ABSTRACT
There is a relatively long history of folk and scholarly interest in the differing roles played by women and men in processes of language change. In 1922, Otto Jespersen repeated (albeit with some caveats) the observation that “women do nothing more than keep to the traditional language which they have learnt from their parents and hand on to their children, while innovations are due to the initiative of men” (Jespersen, 1998, p. 230). Somewhat later, by contrast, the English dialectologist Harold Orton preferred male to female informants on the ground that the speech of older rural men was most likely to preserve traditional dialect forms (Orton, 1962). In the 1970s, variationist sociolinguists using quantitative methods to study language change in progress noted that women were typically more advanced than men in changes toward a prestige norm. This linguistic innovation was attributed, however, to a kind of social conservatism: women were motivated to adopt standard forms because of their greater “status consciousness” or “linguistic insecurity.” Clearly, then, debates about men, women, and language change have been going on for some time: this review does not deal with a sudden flowering of interest in a previously neglected topic. Rather, it considers the influence on recent research of new ideas about gender and its relationship to linguistic phenomena.
