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LANGUAGE AND GENDER Use of standard

المؤلف:  Alan Davies

المصدر:  An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P49-C2

2026-07-21

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LANGUAGE AND GENDER

Use of standard

Many sociolinguists have reported the use by women of more standard (as opposed to vernacular) variants than men (e.g. in English the standard ‘ing’ as opposed to the vernacular ‘in’ as in talking/talkin). Indeed Trudgill (1983: 162) refers to this finding as ‘the single most consistent finding to emerge from sociolinguistics over the past twenty years’. Explanations as to why this is so vary from women’s social status being more dependent on appearance, to the vernacular having more masculine connotations. Both the explanations and the findings themselves have been challenged by feminist sociolinguists (Milroy 1987) and various other proposals put forward, such as the importance of social networks, of solidarity among women (and presumably men) and of variants (such as glottalization) used predominantly to signal gender affiliation. What all these findings indicate is that sex (or gender) does indeed operate as a major trigger of social dialect choice. It is not necessary, it seems, to seek explanations in terms of power or even solidarity: what the findings reveal is that both men and women find ways of marking themselves as men and women in the ways that they use language. Furthermore, they continue to do so and therefore if the other sex catches up, as it were, by taking on the standard forms or the high rise tone or the fronting, then they move on to some other distinguishing marker of difference.