Variation in Language and Gender

98 Suzanne Romaine
4 Variation in Language
and Gender
SUZANNE ROMAINE
1
Introduction
This chapter addresses some of the main research methods, trends, and findings
concerning variation in language and gender. Most of the studies examined
here have employed what can be referred to as quantitative variationist meth-
odology (sometimes also called the quantitative paradigm or variation theory)
to reveal and analyze sociolinguistic patterns, that is, correlations between
variable features of the kind usually examined in sociolinguistic studies of
urban speech communities (e.g. postvocalic /r/ in New York City, glottalization
in Glasgow, initial /h/ in Norwich, etc.), and external social factors such as
social class, age, sex, network, and style (see Labov 1972a).
When such large-scale systematic research into sociolinguistic variation
began in the 1960s, its main focus was to illuminate the relationship between
language and social structure more generally, rather than the relationship
between language and gender specifically. However, the category of sex (un-
derstood simply as a binary division between males and females) was often
included as a major social variable and instances of gender variation (or sex
differentiation, as it was generally called) were noted in relation to other socio-
linguistic patterns, particularly, social class and stylistic differentiation.
Because the way in which research questions are formed has a bearing on
the findings, some of the basic methodological assumptions and the historical
context in which the variationist approach emerged are discussed briefly in
section 2. The general findings are the focus of section 3, with special reference
to connections between sex differentiation, social class stratification, and style
shifting. Section 4 discusses some of the explanations for sociolinguistic patterns
involving sex differentiation. The final section examines some of these explana-
tions in the context of some of the problematic methodological assumptions
made in variation studies which may be responsible for the limited explanatory
power of some of the findings.

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Variation in Language and Gender 99
2
Research Methods
Variationist methodology came into prominence in the late 1960s not to
address the issue of language and gender, but primarily to fill perceived gaps
in traditional studies of variability which for the most part were concerned
with regional variation. Dialectologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries concentrated their efforts on documenting the rural dialects which
they believed would soon disappear. A primary concern was to map the geo-
graphical distribution of forms between one region and another. These forms
were most often different words for the same thing, such as dragon fly versus
darning needle, although phonological and grammatical features were also
included. The results often took many years to appear in print and were
most often displayed in linguistic atlases of maps showing the geographical
boundaries between users of different forms (see e.g. Kurath 1949).
Many dialectologists based their surveys almost entirely on the speech of
men, on the assumption that men better preserved the “real” and “purest” forms
of the regional dialects they were interested in collecting. Dialect geographers
usually chose one older man as representative of a particular area, a man
whose social characteristics have been summed up in the acronym NORM, i.e.
non-mobile, older, rural, male (see Chambers and Trudgill 1980). The extent to
which social variables could be or were built into mapping was thus limited.
In addition, most of the linguistic items whose geographical distribution was
mapped were associated with men’s rather than women’s lifestyles and roles,
for example terms for farming implements.
By contrast, sociolinguists turned their attention to the language of cities,
where an increasing proportion of the world’s population lives in modern
times. Labov’s (1966) sociolinguistic study of the speech of New York (and
subsequent ones modeled after it) abandoned the idea that any one person
could be representative of a complex urban area; it relied on speech samples
collected from a random sample of 103 men and women representative of
different social class backgrounds, ethnicities, and age groups. The method
used in New York City to study the linguistic features was to select easily
quantifiable items, especially phonological variables such as postvocalic /r/ in
words such as cart, barn, etc., which was either present or absent. Most of the
variables studied in detail have tended to be phonological, and to a lesser
extent grammatical, although in principle any instance of variation amenable
to quantitative study can be analyzed in similar fashion (see, however, Romaine
1984a, for discussion of some of the problems posed by syntactic variation). By
counting variants of different kinds in tape-recorded interviews and comparing
their incidence across different groups of speakers, the replication of a number
of sociolinguistic patterns across many communities permits some generaliza-
tions about the relationship between linguistic variables and society.
Analysis of certain key variable speech forms showed that when variation in
the speech of and between individuals was viewed against the background of

