Sociolinguistic studies in Britain and Australia found that women, in every social class, use the more standard forms of speech more often than men do. One explanation is prestige: women may use standard forms to gain social status, while men use non-standard forms to show that they belong to a group.
This is the third article in a short series about language and gender. The earlier articles showed that women and men do talk differently, and that writers and grammarians in the past had already described the differences they noticed in speech.
This article looks at the findings of more recent research. Unlike the views from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century described in the previous article, the sociolinguistic studies below show less bias and rest on more thorough research.
Sociolinguistic research
The early work of sociolinguists concentrated mainly on differences in social class, such as the "upper middle class" or the "lower working class". This social variable was set in relation to linguistic variables: linguistic units that different speakers can pronounce in different ways. One example is the variable "t", which can be pronounced as [t] or as a glottal stop, [ʔ], in words like butter.
Soon, however, other social variables turned out to be important as well. One of them was gender.
In general, researchers had assumed that in many speech communities, women use the more prestigious forms (the more "standard" versions of linguistic variables) more often than men. Studies by Peter Trudgill (Norwich, England), Ronald Macaulay (Glasgow, Scotland), Mark Newbrook (West Wirral, England), and Edna Eisikovits (Sydney, Australia) show that this is true for female speakers across social classes. Men use the non-standard forms much more often than women, in the most formal test situations and in the least formal ones alike.
All of these studies also show a clear preference for one variant depending on the speaker's gender. Women prefer the variant that is closer to standard speech, or that represents it, while men prefer the more colloquial, non-standard variant.
Why is that so?
Sociolinguists have described the differences between male and female speakers, but they have rarely discussed why women tend to prefer the more standard variants.
In a self-evaluation test by Trudgill, women reported that they used the standard variant much more often than they actually did in the study itself. This shows that the female speakers were much more aware of the standard variant than the male speakers were, and it suggests that women "aim" to use the less colloquial variants. Men, on the other hand, reported that they used the non-standard variant much more often than they actually did. This shows that the variants far from the standard hold a certain prestige for them, which Trudgill called covert prestige. It suggests that, unlike women, men "aim" to use the more colloquial variant. Other studies have found the same pattern.
These findings are closely related to prestige and status in general. As the previous articles mentioned, women had to struggle for social status and acceptance. By adopting a more standard way of speaking, the female speakers in these studies seemed to strive for exactly that: a better social status.
Men, on the other hand, did not have to "fight" for socially accepted, higher-ranking roles in the way that women seemed to feel they had to. Instead, it seems that men want to show their loyalty to a certain social group or class, and they use the less standard variants to express that loyalty.
Sources
- Trudgill, Peter: Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich (1972)
- Trudgill, Peter: The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich (1974)
- Macaulay, Ronald: Variation and consistency in Glaswegian English (1978)
- Newbrook, Mark: Sociolinguistic reflexes of dialect interference in West Wirral (1982)
- Eisikovits, Edna: Sex differences in inter-group and intra-group interaction among adolescents (1987)