SOCIOLINGUISTICS - GENDER

Lecturer: Desi Sri Astuti, M.Pd

Created by:
GROUP 10

Gustian (521300178)
Muhammad Harist (521300180)
Novita Sari Dewi (521300217)

Semester V, Class A afternoon

INSTITUT KEGURUAN DAN ILMU PENDIDIKAN

PERSATUAN GURU REPUBLIK INDONESIA

(IKIP-PGRI PONTIANAK)

2015
 PREFACE

Praise is always given to God Almighty for the blessings of his grace and
that we were given the opportunity to be able to finish a working paper which is
going to discuss around a branch of linguistics or sociology, specifically,
Sociolinguistics.

The paper is done in the order to strengthen the knowledge around

sociolinguistics. The discussion in this paper is mainly provided based on the
book Introducing Sociolinguistics written by Miriam Meyerhoff which is
consist of twelve chapters. Besides, this working paper is going to focus only for
Chapter 10 while the rest of the other chapters are going to be discussed in to the
other paper works.

The compilers also thanked to Mrs. Desi Sri Astuti as the sepurvior of
Sociolinguistic subject who has given direction and help in the order to do and to
complete this paper.

Hopefully, this paper can benefit for whoever read it and give a broader
insight about the topic. Nonetheless, this paper is far from perfect that useful
suggestions are perfectly accepted for the paper to be better. Thank you.

Author

23rd of September 2014

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 Table of Content

page

PREFACE ...................................................................................................... i

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................... iii

1.1. Background of the paper .................................................................... iii

1.2. The formulation of the Problem ......................................................... iii
1.3. The purpose of the paper .................................................................... iv

CHAPTER II
DISCUSSION ................................................................................................ 1

2.1. Sex and Gender .................................................................................. 2

2.2. Exclusive Gender Differences ............................................................ 4
2.3. Preferential Gender Differences ......................................................... 5
2.4. The Principles of Gender .................................................................... 5

CHAPTER III
CONCLUSION .............................................................................................. 10

3.1. Conclusion ........................................................................................ 10

3.2. Suggestion ......................................................................................... 10

BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................... 11

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 CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

A. BACKGROUND

Sociolinguistics is an important branch of Linguistic the study of

language. Many perspectives can be found from sociolinguists in defining
what sociolinguistics is. However, one essential point Sociolinguists might
concern that sociolinguistic will be interested when it is about the variety
of language.

When communicating, human can use variety of languages

depending on what kind of biological category they are. Language can be
varied in many different variables. As for example is gender related
variable. The distinctions between the speech of females and males do
exists in different sorts of societies, why both of roles can sound
differently in a conversation?, It has been known that there is specifically
languages that only refer to particular sex category in particular society.
Indeed, there will be some reasons of how this sort of phenomenon can be
emerged.

Complex matters can be widely found in sociolinguistics that this

paper is going to account for one of them. Part of Sociolinguistics concern
namely Gender will be the main topic in this paper which is taken from
Chapter 10 of book called introducing Sociolinguistic.

B. THE FORMULATION OF THE PROBLEM

a. What is Gender related to language about in Sociolinguistics?
b. What is the distinction between exclusive and preferential gender?
c. What is the principal of gender?

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C. THE PURPOSE OF THE PROBLEM
a. To account for what Gender and language will be around in
Sociolinguistics
b. To know the distinction between exclusive gender and preferential
gender
c. To know the principle of gender

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 CHAPTER II
DISCUSSION

Sociolinguistic is a very board field where it can be used to

describe many different ways of studying language. Generally,
sociolinguistic is a field where it can be identified how a language can
be different in different society and how an individual can use different
language in different context whether it is related with the individuals
sex, gender, age or society. Sociolinguistics or the study of language in
society is concerned with explaining all the different forms of linguistic
variation which occur in every-day discourse and with the factors which
determine this variation.

A. SEX AND GENDER

In the universe, human beings are differentiated as males and

females in terms of sex category. However, sociolinguistic has been
introduced a term called gender and that is quite essential part of
Sociolinguistics

Differentiating sex and gender has been widely introduced in lot of

explanation of sociolinguistics. Sex is a biological category. It refers to
biological differences; chromosomes, hormonal profiles, internal and
external sex organs. That is you can obviously determine the people
whether they are males or females by looking at their type of sex. In
addition, the role of both sexes (males and females) has been assigned
at birth.

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 In the other hand, Gender is social and cultural category. It is a
social property: something acquired or constructed through your
relationships with others and through an individuals adherence to
certain cultural norms and proscriptions. Miriam Meyerhoff (2006:
201) defines gender as not grammatical gender (i.e., different classes
of noun that may be called masculine, feminine). Not sex of
speaker which (largely) reflects biological or physiological differences
between people. Moreover, Coates (2004: 4) tries to differentiate the
distinction of terms between sex and gender where the sex is a term
used to differentiate biological differences and gender is a term to
depicted social category based on sex.

