gender and language

[Kari Sommers]

Your question was interesting, and it made me think long enough to come up
with my own theories as to why women use Standard English (what we here in
the US might call Standard American English, depending on who you ask).  One
thing I might throw out is that until the last forty years or so, women were
somewhat confined to the home and not out in society as much as the male
breadwinners, and so when someone came up with a new variation within the
language (e.g., slang), men were more likely to pick it up because they
interacted with a larger number of people with different backgrounds and
whatnot.  This does not explain why it's still true today (and I've observed
myself that it is), but I might go so far as to say that it might have
something to do with women still not having equality with men (we need only
to consider that women still make less money than men while doing the exact
same job).  Since we females have this inequality still facing us today, we
may subconsciously use more formal English in an attempt to be taken more
seriously, since we automatically have the pitfall of gender to get over.  I
think this possibility was even discussed in a linguistics class I had last
semester, but take it for what it's worth.

Kari Sommers
another student of linguistics

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