Style, Gender and

Social Class

4.1. General Characteristics of Style

4.2. Accommodation and Audience Design
4.3. Registers and Domains
4.4. Slang and Solidarity
4.5. Language and Gender
4.6. Social Stratification
Questions for Discussion

4.1. General Characteristics of

Style

One of the most analysed areas where the use

of language is determined by the situation is
the formality scale. Writers (especially in
language teaching) have often used the term
'register' to refer to formal/informal style,
although this definition is becoming outdated.
Linguistics textbooks may use the term tenor
instead, but increasingly prefer the term
'style' we characterise styles as varieties
of language viewed from the point of view of
formality while defining registers more
narrowly as specialist language use related to
a particular activity, such as academic jargon.

All people, regardless of what dialect they

speak, control a range of speech styles.
Depending on who we are talking to, and where
we are, and so forth, we use different styles of
speech. This is called style shifting. We do not
use the same style when talking to our friends,
parents, professors. We tend to be casual with
friends, more formal but still familiar with
parents, and most formal (sometimes even stiff)
with professors. The commonly accepted
explanation for this stylistic variation is the care
that speakers and writers take with their
expression.
Formality
increases
between
participants when the social distance is greater.
Informality (solidarity) increases when the social
distance is little between participants. The more
formal the situation is the more attention we
pay to our language and so the more likely we
are to conform to the educated norms of our

Social status depends on a number of factors

such as social rank, wealth, age, gender and so
on; therefore, the person with the higher social
status has the choice of using formality or
informality (solidarity) when addressing other
persons of lower social status. But the person
with the lower social status uses only formality
when addressing a person of higher social
status. Attention and care are a good
explanation as far as it goes, but it leaves open
the question of where the norms come from,
and it does not deal with the possibility of
conscious choice of a less or more formal style.
One explanation for these cases is the idea of
audience design the influence of the
audience (listeners) on a speaker's style, for
example: the same news is read differently by
newsreaders on different radio stations during
the same day, therefore producing different

A speaker who can control more than one

variety chooses a level of speech
according to the audience he or she is
addressing to. We might consciously
choose an informal style when speaking
to strangers in order to seem friendly.
Related
to
this
is
unconscious
accommodation, i.e. we automatically
adjust our speech to be more like that of
our
interlocutor.
Both
of
these
approaches offer some idea of the
importance of language in establishing
social relations and representing a
speakers sense of identity.

It should be mentioned here that this recognition of

stylistic accommodation as being appropriate to
specific social situations is in opposition to
normativism, the approach taken by purists who
claim that there is one correct version and that all
varieties
are
incorrect
and
bad,
and
prescriptivism, which is the tendency to consider
one variety of a language as innately more
valuable than other varieties, and that this variety
should be considered as the correct one by the
whole speech community. When Websters
dictionary in its fourth edition introduced stylistic
labelling and listed such informal usages as aint,
there were many who criticised its admitting the
barbarians into the gates of pure English.

There are several features which mark the distinction between

the formal style from the informal style.
In the formal style:
a) inanimate nouns (a noun which indicates a place, thing, or
idea that is non-living, such as the words "rock," "house," and
"love") will be used predominantly as subjects of a sentence;
b) passive structures will be used predominantly;
c) more verbal nouns (nouns formed as an inflection of a verb
and partly sharing its constructions, such as smoking) will be
used;
d) more words of Latin origin will be used.
In the informal style:
a) animate nouns (a noun which refers to a person, animal, or
other creature), especially those denoting humans, will be used
predominantly as subjects of a sentence; .
b) active structures will be used predominantly;
c) verb structures (where a choice is possible) instead of verbal
nouns will be used;
b) more words of Germanic origin will be used .

1. Please await instructions before

dispatching items.
Please wait for instructions before
sending items off.
Don't send anything off until you're told
to do so.
2. Essential measures should be
undertaken at the earliest opportunity.
One should undertake any necessary
measures at the earliest opportunity.
You should do whatever you have to as
soon as you can.

