Sociolinguistic

Aan pranata (17018106)

ENGLISH EDUCATION
FAKULTAS BAHASA DAN SENI
UNIVERSITAS NEGERI PADANG

2020
 Age and Gender
A- Language and Gender

Sex is biologically determined. One is born a male or a female.

Gender is socially determined. One chooses to speak either in a feminine or a masculine way.
Notes on Gender:
- It involves a consideration of the psychological, social, and cultural differences between men and
women.
- It is a construction (i.e. acquired socially).
-We create our gender identity through the language we speak. This is culturally determined and
reinforced by socialisation practices.
Differences and Features

Men and women speak differently. These differences can be:

-Phonological - Lexical - Morphological

-Syntactic - Pragmatic

Gender features in a language fall under two categories:

1- Exclusive features: Features associated with speakers of a PARTICULAR gender.

Example: kinship terms: Mother, niece, aunt = females
Father, nephew, uncle = males
(Contrasted with ‘cousin’ which can be for a male or a female).
2- Preferential features: Features distributed across speakers of BOTH genders but used more frequently
by one than the other.
Example: Standard forms are used by both genders but women tend to use it more than men and by
definition men use more vernacular forms than women do.
Gender-specific
Gender-neutral

Differences Between Men and Women

When they speak, men and women differ in many aspects such as:
1.Turn-taking and interruption
2.Minimal responses
3.Using hedges
4.Giving compliments
5.Asking questions
6.Apologising

Explanation of Women’s Linguistic Behaviour

Sociolinguists tried to explain why women speak differently than men. They studied the linguistic
behaviour of women using more standard forms than men and came up with 4 explanations:
1.Social status
2.Role in society
3.Status as a subordinate group
4.Speech expressing masculinity
1- Social Status
Sociolinguists claim that women believe that the way they speak signals their social class
background or social status in community. They are more status-conscious than men.
So women use more standard forms than men because standard forms are prestigious and usually
associated with people from a higher class.
Sociolinguists believe this is especially true for unemployed women as they cannot use their occupations
to signal social status.
this is NOT true because it implies that working women use fewer standard forms than unemployed
women. Research shows that working women use more standard forms than unemployed women.
2- Woman’s Role as Guardian of Society’s Values
Society tends to expect “better” behaviour from women than from men.
Little boys are generally allowed more freedom than little girls.
Misbehaviour from boys are tolerated where girls are more quickly corrected.
Similarly, rule-breaking of any kind by women is frowned upon more severely than rule-breaking by
men.
So, society expects women to speak and behave more correctly and standardly than men because they
are serving as models for children’s speech.
This explanation is true BUT not in all cases as an interaction between a mother and her child is more
relaxed and informal. So, vernaculars can occur.
3- Subordinate Groups Must Be Polite
Sociolinguists proposed that people who are subordinate must be polite and that is why women
use more standard forms than men.
Children are expected to be polite to adults.
It is argued that “women, as a subordinate group, must avoid offending men – and so they must speak
carefully and politely”.
4- Vernacular Forms Express Machismo
Machismo (/məʧɪzməʊ/): An aggressive male behaviour that emphasises the importance of
being strong rather than being intelligent and sensitive.
Men prefer vernacular forms because they carry macho connotations of masculinity and toughness and
that is why women prefer not to use them.
Standards forms, by definition, tend to be associated with female values and femininity.
These vernacular forms are, then, valued by men even if they do not admit it. They have “covert
prestige” as apposed to the “overt prestige” that standard forms have.
B- Language and Age
Age plays a role as a factor that influences people’s linguistic choices. By analysing children,
teenagers and adults’ speech, sociolinguistics agree that speech has age-graded features.
These features show differences among different age groups in terms of:
1.Pitch: It is difficult to determine the gender of a five year old child talking on the phone. When
boys and girls hit puberty, they develop different pitches. Men are lower in pitch, women are higher in
pitch.
Social and cultural factors play a role before that physical growth takes place. Young boys’ voices often
become lower in pitch than girls’ voices as a sign of masculinity.
In domains that are male-dominated (e.g., politics), women tend to speak in a deeper pitch compared to
average women which either reflects the public’ preference for voices with masculine associations in
politics or shows that female politicians are trying to gain acceptance in that male dominated domain.
Age-Graded Features
Not only pitch that makes a difference with age and language but there are language patterns that are
appropriate for 10 year olds and teenagers that disappear as they grow older. Age-graded features like:
2.Vocabulary:
Swear words: Teenagers tend to use more swear words than children or adults. Men restrict swearing to
all-male settings whereas women reduce their swearing in all settings.
Slang: An area of vocabulary that young people use. It signals membership to the age group of
teenagers. E.g. “wicked!” “rad!” to describe something they approve, “groovy” vs. “cool” to identify the
person’s generation.
3. Pronunciation: Different pronunciations can be a real give-away in guessing a person’s age.
E.g. pronouncing “often” as /ɔ:fən/ is old-fashioned as opposed to the more modern /ɔ:ftən/ in British
English.
4.Grammar: E.g. “dreamt”, “learnt” and “burnt” vs. “dreamed”, “learned” and “burned”.