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11. GENDER ISSUES IN LANGUAGE CHANGE

Deborah Cameron

It has long been apparent to scholars that gender exerts an influence on language
change. Recently, however, the patterns of gender differentiation attested in
empirical studies have been reinterpreted in the light of current social constructionist
understandings of gender. Drawing on recent work in variationist sociolinguistics,
sociology of language and linguistic anthropology, this chapter focuses on new
approaches to explaining gender differentiated patterns of sound change and
language shift, the success or failure of planned linguistic reforms, and changes in
the social evaluation of gendered speech styles.

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.

Before proceeding, I should clarify what is encompassed by the term

language change. In some discussions the term is used narrowly, to refer to changes
within a single language system (albeit such changes may involve contact between
subsystems, e.g., dialects spoken in adjacent areas). The prototypical phenomenon
studied under this heading is sound change, a topic that continues to dominate

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 188 DEBORAH CAMERON

research in variationist sociolinguistics. In addition to discussing recent work on

sound change, however, I will consider several other types of change that are of
interest to applied linguists. One is language shift, where one language in the
repertoire of a bilingual speech community progressively encroaches on the functions
of the other and eventually replaces it. Shift typically occurs intergenerationally, as
younger community members become increasingly limited in their bilingual
competence, and eventually monolingual. Since women and girls in most societies
are primary carers for young children, researchers have paid attention to their role in
promoting shift—and, conversely, in maintaining ancestral languages or revitalizing
those which have become endangered. The formation of pidgins, the development of
some pidgins into creoles, and the process of decreolization that creoles may
subsequently undergo are also relevant topics, and I will comment briefly on recent
work which addresses the relationship of gender to pidgin and creole development
(see also McWhorter, this volume). Finally, I will consider the influence on
language of recent and ongoing social changes relating to gender. An obvious case
in point is the impact of overtly feminist linguistic reforms such as the promulgation
of “nonsexist” or “inclusive” language policies. Also of interest are shifts in
gendered language ideologies and verbal hygiene practices (i.e., representations of
language and efforts to regulate its use in accordance with particular value
judgments—for more detailed definitions and illustrations, see Bergvall, Bing, and
Freed, 1997; Cameron, 1995; Finegan, this volume; and Woolard, 1998). Though
not, strictly speaking, examples of language change, these developments affect the
value attached to different ways of speaking, and thus have the potential to influence
the direction of language change in future.

Rethinking Gender: The Rise and Rise of Social Constructionism

In modern feminist theory, it is axiomatic that gender—socially constructed

masculinity or femininity—is not reducible to biological maleness or femaleness.
The sex/gender distinction was not, however, available to pre-feminist scholars like
Jespersen, and many later researchers in practice made no use of it (Eckert, 1990).
The explanations most commonly proposed for observed linguistic differences
between women and men relied on large-scale generalizations about the roles or
personality traits that were supposedly typical of each sex; even when the term
“gender” was used, accounts of it were often shaped by an underlying assumption
that it referred to an inherent natural attribute.

Feminists always regarded gender as a social rather than natural

phenomenon, but in feminist theory during the 1990s there was a shift in the
direction of a more radically social constructionist approach. In that approach gender
is not seen as the stable outcome of early socialization, but as something constructed
continually in social interaction. It is recognized that the construction of gender
takes different forms across cultures and through time—there is no universal essence
of masculinity or femininity—and that gender may be produced differently by
individuals in a single society or community. ‘Women’ and ‘men’ are no longer
treated as discrete and internally homogeneous categories about which one can make
universal statements (“women do X, men do Y”); there is variation within each

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 GENDER ISSUES IN LANGUAGE CHANGE 189

group, and overlap between the two. In language and gender studies, researchers
have turned away from the quest for universal generalizations about men’s or
women’s speech, and focused instead on the particular conditions shaping the
behavior of men and women in specific locales. More attention has been paid to the
interaction of gender with other dimensions of social identity such as race/ethnicity,
class, generation, and sexuality (see contributions to Hall & Bucholtz, 1995); gender
is no longer conceived as a simple binary opposition (Bing & Bergvall, 1997), and
explanations of gender differences have accordingly shifted away from generalities
about sex roles or personality traits. Alternative frameworks adopted by researchers
have included variants of post-structuralist/postmodernist theory (cf. Livia & Hall,
1997), and the notion of the “community of practice” drawn from the work of Jean
Lave and Etienne Wenger (e.g., Wenger, 1998; for the application of this model to
language and gender studies, see Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992; 1999).

The impact of new theoretical approaches on the study of gender and

language change has been mixed. Since the topic is of interest to scholars located in
several fields and traditions, not all of them committed to feminist approaches or
conversant with feminist theory, more conservative theoretical assumptions persist
alongside accounts that challenge them. There has also been at least one recent
theoretical development that goes strikingly against the social constructionist grain,
namely a revival of interest in quasi-biological (neo-Darwinist) explanations for sex
differentiated linguistic behavior. The evolutionary scientist Robin Dunbar (1996),
for instance, has proposed that the main survival advantage conferred on humans by
language was the ability to maintain cohesion in larger social groupings. He argues
that women (playing ex hypothesi the same pivotal role in early human social groups
as females do in many nonhuman primate species) were the major force in the
evolution of natural languages, and that this may have a bearing on the contemporary
observation that women outperform men on various tests of verbal ability. The
sociolinguist Jack Chambers (1992; 1995) has also cited women’s evolved,
neurobiologically-based verbal superiority as a potential factor explaining their
tendency to display greater “stylistic flexibility” than men. This is relevant to the
question of linguistic change because social and stylistic variation is the synchronic
raw material from which change over time is produced. It should be noted, however,
that the postulate of female verbal superiority is controversial (Hyde & Linn, 1988).
At present, discussions framed in terms of Darwinian natural selection remain highly
speculative, and I will concentrate here on the social constructionist approach.