Sociolinguistics pays more attention towards gender as its interest

where here will be more variation of language that related to and it will
deeply to be explained as the matter of language and gender. The next
following explanations will account for kind kinds of gender
difference. They are Exclusive Gender Difference and Referential
Gender Difference.

B. EXCLUSIVE GENDER DIFFERENCES

The use of Exclusive Gender is rather rare and only found or seen
in particular societies. There would be sort of phenomenon where to
speak the variety of the other gender is forbidden for a woman or a
man. Gender Exclusive Differentiation means different speech
varieties used by men and women in few societies. That is used by
only one gender, by either males or females.

Miriam Meyerhoff (2006: 201) says exclusive gender features are

those which are only used by (or to) speakers of particular sex. For
instance, the phrase:

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 My Auntie Sarah

The phrase above tells to us that the person you are referring to is
female. Similarly, the terms grandson and niece respectively tell you
the referents are male and female.

Some of the earliest work on gender differences in language

focused on cases where there were different particles or suffixes that
appeared to only be used by men or only by women. Such differences
would constitute sex exclusive norms, and non-native speakers
sometimes perceived the differences to be so marked and so
fundamental that it was said that the societies had separate languages
for women and men.

Some examples of the kinds of differences that are supposed to be

reliable indexes of the speakers sex are shown in Table 10.1. There
are examples from some Native American languages, an Australian
language, and from Japanese.

Table 1 Some linguistic features indexing the speakers sex,

(Languages identified by family and location of majority of
speakers in Ethnologue, accessed December 2004.)

Language Speaker Form Gloss

Yana Male yaa-na person

(extinct Hokan language,
northern California, Everyone else yaa person
USA)
Koastati Male iisks you are saying
(Muskogean language,
Louisiana and Texas, Female iisk you are saying
USA)

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Yanyuwa Child buyuka-la at/with the fire
(Pama-Nyungan,
Northern Territory and Male ji-buyuka-la at/with the fire

Queensland, Australia)
Female ki-buyuka-la at/with the fire

Japanese Male boku I

(Japanese, Japan) Female atashi I

As you can see, sex-exclusive distinctions occur in many different

parts of the grammar and occur in many kinds of phrase: noun phrases
and pronouns like person or I; verb phrases like you are saying;
and prepositional phrases such as at the fire

C. PREFERENTIAL GENDER DIFFERENCES

Preferential gender differences are noticed more in the language

than exclusive gender differences. It introduces the distinctive
language use between females and males which vary in the language
and it can be possibly influenced by either sex or societies. While
Exclusive Gender features are applied specifically by only one gender,
Preferential Gender Differences can be used by both of sexes but are
preferred by one of them.

The phenomenon regarding with preferential gender differences are

quite diverse. It is commonly related with the variety of lexical, the
variation of pitch, the standard use of language and in a conversation
between females and males.

In terms lexical variations, the distinction between females and

males can be seen in the area of morphology or vocabulary. For
instance, females tend to use sorts of color names a lot which mostly

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men do not, such as, aquamarine, magenta, rose, paisley, burgundy,
chartreuse, and crimson. Whereas males prefer much more around
men activities like hunting, car or sport.

In term of sexual category, it has been recognized the distinction

between females and males pitch of speech. That is females pitch
considered higher than males pitch. It is characteristically around 100-
400 vs. 80-200 cycles-per-second. It is simply because of the size of
vocal tract which males has shorter than females. However, Caroline
henton, a Phonetician, believes that is not only because of the
physiological reason but also due to some social factor occurred along
the acquisition period or during puberty or the result of belief about
how females and males should sound when they speak.

The variety also can be seen in terms on the use of standard

language. Lot of studies around Sociolinguistic related-gender had
been revealed that females use more prestige language (standardized
language) frequently than males. One of finding tells that there are two
realization variants of (ing). The first is the standard one [in] and the
second one is non-standard realization [i?]. For example, the
pronunciation of walking can be different according to different
speakers, like [walkin] or [walki?]. It has been found that there is a
correlation between the two realizations of (ing) towards the factors
such as, socio-economic status and the gender of the speakers. Female
speakers of higher socio-economic status mostly tend to use the
realization of [i?] which is the more standard one.

Another variety of difference between females and males can be

emerged in their conversational style. It has been said that females are
likely to involved tag question during the conversation. Females tend
to use the minimal response like mm hmm, Is that so?, really?, in

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 the process of conversational back-channeling to keep the conversation
going. As for males, they like to interrupt the speech of others,
particularly females speech, take a longer turn in conversation while
females usually tend to operate the strategy of silent protest in this kind
of case.

D. PRINCIPLES OF GENDER

Sociolinguistics studies have observed that the existence of variety

of language that differentiated women and men. It has been said men
use these forms in a language and women use those forms, it is
important to review some of the generalizations that did emerge from
the first social dialect studies. Ultimately, these are the three
generalizations about gender and language variation and there exist
three main principles introduced by William Labov (1990, 2001).

