n males overall (all males are below 6000Hz), but there are outliers, in particular 5 girls, including all four working-class girls, who cluster within the male range. This demonstrates that the articulation of /s/ is not simply dependent on biological constraints of sex, but can be finely controlled to signal gender and social group membership. Vocabulary 1: Japanese: Vocabulary 1: Japanese men’s women’s
1st person formal watakusi watakusi
plain boku watasi
deprecatory/ ore Ø
2d person formal anata anata
plain kimi anata
deprecatory/ omae Ø
casual kisama Other examples: Lakota, Chukchee… Vocabulary 2: English: Vocabulary 2: English Color terms
Fart, take a dump, drop anchor… Gender-based linguistic differences, part 2: Gender-based linguistic differences, part 2 Traditional variationist differences Change towards std lg led by women: Change towards std lg led by women Spanish dialect of Ucieda has posttonic [u] where Spanish has [o]
Ucieda trabaju : Castilian (= Std) trabajo ‘work’
This vowel has been lowering in Ucieda as an accommodation to the Castilian form.
The height of this vowel distinguishes:
those engaged in agriculture vs industrial sector
those engaged in traditional mountain agriculture vs the more modern dairy farming
Women (most noticeably in agriculture/farming) lead this change.
agricultural life is unattractive to women, who share in the farm work and do the housework too.
For this reason women are quicker than men to leave the farm, and quicker to signal their distance from their current way of life in their speech. Holmquist, Jonathan. 1985. Social correlates of a linguistic variable: A study in a Spanish village. Language in Society 14:191-203. Jocks and Burnouts: Jocks and Burnouts Eckert 1989 study of a suburban high school in Detroit, focusing on two social groups:
jocks: middle class bkgd, establishment, extracurricular activities, school-based social life, intend to leave
burnouts: working class bkgd, local friends, intend to stay, vocational training Eckert, Penelope. 1989. Jocks and burnouts: Social categories and identity in the high school. New York: Teachers College Press. Gender asymmetry by age (Labov): Gender asymmetry by age (Labov) Women lead men in most linguistic changes in progress that have been studied by quantitative methods (Labov 1990).
The figure below shows M and F patterns by age for the devoicing of (j) in calle, llame, etc. in the Spanish of Buenos Aires (Wolf and Jiménez 1979).
Women show higher % devoicing from the outset; males lag behind.
The dotted arrows suggest, moreover, that this is a lag of one generation:
Males 15-24 approximate the values of women 38-55
12 year old males have values in the range of women 24-35. Non-canonical genders: Non-canonical genders Non-canonical genders: Non-canonical genders Intonation
Stereotypically, female speech includes a greater intonation range than male speech (McConnell-Ginet 1983, Henton 1989)
What about non-canonical genders?
Stereotypical lesbian speech includes a narrow pitch range and generally flat intonation patterns (Queen 1997)
Disconfirmed experimentally by Waksler 2001
Schuler 2003: significant correlation between 95% pitch range, speaker orientation, and listener rating Waksler, Rachelle. 2001. Pitch range and women’s sexual orientation. Word 52.1:69-77. Influence of sexual orientation on vowel production: Influence of sexual orientation on vowel production Pierrehumbert et al 2004
Phonetic study of vowel production in gay, lesbian, bisexual (GLB), and heterosexual speakers
Differences in the acoustic characteristics of vowels were found as a function of sexual orientation:
Lesbian and bisexual women produced less fronted /u/ and /a/ than heterosexual women.
Gay men produced a more expanded vowel space than heterosexual men.
However, the vowels of GLB speakers were not generally shifted toward vowel patterns typical of the opposite sex.
These results are inconsistent with the conjecture that innate biological factors have a broadly feminizing influence on the speech of gay men and a broadly masculinizing influence 