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100 Suzanne Romaine
the community as a whole, it was not random, but rather conditioned by
social factors such as social class, age, sex, and style in predictable ways. Thus,
while idiolects (or the speech of individuals) considered in isolation might
seem randomly variable, the speech community as a whole behaved regularly.
Using these methods, one could predict, for example, that a person of a par-
ticular social class, age, sex, etc. would pronounce postvocalic /r/ a certain
percentage of the time in certain situations.
3
Findings: Examination of Some
Sociolinguistic Patterns of Social
Class, Style, and Sex Differentiation
Of the principal social dimensions sociolinguists have been concerned with
(i.e. social class, age, sex, style, and network) social class has probably been the
most researched. Moreover, social class differentiation is often assumed to be
fundamental and other patterns of variation, such as stylistic and gender vari-
ation, are regarded as derivative of it. Many sociolinguistic studies have started
by grouping individuals into social classes on the basis of factors such as
education, occupation, income, and so on, and then looked to see how certain
linguistic features were used by each group.
Through the introduction of these new quantitative methods for investigating
social dialects by correlating sociolinguistic variables with social factors, socio-
linguists have been able to build up a comprehensive picture of social dialect
differentiation in the United States and Britain in particular, as well as in other
places, where these studies have since been replicated. The view of language
which emerges from the sociolinguistic study of urban dialects is that of a
structured but variable system, whose use is conditioned by both internal and
external factors. A major finding of urban sociolinguistic work is that differences
among social dialects are quantitative and not qualitative. Thus, variants are not
usually associated exclusively with one group or another; all speakers tend to
make use of the same linguistic features to a greater or lesser degree.
3.1
Language, social class, style, and sex
Some of the same linguistic features figure in patterns of both regional and
social dialect differentiation, with working-class varieties being more local-
ized, and they also display correlations with other social factors. The inter-
section of social and stylistic continua is one of the most important findings of
quantitative sociolinguistics: namely, if a feature occurs more frequently in
working-class speech, then it will occur more frequently in the informal speech
of all speakers.

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Variation in Language and Gender 101
Table 4.1
Social class, style, and sex differentiation in (ing) in Norwich (percentage
of non-standard forms used) (from Trudgill 1974: 94, table 7.2)
Word-list
Reading
Formal speech
Casual speech
Middle-middle
m
0
0
4
31
f
0
0
0
0
Lower-middle
m
0
20
27
17
f
0
0
3
67
Upper-working
m
0
18
81
95
f
11
13
68
77
Middle-working
m
24
43
91
97
f
20
46
81
88
Lower-working
m
66
100
100
100
f
17
54
97
100
There are also strong correlations between patterns of social stratification
and gender, with a number of now classic findings emerging repeatedly. One of
these sociolinguistic patterns is that women, regardless of other social charac-
teristics such as class, age, etc., tended to use more standard forms than men.
Table 4.1 shows the results of Trudgill’s (1974) study in Norwich of the
variable (ing), that is, alternation between alveolar /n/ and a velar nasal /ng/
in words with -ing endings such as reading, singing, in relation to the variables
of social class, style, and sex. The scores represent the percentage of non-
standard forms used by men and women in each social group in four contex-
tual styles: when reading a word-list, reading a short text, in formal speech,
and in casual speech.
Generally speaking, the use of non-standard forms increases the less formal
the style and the lower one’s social status, with men’s scores higher than
women’s. This variable is often referred to popularly as “dropping one’s g’s.”
It is a well-known marker of social status over most of the English-speaking
world, found in varieties of American English too. Although each class has
different average scores in each style, generally speaking all groups style-shift
in the same direction in their more formal speech style, that is, in the direction
of the standard language. This similar behavior can be taken as an indication
of membership in a speech community sharing norms for social evaluation of
the relative prestige of variables. All groups recognize the overt greater pres-
tige of standard speech and shift toward it in more formal styles.
Summing up these sociolinguistic patterns involving social class, gender,
and style, sociolinguists would reply to the question of who is likely to speak

