Explanation
1. Social status
2. Women’s roles as guardian of
society’s values
3. Women’s status as a subordinate
group (subordinate groups must be
polite)
4. Function of speech in expressing
gender identity (vernacular forms
express machismo)
5. Alternative explanations
Description/Drawback
Explanation: Some studies reveal that women 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.
Drawback:
Explanation: Society gives women the stereotype of
a well-spoken person, they must always take care of
their forms of addressing to others.
Drawback: Society expects women to speak more
correctly and standardly than men, especially when
they are serving as models for children’s speech.
Explanation: Women subordinate must be polite
because there are is a hierarchy that establishes the
role of women. In some societies, wives are not
allowed to address their husbands by their name.
Also, in other society every gender has their own
form to say or express words, and the wrong use of
these forms it could be misunderstood.
Drawback: Women that use forms to addressed
men must be careful because the improper use can
even lead others to think that women are assuming a
role that does not belong to them.
Explanation: Gender differences in language are
related to social status and some societies establish
“forms” of addressing between both genders, men
have more permission to speak as they want, they
use vernacular forms to express their status while
women are restricted from speaking informally, they
usually use standard form to speak or addressing
others.
Drawback: Men think that women are hierarchically
a weak link that must always be addressed correctly
and polite to them and that’s why they use
vernacular as a way to demonstrate their level over
women.
How women are categorized
Unfortunately, there are still societies in which
women are deprived of freely expressing themselves,
classified as weak and assigned a role in which they
must be courteous, establishing forms that they
 should use to addressed men.

Influence of the interviewer and the context

In many social dialect studies, the interviewers are
middle-class, well-educated academics. When
people wish to be cooperative they tend to
accommodate to the speech of the person they are
talking to. In other words, their speech becomes
more like that of their addressee

Task 2.2. Explanations of women’s linguistic behavior