ABSTRACT
Sociolinguistic variation arose out of another subfield of linguistics: historical linguistics. Linguistic insecurity is the concepts that people have ideas about ‘correct’ language use, but don’t always think they themselves speak in the ‘correct’ way. The linguistic marketplace explanation suggests that using a particular way of speaking indexes a value in some markets, often thought of in terms of an employment market, although it could be another market such as the heterosexual market. The field of gender studies, and feminists in general, have long struggled to reconcile those who align their social practices and bodies in ways that don’t fit into the dominant categories of gender and sexuality in society, as well as those who have been ‘assigned’ a gender category that feels wrong for them. Gender presentation is the semiotic manifestation and “the various ways that an identity like ‘man’ can be enacted”, including how one talks.