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102 Suzanne Romaine
most non-standardly in a community: working-class men speaking in casual
conversation. Conversely, middle-class women speaking in more formal con-
versation are closest to the standard. In table 4.1, for instance, we can see that
middle-middle-class women never use the non-standard form, while lower-
working-class men use it almost all of the time. Note, however, that the differ-
ences between men and women are not equal throughout the social hierarchy.
For this variable they are greatest in the lower middle and upper working
class. Such patterns reveal basic linguistic faultlines in a community, and are
indicative of the uneven spread of the standard and its associated prescriptive
ideology in a speech community.
Similar results have been found in other places, such as Sweden and the
Netherlands. In fact, Nordberg (1971) proposed that this pattern of sex differ-
entiation is so ubiquitous in Western societies today that it could almost serve
as a criterion for determining which speech forms are stigmatized and which
carry prestige in a community. Similarly, Trudgill (1983: 162) emphasized the
same point when he claimed that the association between women and standard
speech was “the single most consistent finding to have emerged from social
dialect studies over the past twenty years.”
Women also tend to hypercorrect more than men, especially in the lower
middle class. “Hypercorrection” refers to a deviation in the expected pattern
of stylistic stratification of the kind shown in table 4.1 for (ing) in Norwich, for
example. Here all speakers, regardless of social class, tend to shift more toward
the standard forms in their more formal speaking styles. In some cases, how-
ever, where hypercorrection occurs, as with postvocalic /r/ in New York City,
the lower middle class shows the most radical style shifting, exceeding even
the highest-status group in their use of the standard forms in the most formal
style. The behavior of the lower middle class is governed by their recognition
of an exterior standard of correctness and their insecurity about their own
speech. They see the use of postvocalic /r/ as a prestige marker of the highest
social group. In their attempt to adopt the norm of this group, they manifest
their aspirations of upward social mobility, but they overshoot the mark. The
clearest cases of hypercorrection occur when a feature is undergoing change
in response to social pressure from above, that is, a prestige norm used by
the upper class. In New York City the new /r/-pronouncing norm is being
imported into previously non-rhotic areas of the eastern United States.
Hypercorrection by the lower middle class accelerates the introduction of this
new norm. The variable (ing), on the other hand, has been a stable marker of
social and stylistic variation for a very long time and does not appear to be
involved in change, and hence does not display hypercorrection.
3.2
Sociolinguistic patterns and language change
Because variability is a prerequisite for change, synchronic variation may rep-
resent a stage in long-term change. Armed with the knowledge of how variabil-
ity is embedded in a social and linguistic context in speech communities today,

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Variation in Language and Gender 103
sociolinguists have tried to revitalize the study of historical change by incor-
porating within it an understanding of these sociolinguistic patterns (see
Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog 1968). By examining the way in which variation
is embedded into the social structure of a community, we can chart the spread
of innovations just as dialect geographers mapped variation and change through
geographical space.
Sociolinguists have distinguished between “change from above” and “change
from below” to refer to the differing points of departure for the diffusion of
linguistic innovations through the social hierarchy. Change from above is con-
scious change originating in more formal styles and in the upper end of the
social hierarchy; change from below is below the level of conscious awareness,
originating in the lower end of the social hierarchy. Gender is critical here too.
Women, particularly in the lower middle class, lead in the introduction of new
standard forms of many of the phonological variables studied in the United
States, the UK, and other industrialized societies such as Sweden, while men
tend to lead in instances of change from below (see Labov 1990). Moreover,
there is evidence from studies of language shift in bilingual communities for
women being in the vanguard of change to a more prestigious language. In
the case of Oberwart, Austria, for instance, it was women who were ahead of
men, in shifting from Hungarian to German (Gal 1979).
4
Explanations for the Connection Between
Women and Standard Speech
Although many reasons have been put forward to try to explain these results,
they have never been satisfactorily accounted for. After all, it is in some respects
paradoxical that women should tend to use the more prestigious variants
when most societies accord higher status and power to men. Moreover, as has
often been the case with other patterns of gender differentiation, it is women’s
behavior that has been problematized and seen to be deviant and thus in need
of explanation. We could just as easily ask instead why men tend to use the
standard less often than women of the same status. Indeed, Labov (1966: 249–
63) commented on a striking case where an upper-middle-class male, Nathan B.,
used a high level of non-standard variants for certain variables comparable to
lower-middle- or working-class speakers. After receiving his PhD in political
science, Nathan B. was being considered for a university teaching appointment,
but was denied it when he refused to take corrective courses to improve his
speech.
4.1
Language, sex, and gender
One explanation that can be dismissed relatively easily is Chambers’ (1995: 132–
3) view that women’s greater verbal abilities are responsible for the differences.

