Sociolinguistics

&
Language and Gender

By Marielle Lerner
based on lecture notes by Mark Liberman
 Sociolinguistics
Dialect Variation and Evaluation

In addition to regional dialect differences, the way people

speak depends on their place in society

We may have (often stereotypical) impressions of dialects

from regions other than our own, while we are more
sensitive to social class markers in dialect areas we know

What’s an example of a (variable) linguistic feature that

can be associated with a certain social class?
 Sociolinguistics
Dialect Variation and Evaluation

A person’s dialect may put them at a disadvantage in

competing for jobs, housing, and so on

Matched Guise experiments reveal the strong effect that

social stereotypes connected to different speech varieties
can have on the evaluation of a speaker by their audience
One example of this kind of experiment showed that someone
reading the same text or transcript using Latino or African
American speech markers, as opposed to standard English
speech, is more likely to be told that a house or apartment is
unavailable when making phone calls to realtors
 Sociolinguistics
Dialect Variation and Evaluation

Age stratification of the

fronting of /aw/ in the Philadelphia
Neighborhood study [N=112].
Vertical axis shows expected
values of F2 for each age range,
calculated by adding age
regression coefficients to the
constant [Source:Labov 2001,
Ch.5].

• What does “fronting” mean, and how is it related to F2?

• What does this graph tell us about the fronting of /aw/ in Philadelphia?
 Sociolinguistics
Dialect Variation and Evaluation

Social stratification of the

fronting of /aw/ in the
Philadelphia Neighborhood
Study [N=112]. Expected values
of F2 calculated by adding social
class regression coefficient to
the constant. [Source: Labov
2001, Ch. 5].

• What pattern of social class stratification is exemplified in this graph?

• What additional information does this give us about the fronting of /aw/ in
Philadelphia?
 Sociolinguistics
Register and Genre Variation

Biber examined a
large variety of text
types to identify the
basic dimensions of
variation

Think of another
genre of text or
speech. Where would
you place it on this
plot?
 Sociolinguistics
Register and Genre Variation

The other dimensions that Biber identified include:

"situation-dependent vs. elaborated reference"

today vs. November 2, 1998

"overt expression of argumentation"

explicitly structured argument vs. other modes of
organization (or none)

"abstract vs. concrete style"

certain human errors seem to have occurred vs. John was
fiddling with the radio and drove off into the ditch.
 Sociolinguistics
Register and Genre Variation

Within a given register, a given speaker will talk differently

for different audiences

What motivation could a speaker have for speaking like, or

speaking differently from, their audience?

Can you think of a way that one’s speech could be affected

by an audience that is not present?
Sociolinguistics
Register and Genre Variation

“g-dropping”
from a 1969 study
done by Labov in New
York City

What social class

trends are found for
each speech style?

What style trends are

found for each social
class?
 Language and Gender
Biology/Sex/Language

Physiologically, there is one clear way that sex affects

language cross-linguistically
The vocal folds of post-pubescent males average about 50-
60% longer than those of females of the same age, and the
overall adult male vocal tract length is about 15% longer on
average.
Thus adult females voices are likely to show pitches roughly
75% higher than those of male voices
 Language and Gender
Biology/Sex/Language

Fundamental frequency (F0) of males and females by age

 Language and Gender
Biology/Sex/Language

There are additional anatomical differences between men and

women that supposedly affect language (although they are
contested)
What are they?
 Language and Gender
Biology/Sex/Language

There are additional anatomical differences between men

and women that supposedly affect language (although they
are contested)
The female corpus calllosum, an array of neural fibers that
connects the two hemispheres of the cortex, is said to be larger
This has been proposed as evidence that interhemispheric
communication may differ between the sexes
Women are more likely to suffer aphasia when the left anterior
portion of the frontal cortex is damaged, and men are more
likely to suffer aphasia when the left posterior portion of the
frontal cortex is damaged
The suggestion in this case is that there are differences between
men and women in functional localization of language skills in the
brain
 Language and Gender
Culture/Gender/Language

There are cases of language differentiation with respect to

gender by particular forms that are typically used by
women or by men, as in Japanese:
 Language and Gender
Culture/Gender/Language

While some languages code gender differences as shown

above, gender-based sociolinguistic differentiation is
much more frequent

A common observation is that female speech tends to be

evaluated as more "correct" or more "prestigious," less
"slangy,” more polite, more complex, and so on
On the other hand, women are usually the leaders of change
in pronunciation, typically producing new
pronunciations sooner, more often, and in more extreme
ways than men.
 Language and Gender
Culture/Gender/Language

Two broad classes of explanations for such gender effects

have been offered
What are they?
 Language and Gender
Culture/Gender/Language

Two broad classes of explanations for such gender effects

have been offered:
difference theories and dominance theories
difference theories (or two-culture theories): men and women
inhabit different cultural (and therefore linguistic) worlds.
dominance theories: men and women inhabit the same cultural
and linguistic world, in which power and status are distributed
unequally, and are expressed by linguistic as well as other
cultural markers
 Language and Gender
Culture/Gender/Language

Correlations of five
stages of the Northern Cities
Shift with gender and social
category in a Detroit
suburban high school (based
on Eckert 1999)

What is the difference between the first three variables and the last two?

Knowing that the first three are the earlier stages of the Northern Cities
Shift, and the last two are more recent, what does this tell us about the
relationship between social factors, gender, and language change?