2. IDENTITIES IN SPEECH
• People will have attitudes towards women’s and men’s speech that are
consequential for evaluation of speakers, on the other hand, speech
cues are thought to trigger attributions about the gender identity of the
speaker (that is, how masculine or feminine they are). (Weatherall-2002)
• In general, men’s speech was seen as logical, concise and dealing with
important topics, whereas women’s speech was rated as
emotional, flowery, confused and wordy. (Kramer-1978)
• Cutler and Scott (1990) researched that the dialogue between man and
woman, the woman was judged to be talking more than man. When the
members of the same gender performed the dialogue, then each
speaker was judged as contributing to the conversation equally.
• Lawrence et al. (1990) concluded that impact of gender difference in
speech styles and gender stereotypes may be fluctuating and transitory
in nature.
3. SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY
• According to social identity theory, a person’s sense of who the are is
comprised of aspect of the self deriving from themselves as an
individual and those that arise out of their membership of the social
group. (Weatherall-2002)
• Williams and Giles (1978) suggested that prior to the women’s liberation
movement of the 1960s to 70s, women had largely accepted their
secondary status in society.
• According to Williams and Giles (1978), another strategy that members
of low-status group might use to improve their social identity was to
create new dimensions for comparison with other group.
4. SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY
• Coates (1986) suggested that, in term of gender and language, an
assimilation strategy was a widespread identity maintenance tactic
being used by women to enhance their social identity.
• The heterogeneous nature of what it means to be a woman or to be a
man is also problem for research based on essentialist and realist
assumption about gender identity and its relationship to language.
Despite the considerable problems with social identity theory for
understanding women’s identities, it continues to be used, particularly
in sociolinguistics, as a frame-work for understanding the relationship
between identity and language. (Weatheall-2002)
5. IDENTITY AND LINGUISTIC VARIATION
• In a study of dialect variation in Norwich, people who were categorized
as middle middle class (MMC) used more tokens of the “-ing” variant the
lower middle class (LMC), who used more than the upper working class
(UWC), who used more that the middle working class (MWC). The lower
working class (LWC) used the “ing” variant least frequently. (Trudgill1972)
• One explanation for women’s more standard speech was similar to that
given for the stratification of phonological variables by social class. It
was suggested that women are mire status-conscious than men because
their social status is more precarious then men’s.
6. SPEECH COMMUNITIES
• Social network relatively ‘open’ or ‘closed’ . In closed social
network, people all know each other, whereas in a more open network
an individual’s personal contacts tend not to know each other.
• The social network or speech community explanation does not rely on
stereotyped ideas about what role women play in society.
• The speech community explanation of gender differences in
phonological variation was a development because it considered the
influence of social contact on speech, but it too has been the subject of
feminist critique. (Bucholtz et al-1999).
• One problem with speech community explanatory framework is that
gender identity is effectively reduced to a position within a social
structure. Being a ‘woman’ or being a ‘man’ is treated as social address.
(Weatherall-2002)
7. COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE (COFP)
• Eckert and McConnell-Ginert (1992) suggested that the notion of
communities of practice (CofP) be used instead of speech communities
in order to avoid treating social identity as fixed and gender as a
homogenous identity category.
• For them, a Cofp framework is a constructionist approach to the
relationship between language and identity. They describe gendered
practices as constructing members of a community ‘as’ women or ‘as’
men, and argue that this construction also involves constructing
relations between and within each sex.