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104 Suzanne Romaine
For Chambers then, the differences are sex-based or biological rather than
culturally derived or gender-based. Although there was little recognition or
critical discussion of the notion of gender as a social and cultural construct in
most of the early sociolinguistic literature (see McElhinny, this volume), socio-
linguists often invoked explanations based on women’s supposed greater status-
consciousness, greater awareness of the social significance of variants, and
concern for politeness. When asked to say which forms they used themselves,
Norwich women, for instance, tended to “over-report” their usage and claimed
that they used more standard forms than they actually did. Men, however,
were likely to under-report their use of standard forms. This led Trudgill
(1972) to argue that for men, speaking non-standardly has “covert” prestige,
while the “overt” prestige associated with speaking the standard variety is
more important to women (see James 1996; Kiesling, this volume).
Thus, women may be using linguistic means as a way to achieve status denied
to them through other outlets. Since women have long been denied equality
with men as far as educational and employment opportunities are concerned,
these are not reliable indicators of a woman’s status or the status she aspires
to. Although the marketplace establishes the value of men in economic terms,
the only kind of capital a woman can accumulate is symbolic. She can be a
“good” housewife, a “good” mother, a “good” wife, and so on, with respect to
the community’s norms and stereotypes for appropriate female behavior.
In this sense, the use of the standard might be seen as yet another reflection
of women’s powerlessness in the public sphere. This interpretation accorded
well with one of the assumptions made by early gender scholars such as Lakoff
(1975), who saw women’s language as the “language of powerlessness,” a
reflection of their subordinate place in relation to men. The importance of
power rather than gender per se emerged in O’Barr and Atkins’s (1980) finding
that some of the features thought to be part of “women’s language” were also
used by males when in a subordinate position (see Lakoff, this volume, for
discussion of women and power).
Further examination of the historical context provides ample support for the
association between perceived femininity and the use of standard English. In
the Victorian era “speaking properly” became associated with being female,
and with being a lady, in particular (see Mugglestone 1995). That is why Sweet
(1890), for instance, considered it far worse for a woman to drop initial /h/ in
words such as house or heart.
Because a woman aspirant to the status of lady could not attain it independ-
ently, but only through marriage, it was incumbent on her to behave and
speak like a lady. George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1916) and the popular
musical made from it, My Fair Lady, illustrate the power of accent in social
transformation. Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle is trained by a phonetics
professor, Henry Higgins (based on Henry Sweet), to speak like a “lady.” As
long as she pronounces her vowels and consonants correctly, Doolittle does
not betray her working-class East London origins and is indeed received in the
best of society.

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Variation in Language and Gender 105
Doolittle’s transformation is enabled partly through changes brought about
by the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century Britain which opened up
new avenues for the accumulation of wealth, prestige, and power other than
those based on hereditary landed titles. Thanks to the Universal Education Act
of 1872, there were greater educational opportunities for a wider portion of
the social spectrum. This facilitated the spread of what Wyld (1920) called the
“newfangled English,” that is, the newly codified standard. Yet it was not the
highest-ranking social groups of the day but instead the nouveau riche or
bourgeoisie who eagerly sought the refinements the grammarians had to offer,
as signs of their emergent status as educated persons. Good grammar and the
right accent became social capital in an age in which the definitions of “gentle-
man” and “lady” were no longer based entirely on hereditary titles and land.
Anyone with money, ambition, and the right connections or education could
aspire to be a gentleman or a lady – even Eliza Doolittle.
The changing times brought about a semantic shift in the meanings of the
terms gentleman and lady. Titles once associated with the aristocracy became
terms of social approval and moral approbation. In a letter to his sister Hannah
in 1833, historian Thomas Macaulay wrote that “the curse of England is the
obstinate determination of the middle classes to make their sons what they call
gentlemen” (cited in Trevelyan 1878: 338). Likewise, Sarah Ellis (1839: 107), a
contemporary of Macaulay, commented on the metamorphosis in the meaning
of the social label lady brought about by modern schools:
Amongst the changes introduced by modern taste, it is not the least striking, that
all daughters of tradespeople, when sent to school, are no longer girls, but young
ladies. The linen-draper whose worthy consort occupies her daily post behind
the counter, receives her child from Mrs. Montagu’s establishment – a young
lady. At the same elegant and expensive seminary, music and Italian are taught
to Hannah Smith, whose father deals in Yarmouth herrings; and there is the
butcher’s daughter, too, perhaps the most ladylike of them all.
It is striking that the daughters of the butcher, the herring seller, and other
categories of tradespeople mentioned would all belong to the upper working
class and lower middle class, precisely those levels within the social hierarchy
where modern sociolinguistics finds the greatest differentiation in male and
female speech (see Romaine 1996).
4.2
Sex-based versus class-based differentiation
Despite this historical support for the view that speaking properly became
social capital, we may question how relevant it is for women today, given
women’s great strides in achieving educational and economic parity with men,
partly as a result of the modern women’s movement. If women are using the
standard to achieve status denied to them through conventional outlets, we

