gender and language

[Penny Eckert]

I don't disagree with the explanations that have been offered so far for
women's greater use of standard speech. But I wouldn't go too far down
this road without considering the many cases in which women's speech is
not more standard than men's. Trudgill's data were unusual in the
consistent male lead in sound change; other studies have found women to
lead in many changes. The question of how non-standard these sound changes
are is another problem - we've developed pretty monolithic models of
"standard" and "vernacular". Nonetheless, the generalization that women
use more standard erases the considerable differences among women - and
indeed, these differences are greater than those among men. The real
generalization is that there is greater linguistic differentiation among
women than among men. So the question is not "do women use more standard
language?" but "which women use more standard?" Labov and I have both
found evidence of a crossover in a variety of variables, with women who
function in the standard language market using more standard language than
men in the standard market, and women who function in the vernacular
market using more vernacular than men in the vernacular market.

See:

ECKERT, PENELOPE. 1990. The whole woman: Sex and gender differences in
variation. Language Variation and Change, 1.245-67.

LABOV, WILLIAM. 1991. The intersection of sex and social class in the
course of linguistic change. Language Variation and Change, 2.205-51.

The examples are phonological, but I have found the same pattern in the
use of negative concord among adolescents.  One hypothesis that Sally
McConnell-Ginet and I proposed is that women have to work harder to
construct themselves as "authentic" participants in any market.

ECKERT, PENELOPE and MCCONNELL-GINET, SALLY. 1995. Constructing meaning,
constructing selves: Snapshots of language, gender and class from Belten
High. Gender articulated: Language and the culturally constructed self,
ed. by Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, 469-507. London: Routledge.

This is not to deny that statistically, women's grammar (if not their
phonology) is more standard than men's, and I think the explanation is
complex. I agree that depending on the situation, nonstandard grammar can
be associated with toughness or defiance, both of which are tolerated or
valued more in males than females. It also is associated with lack of
education and, once again depending on the situation, with ignorance,
which is more face threatening to females. A nice account of this is in:

DEUCHAR, MARGARET. 1989. A pragmatic account of women's use of standard
speech. Women in Their Speech Communities, ed. by Jennifer Coates and
Deborah Cameron, 27-32. London and New York: Longman.

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Penelope Eckert                              phone: (650)725-1564
Professor, Department of Linguistics         fax:   (650)723-5666
Director, Program in Feminist Studies
Stanford University
Stanford CA 94305-2150