Sociolinguistics: Sex and Age

The linguistic forms used by women and men contrast - to different degrees - in all speech communities.
There are other ways too in which the linguistic behaviour of women and men differ. It is claimed
women more linguistically polite than men.

Sex-exclusive speech differences - non-Western communnities

- Women and men do not speak in exactly the same way as each other in any community.

- There are communities where the language is shared by women and men, but particular linguiatic
features occur only in the women's speech or only in the men's speech. These features are usually small
differences in pronunciation or word-shape (morphology). Sex differences in language are often just one
aspect of more pervasive linguistic differences in the society reflecting social status or power
differences. Sex-exclusive speech forms reflect sex-exclusive social roles.

Sex-preferential speech features-social dialect research

In Western communities where women's and men's social roles overlap, the speech forms they use also
overlap. In other words women and men do not use completely different forms. They use different
quantities or frequencies of the same forms. Women tend to use more of the standard forms than men
do.

Sex and social class

The linguistic features which differ in the speech of women and men in Western communities are
usually features which also distinguish the speech of people from different social classes. In every social
class men use more vernacular forms than women. In the lowest and the highest social groups the
women's speech is closer to that of the men in the same group than to that of women in other groups.
Across all social groups women use more standard forms than men and so, correspondingly, men use
more vernacular forms than women.

Explanations of women's linguistic behaviour

The social status explanation

Some linguists have suggested that women use more standard speech forms than men because they are
more status-conscious than men. The claim is that women are more aware of the fact that the way they
speak signals their social class background or social status in the community. Standard speech forms are
generally associated with high social status, and so, according to this explanation, women use more
standard speech forms as a way of claiming such status.

Woman's role as guardian of society's values

A second explanation for the fact that women use more standard forms than men points to the way
society tends to expect better behaviour from women than from men. Women are designated the role
of modelling correct behaviour in the community.

Subordinate groups must be polite

Children are expected to be polite to adults. Women as a subordinate group, it is argued, must avoid
offending men and so they must speak carefully and politely. Suggesting that a woman uses standard
forms in order to protect her face is not very different from saying she is claiming more status than she
is entitled to.

Vernacular forms express machismo

Men prefer vernacular forms because they carry macho connotations of masculinity and toughness.
Standard forms tend to be associated with female values and femininity.

Some alternative explanations

- How are women categorised?

Not all women marry men from the same social class, however. It is perfectly possible for a woman to be
better educated than the man she marries, or even to have a more prestigious job than him. Women's
use of more standard forms would require no explanation at all. They would simply be using appropiate
forms which accurately reflected their social background.

- The influence of the interviewer and the context

Women tend to be more cooperative conversationalists than men. It seems very likely that one factor
accounting for women's use of more standard forms in social dialect interviews is their greater
accomodation to the middle-class speech of their interviewers. Men, on the other hand, tend to be less
responsive to the speech of others, and to their conversational needs. It is worth noting that although
sex generally interacts with other social factors, such as status, class, the role of the speaker in an
interaction, and the formality of the context, there are cases where the sex of the speaker seems to be
the most influential factor accounting for speech patterns. There are other features of people's speech
which vary at different ages too. Not only pitch, but vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar can
differentiate age groups. Slang is another area of vocabulary which reflects a person's age. Current slang
is the linguistic prerogative of young people and generally sounds odd in the mouth of an older person.
It signals membership of a particular group - the young.

Age and social dialect data

Most social dialectologists have found that adolescents use the higher frequencies of vernacular forms,
especially if they are forms which people clearly recognise or identify as non-standard. On the other
hand some researchers who have interviewed younger children have noted a different pattern. When
people are not particularly aware that forms are vernacular forms, there is no adolescent peak, but
rather a gradual reduction as the child approaches adulthood. As people get older their speech simply
becomes less dialectical and more standard. Patterns for particular linguistic features may vary between
communities, but there is general agreement that in their middle years people are most likely to
recognise the society's speech norms and use the fewest vernacular forms.

Age grading and language change

When a linguistic change is spreading through a community, there will usually be a regular increase or
decrease in the use of linguistic form over time. Younger people will use less of the form and older
people more.