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106 Suzanne Romaine
Table 4.2
Gender differentiation in six morphological variables in 1967 and 1996
(percentage of standard forms; from Nordberg and Sundgren 1999: 7, table 3)
1967
1996
Extent of gap
Male
Female
Male
Female
1967
1996
Neuter sg. def. art
52
60
52
68
8
16
Neuter pl. def. art.
30
47
54
69
17
15
Past part. V,
classes 1 and 4
21
30
20
30
9
10
Past part. V, class 2
88
88
88
98
0
10
Preterite, V, class 1
16
15
12
17
−1
5
Blev/vart
26
58
28
66
32
38
might expect that this need should diminish once women have more access
to high-status and high-paying jobs, for example. Furthermore, if a related
assumption made by sociolinguists is also true, namely, that social structure
is reflected in patterns of linguistic variation, we might expect more recent
sociolinguistic studies to reveal less gender variation in some of the classic
linguistic variables examined in early studies of the 1960s and 1970s.
However, Nordberg and Sundgren’s (1998, 1999) comparison of sociolin-
guistic surveys done in Eskilstuna, a medium-sized town in central Sweden
110 kilometers west of Stockholm, in 1967 and a generation later in 1996 re-
veals that gender differentiation in most of the variables has been maintained,
or even increased rather than decreased. Table 4.2 shows gender differentiation
for six morphological variables in 1967 and 1996. For each variable, with only
very minor exceptions, the women use the standard forms more frequently
than men, in both 1967 and 1996. The final column shows the extent of the gap
measured in terms of percentage points between the men’s and women’s scores
at the two time periods.
The first variable is the neuter singular definite article ending in -t in stand-
ard Swedish, as in huset “the house,” and without it, in non-standard usage.
Although male usage has remained at the same level over time, the women
have moved closer to the standard. The second variable is the neuter plural
definite article, which in standard Swedish is expressed by the suffix -en as in
husen “the houses”; the local dialect variant is -ena/-a, as in husena or barna
“the children.” Both men and women have shifted more toward the standard
in 1996, but the gap between the sexes remains roughly the same. The third
variable is the past participle forms of verbs in conjugation classes 1 and 4,
whose standard forms end in -t in standard Swedish, e.g. dansat “danced,”
sjungit “sung.” There has been virtually no change in this variable over time. It
shows roughly the same amount of sex differentiation in both time periods.
The fourth variable is the past participle of verbs in conjugation class 2. Here
too there is an increase over time in the gap between men and women, with

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Variation in Language and Gender 107
women, but not men, moving toward the standard. In fact, there was no
gender differentiation in 1967, with both men and women conforming very
closely to the standard norm. In 1996, however, the women have shifted almost
completely to the standard.
The fifth variable, preterite forms for verbs in conjugation class 1, also shows
almost no gender differentiation in 1967, but women have shifted in the direc-
tion of the standard in 1996, and men have increased their use of the non-
standard forms. In the case of the sixth variable, the use of the non-standard
preterite forms for the highly frequent verbs vara “to be” and bli “to become,”
men have hardly changed their usage between the two time periods, while
women have moved closer to the standard, resulting in an increase in the gap
between male and female scores.
The results are striking, all the more so for their occurrence in Sweden, a
country renowned for gender equality. In Sweden as well as in other Nordic
countries the position of women is more nearly equal to that of men than in
most other parts of the world, thanks to legislation comparable to the proposed
but eventually doomed US Equal Rights Amendment.
Another surprising finding in Nordberg and Sundgren’s results is the de-
crease in social class differentiation between 1967 and 1996. At first glance, this
too flies in the face of global trends showing an increase in the gap between
rich and poor, both between developed and developing nations as well as
within nations. Economists such as Sen (1999) report stark contrasts between
income per person (and related measures of well-being such as life expect-
ancy, rate of infant mortality, etc.) in developed countries, most of them in the
temperate zone of the Northern hemisphere, and developing countries in the
tropics and semi-tropics, particularly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
The richest 20 per cent of the world’s people have 150 times the income of the
poorest 20 per cent.
Even within developed countries such as the USA, there are similarly
extreme contrasts, despite the fact that at the turn of the twenty-first century
the country had enjoyed eighteen years of almost uninterrupted growth and
the longest-running economic expansion in history (Economic Policy Institute
2000). Although the gap between the poor and the middle class is shrinking,
the gap between the poor and everyone else is increasing. Incomes have gone
up each year since 1995 without narrowing the inequality gap: the poorest
fifth of the population saw a fall of 8.9 per cent in after-tax income from 1979
to 1999, but the richest 1 per cent realized a gain of 93.4 per cent.
Eskilstuna too has undergone a number of social transformations since the
late 1960s. In 1967 it was primarily a prospering industrial town engaged in
steel manufacturing, with a growing population and a low rate of unemploy-
ment. Since the beginning of the 1970s, however, the population has been
stagnating or diminishing, with an over-representation of older age groups. As
in many other countries, the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial
economy has occasioned a number of economic crises such as factory closings
and high unemployment, as well as witnessing an increase in the number of

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