The formal language does not include

contractions, slang, or humour. It is often
technical. Sentence structure includes lengthy
sentences with complex subordination, long
verb phrases, and the expletive pronouns it
and there for subjects. Since the information
content of formal, technical, or legal
documents is high, both readers and writers
expect the reading pace to be slower than in
informal writing. Formal style is appropriate for
official documents, computer documentation,
scholarly articles and books, technical reports,
or
letters
with
a
negative
message.

4.2.
Accommodation
and
Audience
Design

People tend to talk like the people they talk to most

of the time. The dialects of physically isolated
localities are different from the dialects of
neighbouring localities, and even more different from
the dialects of more distant localities. Similarly, the
social isolation of specific groups explains why their
dialects remain relatively unaffected by those of
other groups. These phenomena can be explained by
the audience design (when the speaker chooses the
level of speech according to the audience he or she
is addressing to). By selecting a style appropriate to
a particular audience, the speaker is identifying
himself or herself with audience. One speaks most
like the people with whom one associates, but one
may also choose to allow his or her speech to move
in the direction of another group.

In conversations between people with differing

pronunciations, it has been noticed that there is a
common tendency for the pronunciation of the two
to move slightly closer together. This process,
called accommodation, explains the way that a
person who moves to a new part of a country
gradually modifies his or her speech in the
direction of the new norm. The change will not be
immediately obvious to the speaker or listener. But
if we record a conversation between two speakers
of differing varieties, we find that the percentage
of use of some features often is the same. It is
common to find that ones choice of vocabulary,
grammatical forms and even pronunciation moves
towards that of ones interlocutor.

The possibility of using variations in

language to identify group membership
can have harmful effect when it is
associated with prejudice. E.g., telephone
operators at car factories in Detroit were
trained to recognise Afro-Americans by
their speech and to say there were no
jobs available. So, the more stratified a
society is, the more likely it is that
speaking a prestigious variety will be
rewarded, and that speaking a nonstandard variety will lead to prejudicial
treatment.

4.3. Registers and

Domains

Dialect concerns variations that are located regionally

or socially. Style refers to differences in degree of
formality. A third set of variations concerns the special
variety - register especially marked by a special set
of vocabulary associated with a profession or
occupation or other defined social group and forming
part of its in-group variety. People with a particular
occupation develop new terms for new concepts.
Phrases like hacking and surfing the net have no
obvious meaning to those who are not keeping up
with the computer revolution. A specialized language
serves not just to label new and needed concepts, but
also to establish bonds between members of the ingroup and make boundaries for outsiders. If you cant
understand my jargon, you dont belong to my group.

Register describes an occupational style using

specialized or technical jargon; it also describes the
language of groups of people with common interests
or jobs, or the language used in situations associated
with such groups, such as the language of doctors,
engineers, journals, legalese, etc. The term was first
used by the linguist Thomas Bertram Reid in 1956,
and brought into general currency in the 1960s by a
group of linguists who wanted to distinguish between
variations in language according to the user (defined
by variables such as social background, geography,
sex and age), and variations according to use in the
sense that each speaker has a range of varieties and
chooses between them at different times. The focus is
on the way language is used in particular situations.

A useful way of classifying social

situations is to analyse them into three
defining characteristics place, role relationship, topic. Together, these make
up a set of typical domains. The term
was popularised by the American
sociolinguist Joshua Fishman and it
involves typical interactions between
typical participants in typical settings
about a typical topic. Domains are
named usually for a place or an activity
in it. Examples of these domains are
family, friendship, religion, education and
employment.

One common domain is home. Home, then, is the

place. The role relationships associated with home
include family members and visitors. There is a
suitable set of topics such as activities of the family,
news about family members, the meals, and the
household. A particular variety of language is
appropriate to the domain. In a multilingual
community, different languages may well be
considered appropriate for different domains. In a
multilingual family, different role relationships might
involve different language choice. E.g., husband and
wife might use one language speaking to each other,
but father and children might use another. Another
common domain is work. The place might be a factory
or an office or a store. The role relationships include
a boss, a worker, a colleague, a customer, and a
client. The topics are work-related.

As with other types of language

variation, we tend to find register
continuums
rather
than
discrete
varieties there is an endless number of
registers we could identify, with no clear
boundaries to where each one starts and
ends. Discourse categorisation is a
complex problem, and even in the
general definition of register given
above (language variation defined by use
not user), there are cases where other
kinds of language variation, such as
regional
or
age
dialect,
overlap.

