Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

372 Part 5: Language and Identity
and how features such as /ng/ (Trudgill, 1974) and third-person /s/
(Cheshire, 1978) pattern across male and female speakers of British
English. The purpose of this research has been to understand how social
class structures such as gender, class, and race are related to linguistic
forms, and to provide socially based explanations of linguistic variation
and change.
Variationist studies have been critiqued for what has been called the
‘correlational fallacy’ (Cameron, 1997: 59), or the failure to fully explain the
distribution of socially structured linguistic variation. Much research in
the variationist paradigm treats variables such as sex of the speaker as the
cause of variation rather than investigating why it is that men and women
(and other sexed identities, often neglected in such research) choose to
speak the way they do. Trudgill (1974: 182) has tentatively suggested that
women prefer standardized norms because of their powerless positions in
society and their need to enhance their social positions through linguistic
and other means, but most variationists do not seek explanatory theories
in their work on male and female differences.
Researchers who have examined ‘men’s’ and ‘women’s language’ from
more hermeneutic perspectives have more frequently sought to situate the
features of language that are associated with men and women in explanatory
frameworks. In contrast with variationist sociolinguistics, explanations
for differential male and female language use are treated as central
in this line of inquiry. Lakoff (1975) is well known for her work on
‘ women’s language’, which she describes as characterized by features
such as greater usage of modals such as should, could and might, more
negative politeness (e.g. You wouldn’t mind, would you?) and different
vocabulary such as more color terms (e.g. mauve, taupe, ivory) and a
distinct set of adjectives (e.g. exquisite, lovely, divine). Taking a feminist perspective,
Lakoff argues that women’s language is a result of patriarchal
social relations and hence is a language that refl ects powerlessness and
subordination. In contrast to most quantitative variationist approaches,
Lakoff takes a theoretical perspective as the starting point in her work,
explaining sex-based language differences as the result of men’s dominance
over women. According to Cameron (2005: 484), Lakoff’s ideas
draw on concepts in socialization theories that view women as subject to
men’s power in social, economic, and linguistic spheres of life. Socialization
theories also form a foundation for research by Tannen (1990, 1994), who,
in contrast, has preferred to describe gendered language as involving male
and female ‘cultures’, rather than including discussions of power difference
in her research. Tannen argues that men and women use language
differently because they have been exposed to different sociolinguistic
subcultures, and hence they employ interactional features such as overlap,
eye-contact and topic initiation differently, which sometimes leads to
what Tannen calls ‘cross-cultural’ miscommunication.