ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews in brief sociolinguistic research on women’s and men’s language styles in interaction. It focuses on sex/gender difference in language usage under three headings: phonology and grammar; lexis and pragmatic particles; discourse features. As feminists began to theorize gender in terms of a socially constructed difference and inequality, research focused on how a social group’s language use reflected their powerful or powerless status, and parallels were drawn between what had been seen as women’s stylistic features and powerless features. Lesley Milroy found that gender could not explain the data her research produced, and employment patterning was also inadequate to account for it. She developed a model which has become known as social network analysis. The connotations of working-class dialects and accents as masculine, tough and confrontational may cause women to avoid them, given gender prescriptions on behaviour.
