5). For today's developed society, where as a consequence of the feminist movement social differences almost entirely disappeared in most part of the world and where women and men have the same rights, this is difficult to imagine. However, if we go back in time, we see that even in the 1940s after the Second World War a male-dominated society was the norm worldwide. "The major change that has occurred since that time, due to the feminist movement, is that women have achieved the right to be treated equally with men (Coates, 2004, p. 5). One of the symbolic moments of the "striving" for equality, concerning language use, was the publication of Robin Lakoff's Language and Women's Place in 1975. This was the book which made many linguists investigate women's talk, and carry out research concerning the way females communicate (Coates, 2004). Following the publication of this book, many studies were carried on concerning differences in the two sexes' language use in five major fields. .
Vocabulary is one field where differences between the use of language of the two sexes can be found. Although codification attempts to fix the language, vocabulary has always been an area that kept changing and developing in a way that has made it impossible to be 'fixed'. The investigating of the differences between the two genders in terms of vocabulary was widespread in the 18th century. As Richard Cambridge implied in his 1754 book The World, "the nature of women's vocabulary is associated with the unimportance of what they say. Eighteen-century writers defined language in terms of male language; the way men talked was seen as the norm, with women's language as being deviant" (Coates, 2004, p. 12). In the early twentieth-century linguists still believed that women had restricted vocabulary. According to Danish grammarian, Otto Jespersen "it is men rather than women who introduce new and 'fresh expressions' and thus men who are 'the chief renovators of language'" (Talbot, 2010, p.