4.4.
Slang
Solidarity

and

The
importance
of
language
in
establishing social identity is also shown
in the case of slang as a special kind of
intimate or in-group speech or jargon
marked by its rejection of formal rules, its
comparative freshness and its common
ephemerality, and its marked use to
claim solidarity. It is a dynamic variety of
language that is used to show solidarity
and in-group membership. Slang is also
one of the most important 'mechanisms'
or devices for showing social awareness.
This variety of language often occurs
around 'taboo' subjects such as sex,
drugs, alcohol, homosexuality, etc.

Slang is a type of sociolect aimed at

excluding certain people from the
conversation. It functions as a way to
recognize members of the same group,
and to differentiate that group from the
society at large. This means that a
certain group of people, for example of
teenagers, feel the need to alienate their
parents and use language that the older
generation will not understand. In this
case, the in-group would be the
teenagers, and the out-group is the
parents. The in-group has 'shared
knowledge' and similar expectations, and
amongst the members they all possess
the in-group vocabulary.

Slang terms are often particular to a

certain subculture, such as drug users,
skateboarders and musicians; therefore,
there is not just one slang, but many
varieties or dialects - of slang. Different
social groups in different times have
developed their own slang. Slang must
constantly
renew
its
process
of
expression,
and
specifically
its
vocabulary, so that those not part of the
group will remain unable to understand
the slang. Slang thus serves social
functions, setting and proclaiming social
boundaries and permitting speakers to
claim or assert membership of identity or
solidarity groups.

Slang expressions often embody attitudes and values

of group members thus contributing to a sense of
group identity and conveying information about the
speakers background. If the subculture has enough
contact with the mainstream culture, its figures of
speech become slang expressions known to the whole
society (cool aloof, stylish, Mr Charley a white
man, the Man the law, Uncle Tom a meek black). A
slang expression may become accepted as standard
speech, either in its original slang meaning (bus from
omnibus) or with an altered meaning (jazz, which
originally had sexual connotations). Some expressions
have persisted for centuries as slang (booze
alcoholic beverage). Television and literature have
turned criminal cant (vocabulary) into slang (five
grand
for
$5000).

4.5.
Language
Gender

and

A variety of speech (or sociolect) associated

with a particular gender is sometimes called a
genderlect. Men and women, on average, tend
to use slightly different language styles. These
differences tend to be quantitative rather than
qualitative. The study of gender and language in
sociolinguistics and gender studies is often said
to have begun with Robin Lakoff's 1975 book,
Language and Woman's Place. The researcher
claimed that the style of language served to
maintain women's (inferior) role in society;
consequently, gender differences in language
reflected a power difference. These perspectives
identify the language style of men as normative,
implying that women's style is inferior.

More recently, Deborah Tannen has

compared gender differences in language
as more similar to 'cultural' differences.
Comparing conversational goals, she
argued that men have a report style,
aiming
to
communicate
factual
information, whereas women have a
rapport style, more concerned with
building and maintaining relationships.

Communication styles are always a

product of context, and as such, gender
differences tend to be most pronounced
in single-gender groups. One explanation
for this is that people accommodate their
language towards the style of the person
they are interacting with. Thus, in a
mixed-gender group, gender differences
tend to be less pronounced. A similarly
important observation is that this
accommodation is usually towards the
language style, not the gender of the
person.

Of the social causes of gender differentiation in

speech style, one of the most critical appears to
be level of education. In all studies, it has been
shown that the greater the disparities between
educational opportunities for boys and girls, the
greater the differences between male and
female speech. Studies of differences between
the speech of Arab men and women provide
evidence that the major cause of difference is
educational. In one village a greater difference
between male and female speech was found in
the half where girls had less education than boys
than in the half where both boys and girls had
more or less equal opportunity for schooling.

Studies of gender differences have shown the

power of stereotyping. A businessman is taken
more seriously than a businesswoman; womens
status is lowered by references to the girls. In
Hebrew, only the lower ranks in the army have
feminine forms. The use of generic masculine
(Everyone should bring his book; we need to
employ the best man available), however wellmeaning and neutral the speakers intention
may be, reinforces the secondary status of
women in many social groups. With the growth
of social awareness in this area, there have been
many attempts to overcome this prejudicial use
of
language.

