LL-L "Sociolinguistics" 2002.09.04 (04) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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 A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian L=Limburgish
 LS=Low Saxon (Low German) S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic Z=Zeelandic (Zeeuws)
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From: "John M. Tait" <jmtait at wirhoose.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Pronouns" 2002.09.02 (03) [E]

Daniel wrote:

 So Luc, there is a "sex-thing" here, but it appears to
>be
>the males who are more conservative than the females.
>
>Daniel

I was under the impression that it was almost a given in language
research that women tend to speak the more polite - or standard - form
of a language than men of the same social strata. Not only that, but
women tend to over-report - to state that they speak more like the
standard language than they do, whereas men tend to under-report, that
is, state that they speak less like the standard language than they
do.Perhaps some professional linguist would like to corroborate - I
think the information I remember reading came from research in America.
Certainly I have met Scots-speaking women who would _state_ that they
only used the forms 'fan' (when) and 'oor' (our), and criticised their
children for using the unemphatic forms 'fin' and 'wir', whereas in fact
they used these forms themselves (it would be impossible to speak Scots
naturally without doing so.)

This means that the word 'conservative' can be ambiguous. In a situation
where there is only one language - such as in standard-English speaking
parts of England - the women are more likely to speak the standard
language, and less likely to use 'slang', than men of the same social
strata. Similarly, conservative language features in indigenous
languages are more likely to be conserved by women, as long as that
language is healthy enough to have some status. It has been surmised
that grammatical differences in the way men and women speak in some
North American Indian (I think it's OK to use the word 'Indian' here?)
languages is owing to women preserving more conservative features. I
remember reading that some present-day Lakota objected to the language
in Dances with Wolves on the grounds that the actors - who were tutored
by a female scholar - were speaking like women. Somebody conjectured
that perhaps this was the way men spoke in the 1800s, and the scholar
knew this but present-day speakers didn't necessarily. However, I don't
know if this is true or not - but the general tendency is well
documented, I believe. In these cases, women's speech tends to be more
conservative.

This all changes, of course, when indigenous languages come into contact
with dominant languages or forms of the same language, when the dominant
language is held to be the more 'polite'. Here, women tend to prefer the
'polite' dominant language, so their speech tends to be less
conservative, in the sense that they tend to lose the local or
indigenous characteristics. In an extreme case I have heard of - a
native American (hedging my PC bets here!) language of the North West
coast of the US or Canada, the native language is used only be men when
drunk!

Again, I hope somebody will tell me if I've got all this right!

This general tendency can easily be seen in the use of 'du' in Shetland.
Before the more recent tendency for Lerwick children to speak standard
English, we country kids were surprised to here some Shetland-speaking
_girls_ from Lerwick always using the 'you', and never the 'du' form.
Boys, on the other hand, used the 'du' form just as we did. This was
doubtless the beginning of the tendency for women to prefer the more
polite form, ie, for mothers to use it to their children, and for their
daughters to emulate it, whereas boys were more likely to prefer the
'du' form which, its original 'country' connotation having broken down
by virtue of many of the womenfolk having abandoned it, was perhaps now
seen as more 'street' and perhaps a token of male mateyness. In these
cases, women's speech tends to be less conservative, because they are
more likely to abandon the indigenous forms in favour of more 'polite'
standard ones.

John M. Tait.

http://www.wirhoose.co.uk

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