech is deficient relative to a male went largely unchallenged until Lakoff's work appeared fifty years later. Nevertheless, despite the political incorrectness of the chapter's language from a modern perspective, Jespersen's contributions remain relevant. These include the prospect of language change based on social and gendered opportunity, lexical and phonological differences, and the idea of and gender roles influence language.

"Deficit" is an approach attributed to Jespersen that defines adult male language as the standard, and women's language as deficient. This approach created a dichotomy between women's language and men's language. This triggered criticism to the approach in that highlighting issues in women's language by using men's as a benchmark. As such, women's language was considered to have something 'wrong' with it. The ‘Deficit Model’ refers to how this language use contributes to women’s lower status and weaker position in society.

Another important study to consider was completed by O’Barr and Atkins in 1980. In their courtroom study, they tested Lakoff’s that features of ‘Women’s Language’ would be used more frequently by women. Their conclusions, however, suggested that these features were more closely linked to power, social status and social class. This led to them suggesting that ‘Language’ would be a more accurate definition of the features Lakoff identified. According to them, men would also often use these features and it was social , not gender, which determined their use.