ABSTRACT
A variety of proposals have been made to account for the differences between women's and men's use of prestige speech. To understand people's speech choices, it is vital to take into account the specific cultural settings and discourse contexts in which speech is used. Women's and men's speech choices are determined by the particular social conditions of the community in which they live. In a community in which the native speech form is a low-prestige dialect or language, one sex may have more exposure in life than the other sex to standard speech forms or to a more prestigious language. One of the approaches to accounting for sex differences in the use of prestige speech which also invokes economic factors is that involving the concept of social networks. Studies show that individuals with standard speech are generally perceived to be more intellectually competent and able than those with non-standard speech.