There are a number of dimensions according to

which conclusions related to the difference
between mens and womens speech have been
drawn.
Men and women differ in their use of questions
in conversations. For men, a question is usually
a genuine request for information whereas with
women it can often be a rhetorical means of
engaging
the
others
conversational
contribution or of acquiring attention from
others conversationally involved, techniques
associated with a collaborative approach to
language use. Women use tag questions more
frequently (The weather is nice today, isnt it?).

Female
linguistic
behaviour
characteristically encompasses a desire
to take turns in conversation with others,
which is opposed to mens tendency
towards centring on their own point or
remaining silent when presented with
such implicit offers of conversational
turn-taking as are provided by hedges
such as "y know" and "isnt it".
Males tend to change subject more
frequently than females. This difference
may well be at the root of the conception
that women chatter and talk too much,
and may still trigger the same thinking in
some males. In this way, lowered
estimation of women may arise.

Female tendencies toward self-disclosure,

i.e.
sharing
their
problems
and
experiences with others, often to offer
sympathy contrasts with male tendencies
to non-self-disclosure and professing
advice when confronted with anothers
problems. Women tend to use empty
adjectives (adorable, charming, divine,
nice). They also use intensifiers more
frequently than men (I feel so happy).

Men tend to be more verbally aggressive in

conversing, frequently using threats, profanities,
yelling and name-calling. Womens speech is more
polite than that of men. It appears that women attach
more weight than men do to the importance of
listening in conversation, with its connotations of
power to the listener as confidant of the speaker. Men,
however, interrupt far more frequently with nonrelated topics, especially in the mixed sex setting and,
far from rendering a female speaker's responses
minimal, are apt to greet her conversational spotlights
with silence. All of this suggests that men see
conversation as a means by which to draw attention
to themselves, either by interruption or by
questionably undermining what the woman has to say
by
non-paralinguistic
response.

Robin Lakoff also added the following

peculiarities typical of womens speech:
- the extensive use of lexical hedges or fillers
(you know, sort of, well, you see);
- rising intonation on declaratives (it's really
good);
- the precise use of colour terms (magenta,
aquamarine);
- hypercorrect grammar (consistent use of
standard verb forms);
- super-polite forms (indirect requests,
euphemism);
- avoidance of strong swear words (fudge, my
goodness) .

Sociolinguists try to make the connection between our

society and our language in a way that suggests that
women talk less because it has not always been as
culturally acceptable as it has been for men. Men have
tended to take on a more dominant role not only in the
household, but also in the business world. This everchanging concept is becoming less applicable in our
society; however, the trend is still prominent in some
societies across the world. It is more acceptable for a
man to be talkative, carry on long conversation, or give a
long wordy speech, however it is less acceptable for a
women to do so. It has been more of a historical trend for
men to have more rights to talk. However, it is common
for men to be more silent in situations that require them
to express emotion. Since childhood, they have been told
to "keep their cool" and "remain calm, be a man."

4.6.
Stratification

Social

Social class is a central concept in sociolinguistic

research. Class and occupation are among the most
important linguistic markers found in society.
One of the fundamental findings of sociolinguistics,
which has been hard to disprove, is that class and
language variety are related. The working class
tends to speak less standard language. The lower,
middle, and upper middle class will in turn speak
closer to the standard. However, the upper class,
even members of the upper middle class, may
often speak 'less' standard than the middle class.
This is because not only class, but also class
aspirations,
are
important.

Studies, such as those by William Labov

in the 1960s, have shown that social
aspirations influence speech patterns.
This is also true of class aspirations. In
the process of wishing to be associated
with a certain class (usually the upper
class and upper middle class) people who
are moving in that direction socioeconomically will adjust their speech
patterns to sound like them. However,
not being native upper class speakers,
they hypercorrect, and end up speaking
'more' standard than those whom they
are trying to imitate. The same is true for
individuals moving down in socioeconomic status.

Social stratification refers to any

hierarchical ordering of groups within a
society, especially in terms of power,
wealth and status. In the industrialised
societies of the West, this takes the form
of stratification into social classes, and
gives rise linguistically to social-class
dialects.

