Power and gender in speech

Why should boys adhere to non-standard local pronunciations? Sociolinguists have come up with a number of different, speculative suggestions. Firstly, the working-class speech, like certain other aspects of the working-class culture in our society, seems to have connotations or associations with masculinity, which may lead men to be more favourably disposed to non-standard linguistic forms than women. This, in turn, may be because working-class speech is associated with 'toughness' traditionally supposed to be characteristic of working-class life - and 'toughness' is quite widely considered to be a desirable masculine characteristic. Secondly, many societies seem to expect a higher level of adherence to social norms - better behaviour - from women than from men. If father comes home drunk on Saturday night and vomits over the living-room carpet, this is bad... But if mother does the same, many people would feel it is disgustful.

Like age, gender is a biological category that serves as a fundamental basis for the differentiation of roles, norms, and expectations in all societies. Gender differences are exceedingly complex, particularly in a society and era where women have been moving self-consciously into the marketplace and calling traditional gender roles into question. Gender roles and ideologies create different ways for men and women to experience life, culture, and society.

Sociolinguists have emphasized a greater orientation to community prestige norms as the main driving force in women's, as opposed to men's, linguistic behavior. This led them to see women as overwhelmingly conservative, as they showed men leading in most change. Furthermore, women in experiment tended to over-report their use of prestige forms and men tended to underreport theirs. Therefore it is believed that women and men respond to opposed sets of norms: women to overt, standard-language prestige norms and men to convert, vernacular prestige norms. Overt prestige attaches to refined qualities, as associated with the cosmopolitan marketplace and its standard language, whereas covert prestige attaches to masculine, rough and tough qualities.

Based on multiple patterns of gender, class, and age differences Labov (1984) argued that women lag in using variants that are stigmatized (позорные) within the larger community. Women's behavior in these cases is driven by global prestige norms. At the same time, women lead in changes that are still sufficiently limited to the neighborhood and local community to carry local prestige.

Two things follow from the specialization of gender roles, which may apply also to other kinds of differences such as ethnicity.

1. Men perceive their social status in relation to other men, whereas women largely perceive their social status in relation to other women. Thus, differentiation on the basis of gender might well be sought within sex groups.

2. Men and women compete to establish their social status in different ways, as dictated by the constraints placed on their sex for achieving status. This is particularly clear where gender roles are separate, and in fact when people do compete in the domain of the other sex.

Since to have personal influence without power requires moral authority, women's influence depends primarily on the creation and elaboration of an image of the whole self as worthy authority. Whereas men can justify and define their status on the basis of their accomplishments, possessions, or institutional status, women must justify and define theirs on the basis of their overall character.

When social scientists say that women are more status-conscious than men, and when sociolinguists pick this up in explaining sex differences in speech, they are stumbling on the fact that, deprived of power, women must satisfy themselves with status. It would be more appropriate to say that women are more status-bound than men. An important part of the explanation for women's innovative and conservative language patterns lies, therefore, in their need to assert their membership in all of the communities in which they participate, since it is their speech authority, rather than their power in that community, that assures their membership.

For similar reasons, it is common to confuse femininity and masculinity with gender, and perhaps nowhere is the link between gender and power clearer. Femininity is a culturally defined form of mitigation or denial of power, whereas masculinity is the affirmation of power.In Western society, this is perhaps most clearly illustrated in the greater emphasis on femininity in the south, where regional economic history has made women housewives and denied them economic power to a greater degree than it has in the industrial north.

Given that there are linguistic variables in a speech community, which are involved in co-variation with social class (higher-class forms being more statusful or 'correct' than lower-class forms), then there are social pressures on speakers to acquire prestige or to appear 'correct' by employing the higher-class forms. Other things being equal, however, it is probably true to say that these pressures will tend to be stronger on women. On the other hand, there will also be pressure to using less prestigious non-standard variants as a signal of group solidarity and personal identity. These pressures, however, will tend to be stronger on men than on women, because of concepts of masculinity which are current in our society.

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