Man and Woman

In the Punjabi culture, the roles of men and women are fundamentally the same as they are in American culture. In the Panjabi language is structured so that every noun is split into obligatory categories of male or female. Every object must be spoken of in a feminine or masculine form. The entirety of the language has masculine or feminine forms for every word. This underscores the importance of gender identity and, to a far lesser extent, gender roles within the culture. The obligatory categories of masculine and feminine actually highlights an underlying similarity with American culture: that the most important, fundamental aspect of identity for an individual is whether they are a female or a male. This is reflected in exactly the same manner in both cultures.
The ways in which men and women communicate are actually quite the same in both cultures. Punjabi men are much more nonverbal and are more insensitive and blunt than women. C.P. tells me that men tend to express their feelings though non-verbal communication, and much of this mirrors the kinesics that American men tend to use, such as affective displays like eye rolling, frowning, grimacing, or smiling, gazing, and the like. Panjabi men also communicate their feelings through adaptors, such as drumming fingers on a table and sighing. Grammatically and lexically men speak in shorter phrases, tend to utilize the report-style of talk. They do not speak descriptively, and they tend to have smaller vocabularies and much less detail when trying to explain emotions or events. They freely interrupt one another, and this is not considered rude. Men also tend to use more slang words, and also discuss topics, such as sex, that are generally considered impolite or crass for a woman to reference. In addition, and speck more ungrammatically then women do.
The manner in which women is quite different. They are very verbal and rely much less on nonverbal communication. They are polite in public, but they have no formal rules to follow that dictate specific phrases which they must say differently than men. They are somewhat avoidant of only one topic: sex. It is not abhorrent if a woman talks about sex- but it is still viewed as a bit negative. C.P believes that Underlying this rule is the vestiges of an ancient belief (shared even by the American culture in the 1800’s) that a woman must be demure and should enjoy sex less than a man. Thus if she participates in s discussion about sex, then she is viewed as being unfeminine.
C.P. says that in Punjab, women are somewhat more demure outside of the home-but not in it among their family. A dispute between a married couple for example would be address behind closed doors.