In the class societies of the English-speaking world

the social situation is much more fluid, and the
linguistic situation is more complex. Social classes
are not clearly defined entities but simply
aggregates of people with similar social and
economic
characteristics;
social
mobility,
movement up and down the social hierarchy, is
perfectly possible. The more heterogeneous
(consisting of parts or things that are very different
from each other) a society is, the more
heterogeneous is its language. For many years, the
linguists reaction to this complexity was generally
to ignore it in two different ways. Many linguists
concentrated their studies on the idiolect an
individual persons acquisition of a language, the
way an individual speaks.

Dialectologists, on the other hand,

concentrated on the speech of rural
informants, and in particular on that of
people with little education in small
isolated villages. Later, they began to
incorporate
social
as
well
as
geographical information into their
dialect surveys. For this reason, works
with titles like The Speech of New York
City and The Pronunciation of English in
San Francisco began to appear. But
urban studies presented a further
problem how could a linguist describe
the speech of such big cities? This
phenomenon is what W. Labov called the
observers paradox.

The methods developed by W. Labov have proved

to be very significant for the study of social-class
dialects and accents. The speech of single speakers
(their idiolects) may differ considerably from that of
other speakers like him. The speech of most New
Yorkers appeared to vary in a completely random
and unpredictable manner. Linguists have called
this free variation. W. Labov showed, however, that
this variation is not free; it was determined by
extra-linguistic factors in quite a predictable way. If
speakers were of a certain social class, age, sex,
they would use one or other variant a definite per
cent of time, on average, in a given situation. The
idiolect might appear random, but the speech
community
was
quite
predictable.

In Great Britain the situation is somewhat

simplified. Conservative, and, in particular, rural
dialects old-fashioned varieties associated with
groups lowest in the social hierarchy change
gradually as one moves across the countryside.
Speakers of the highest social class employ the
dialect called Standard English, which is only very
slightly different in different parts of the country.
But regional variation in nonstandard English
varieties is much greater. All the following
statements are possible:
Hes a man who likes his beer.
Hes a man that likes his beer.
Hes a man at likes his beer.
Hes a man what likes his beer.

If we are to obtain a correct picture of the

relationship between language and social
stratification, we must measure both
linguistic and social phenomena so that
we can correlate the two accurately. As
far as social class is concerned this can
be done relatively easily by the
sociological
method
of
assigning
individuals a numerical index score on
the basis of their occupational, income,
educational and other characteristics,
and the grouping them together with
others with similar indexes. Measuring
language is more difficult.

The solution developed by W. Labov is to take

linguistic features which are known and which are
easily countable in some way. For instance, in two
separate surveys, one in Detroit, the USA, and one
in Norwich, England, the same grammatical
feature appeared to be suitable in this way. In
Standard English the third-person present-tense
singular form of verbs has an affix, orthographic
s, which distinguishes it from other persons. In
East Anglia, the area of England in which Norwich
is situated, and in Detroit this s is often not
present. This means that the following samples
may occur in speech:
She like him very much.
He dont know a lot.

Since Standard English has the s, and since

the standard variety is generally associated
with higher social groups, it was suspected
that there might be a direct correlation
between social-class position and usage of
s. To investigate this possibility was
relatively easy, since there was no difficulty
in measuring this linguistic feature: it was
simply a matter of listening to taperecordings made during the surveys and
counting the number of times a speaker did
or did not use s. As a result, it has been
proved that there is a direct correlation
between social class and the usage of s..

All the Norwich informants who belong to

the middle middle class use the presenttense singular form s, two informants
who belong to the lower middle class
omit this affix, and all the informants who
belong to the lower working class never
use s as a marker of present-tense
singular form. The same conclusion has
been reached with regard to the
informants
from
Detroit.
So,
the
relationship between language and social
class is obvious

The results of this research are also

indicative of social-class dialects. Even
though we are concentrating on only one
feature rather than on a variety as a
whole, it is still apparent that, like
regional dialects, social-class dialects are
not distinct entities. They merge into
each other to form a continuum. This
research gives us a great deal of
information about the processes involved
in linguistic change involving human
languages.