1. Principle I. Stable sociolinguistic variables: women use the

standard more than men

A number of studies have observed that the generalizations for

stable linguistic variables women seem to be using more standard
language than men.

For stable sociolinguistic variables (stable variables, that is,

linguistic variables not involved in change) , such as the (ing)
variable, or the (th) and (dh) variables (the alternation between an
initial fricative or stop in words like thin and this), or negative
concord (I didnt do nothing~anything), it has often been noted
that women use more of the standard forms than men do overall:

(ing) variable: women [i] > men [i]

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 (dh) variable: women [] > men []
negative concord: women I didnt do anything > men

This generalization is illustrated in Figure 10.1 which shows the

distribution of the alveolar variant [in] in Trudgills survey of Norwich
English. The data for working-class speakers show that in all three
speech styles, women use more of the [i] variant and men use more of
the [in] variant. This pattern largely holds for the middle-class speakers
as well, even though their overall rate of [i] is much higher than it is
for the working class. (Trudgill notes that in casual speech, where the
frequency of [i] is greater among male speakers than among female
speakers is probably due to the very small number of tokens he
happened to elicit from casual conversation with middle-class men.)
The tendency for women to use more of the standard with stable
variables has been interpreted in various ways. Very often it is seen as

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indicating womens greater sensitivity to what is considered standard
and non-standard.

2. Principle Ia. Change in progress above the level of awareness:

women use the standard more than men

Like Principle I, Principle Ia generalizes across variables where

women seem to use more of the standard form than men do. However,
it deals with cases where speakers are consciously aware of a change
in progress, in these cases, women tend to use more of the innovative
and positively evaluated variant than men do

Change from above denotes linguistic change in a speech

community above the level of speakers conscious awareness. That is,
speakers are consciously aware of an ongoing change and they can
comment on this linguistic innovation. One of famous examples of
change from above is the variable (r) studied by William Labov (1996)
in New York City.

The shift to r-ful speech is led overall by higher class speakers and
it is more frequently in careful speaking styles and when respondents
were given tasks like reading aloud. However, Labov also found that
within each social class, (r) use was usually more frequently in the
speech of women than in the speech of men. As a group, working-class
women used more tokens of (r) than working class men did as a group,
although he noted some individual exceptions to the group patterns as
well. In addition to the evidence from style-shifting, it is clear from the
way most New Yorkers talked about [r] presence and absence that
New Yorkers generally prefer or value r-ful speech more highly than r-
less pronunciations.

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3. Principle II. Change in progress below the level of awareness:
women use more of the incoming variant than men

The other kind of change in progress is Change from below

which denotes linguistic change in a speech community below the
level of a speakers conscious awareness. In this case speakers are not
consciously aware of linguistic change in progress in a community.

These are variables where there is little or no clear evidence of

style-shifting. In these cases, women seem to lead men in the use of
the incoming, non-standard variant. Many of the examples of these
kinds of variables involve changes to the vowel system. For instance,
in many varieties of English there is laxing of /i/ and /u/ before /l/. The
laxing means you end up with a merger between [i] and [i] and
between [] and [u] so that still and steel become homophones (i.e.,
they sound the same) and pull and pool become homophones. Work
on this merger by Marianna Di Paolo (1988, cited in Labov 1994) in
Utah and by Guy Bailey and colleagues (1993) in Texas shows that the
laxing of [u] to [] is more advanced in the speech of younger women
than it is in the speech of younger men

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 CHAPTER III
CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION

A. CONCLUSION

Gender has been studied among Sociolinguists as part of

Sociolinguistic. There people realize that language can be
differentiated according to sexual category of the speakers. There will
be a language which is only referred for women as well as for men. It
is not only in the terms of sex category like women and men but also
influenced by the culture, norms or social category where it is related.

B. SUGGESTON

Hopefully, after have a look a broadly insight to what gender

relation towards language commonly is about and as it has been
discussed in this paper, it can give you a few understanding about
Sociolinguistics fields. However, Sociolinguistic is not quite simple to
learn since there are others explanation outside gender that you may
find it out and learn it further so that you can understand more about
Sociolinguistics as whole.

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 Bibliography

Miriam Meyerhoff. (2006). Introducing Sociolinguistics, British

Library Catalouge
Rajend Mesthrie et al. (2000). Introducing Sociolinguistics, Edinburgh
University
Sarah Yelkenac, Language and Sex Difference, University of Mersin
http://www.lingate.8k.com/serap.html
Suzanne Gregoire. (2006). Gender and Language Change.
http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6362-
gregoire.htm
ELLO. English Language and Linguistics Online. William Labov New
York City USA (1996)
http://www.ello.uos.de/field.php/sociolinguistics/Exemplarystud
ylabov

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