Barbara Horvath The Variable Effect of Gender

University of Sydney
P.O. Box 208
Glebe NSW 2037
AUSTRALIA
bhorvath@mail.usyd.edu.au

About Barbara Horvath

Horvath is a variationist sociolinguist whose work on Australian English is internationally recognized for its comprehensiveness and methodological acuity. Horvath has been sensitive to the role played by gender--among many social variables, including ethnicity and class--in constraining variation. Her research on Cajun English in collaboration with Sylvie Dubois has also explored the role of perception in this process. They are leading proponents of the use of nonethnographic methods to analyze variation and to conduct research on language and gender.

Abstract

The effect of gender on language change has been a core issue in sociolinguistics since Labov's New York City study. Do women lead change? Was Nathan B an anomaly? A minimalist variationist study is based on a sample of speakers that represents the age, gender, and social-class divisions in a speech community, and for many communities ethnicity is also critical to an understanding of how language change processes work. The first part of the paper presents a view from within the variationist paradigm in which I canvass my own work within the minimalist approach in order to examine the effect of the gender variable. The effect of gender in Australian English varies according to the linguistic phenomenon being studied, such as whether it is phonological variation, incoming sound changes, intonation, or the production of narratives. Importantly, the gender correlates are not predictable and thus call into question any "universal" social patterns associated with change, especially those that predict the leadership of women in the change process. In fact, in our study of Cajun English, Sylvie Dubois and I have identified ongoing sound changes that are currently associated mostly with young men in Louisiana, but in earlier generations both men and women participated equally in the changes. Over time the question of who is leading whom in language change in the Cajun community has had a number of different answers. Despite all of the studies that have shown women to be the leaders of change, my work with Ronald Horvath on Australian and New Zealand English and with Sylvie Dubois on Cajun English has left us unconvinced and we have continued to look more closely at those situations in which either men lead change or neither men nor women lead change in order to determine whether there are some commonalities that we can find. Two approaches are being taken: (1) comparative speech community studies of a single language change, and (2) the use of external sources of knowledge about the community, including sociolinguistic questionnaires, direct questioning of speakers in the sample about their linguistic history, and examining the sociohistorical processes that form the background to change.


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