English Gender Differences Research

Language Gender Research

Peter Trudgill's Norwich Research 1972

Peter Trudgill's carried out research in the 1970s on the language change and social class and the differences between men and women.  The independent variables were the 5 social class that he studied.

Trudgill made a detailed study in which subjects were grouped by social class and sex. He invited them to speak in a variety of situations, before asking them to read a passage that contained words where the speaker might use one or other of two speech sounds. An example would be verbs ending in -ing, where Trudgill wanted to see whether the speaker dropped the final g and pronounced this as -in'.

His findings were:

In all social classes, the more careful the speech, the more likely people were to say walking rather than walkin'.

The proportion of walkin' type forms was higher in lower social classes.

The nonstandard -in' forms occurred much more often in men's speech than in women's, and this was true for all social classes.

When women were questioned about what they thought they were saying, they tended to say they used the standard -ing forms more often than they really did.

When men were questioned about what they thought they were saying, they tended to say they used the nonstandard -in' forms more often than they really did.

His findings shown that women were more likely to use the prestige pronunciation of words to speak a higher prestige above their social class, therefore trying to sound more intelligent.  On the other hands, men displayed men being less socially aspirational and appearing more secure in their social class. Therefore, this indicated women having higher social class aspirations than men. It also shows women spoke in a correct, better language than men which shows their language was more powerful than men’s as they use ‘better’ words.        

Robin Lakoff's research 1973
Robin believed womens speech can be distinguished in certain features. She wrote a book titles ‘The logic of politenesses in 1973. She devised the ‘politeness principle’ in 3 maxims

1. Don’t impose
2. Give options and
3. Make your receiver feel good

Lakoff claimed that there were certain features of women’s language that gave the impression women are weaker and less certain than men are. There are 9 features that encourage the opinion of women to be weaker than male.

1-Women have a specific lexis, using words like ‘mauve’ not shared by men. However, men have their own discreet lexis as well, relating to cars, sports, computers etc

2-Women use ‘empty’ adjectives like ‘divine, cute, charming’. But men use ‘damn, jolly’

3-Women use intonation on declaratives and co-operative tag questions- ‘it’s a hot day, isn’t it?’ (Tannen) men hate tag questions as they feel they are being manipulated, and use them for assertion- ‘that was a clever thing to do, wasn’t it?’

4-Women use hedges which suggest uncertainty though the intention is to be polite eg ‘well, kind of, sort of, I wonder, I think…’ They are regarded as weak. Men use tentative forms as well- ‘like’ (Scouse) but they are not perceived as signs of weakness

5. Women use more intensifiers like ‘so’ as in ‘so you’. Men use more taboo language to intensify their language but that isn’t regarded as weak. Women may now use more taboo language so as not to seem weak to men. Men use the f-word as a modifier, women use it as an expletive

6. Women tend to use more correct grammar forms than men. Research suggests this is due to parental influence. Women are less likely to use covert prestige (aggressive- male) but do use overt prestige to gain social status (convergence/divergence). Women gain status by sounding correct.

7. Women use superpolite forms. They use modals, implicatures, mitigated directives, avoid off colour remarks by using euphemisms and use please and thank you. They use hyper correction. Men can break politeness rules and tell rude jokes without being told off.

8. Women are poor at telling jokes and often don’t understand them. Men need to tell jokes to raise their prestige with other men.

9. Women speak in italics (over emphasis) to show that what they are saying is important, as they feel they will be ignored otherwise.