Gender and Language Change in Recent Variationist Sociolinguistics

Since its beginnings in the 1960s, variationist sociolinguistics has attended

to differences between women and men, but the perceived importance of those
differences has increased over time. Gender is no longer considered, as it was in the
early years of the paradigm, secondary to class as a factor influencing language
change. The ubiquity of gender differentiation within speech communities offers a
particularly compelling illustration of the point that linguistic variation (and
therefore, language change) is not simply the outcome of separation between groups
in society, while conversely, sustained close contact does not necessarily produce

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 190 DEBORAH CAMERON

homogeneity. In the words of William Labov: “No one can deny that husbands and
wives, brothers and sisters, are involved in intimate communication in everyday life.
Yet gender is a powerful differentiating factor in almost every case of stable social
stratification and change in progress that has been studied” (Labov, 2001, p. 262).

As I noted above, variationist sociolinguists using quantitative methods to study

language change (typically, sound change) in progress developed an early account of
the relationship of gender to change, which laid emphasis on the “status-
consciousness” and “linguistic insecurity” of women. That account was later refined,
however, in the light of accumulating evidence. After reviewing relevant research,
Labov (1990) proposed the following generalizations (the formulation below is from
Dubois and Horvath, 2000, p. 289, parenthetical explanations mine):

ƒ Principle I: For stable sociolinguistic variables (i.e., those not involved in

change), men use a higher frequency of nonstandard forms than women.
ƒ Principle Ia: In change from above (i.e., where speakers are conscious of the
existence and social meaning of competing variants, women favor the
incoming prestige form more than men.
ƒ Principle II: In change from below (i.e., where speakers are not conscious
that change is occurring), women are most often the innovators.

Labov has drawn attention to the “gender paradox” his principles embody:
women as a group “conform more closely than men to sociolinguistic norms that are
overtly prescribed, but conform less than men when they are not” (Labov, 2001, p.
293). Though studies have documented the existence of individual women speakers
whose behavior exemplifies the predicted pattern—simultaneously conservative with
respect to stigmatized changes and innovative with respect to nonstigmatized
changes (e.g., Maclagan, Gordon, & Lewis, 1999)—it is also important to note that
the leaders of change from above and change from below may be different
individuals. In the communities studied by Labov and his associates in Philadelphia,
the leaders of both kinds of change are upper working class women, but they are
distinguished by their degree of social conformity. Women’s behavior is not
uniform, then, and cannot be explained in terms of some essential characteristic
common to all members of the group. The question does remain, however, of why
the leaders of most changes are women rather than men.

Labov (2001) offers a multicausal account. In relation to change from

above, he cites women’s greater concern or responsibility for ensuring the social
mobility of their children as a key motivation for adopting prestige norms, while his
discussion of change from below refers to an assortment of proposals by other
scholars—some of them problematic from the point of view of social
constructionism, since they belong to the “biological” tendency mentioned above
(e.g., Chambers, 1995; Gordon & Heath, 1998).1 In line with the overall aims of this
review, the discussion below will not look closely at arguments to which sex rather
than gender is central, but will concentrate on accounts framed in social
constructionist terms.

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 GENDER ISSUES IN LANGUAGE CHANGE 191

One such account is particularly associated with the sociolinguist Penelope

Eckert, though it has also been taken up by others (an accessible recent summary
appears in Eckert, 1998, see also Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 1999; Wolfram and
Schilling-Estes, 1998). This account suggests that women as social subordinates are
more dependent than men on symbolic resources for asserting identity and group
membership. Eckert carried out research in a suburban high school near Detroit,
Michigan, where identity and social practice were organized around the contrast
between ‘jocks’ (who embraced the official definition of school success, e.g.,
participating actively in both academic and extracurricular pursuits and going on to
college) and ‘burnouts’ (who rejected the school’s values and resisted active
participation in its official culture). The contrast was also marked linguistically, with
particular phonological variables that are involved in an ongoing change in the
Detroit area (the Northern Cities Vowel Shift) being appropriated differentially to
mark either jock or burnout identity. Eckert found that in both the jock and the
burnout groups, young women were more advanced than young men in their use of
the innovative variants marking group membership. This cannot be explained as
status consciousness in the sense earlier sociolinguists used the concept, for the
vowel shift is a case of change from below and the innovative variants are vernacular
rather than standard. The kind of status sought by the young women is not the
prestige associated with correct pronunciation; rather, they assert their status as ‘good
jocks’ or ‘good burnouts’ by carrying their use of variants that function as group
identity markers to a greater extreme than their male counterparts do. Eckert
observes that nonlinguistic markers of status within the group—for instance, athletic
prowess and fighting skills—are not available to women on the same terms as to
men. Even if they possess the same skills, women are not rewarded for them in the
same way. Their capital as jocks and burnouts is largely symbolic, and so they work
harder to assert in-group status through symbolic details like the styling of their jeans
and the pronunciation of their vowels.

Similar considerations may be invoked to account for women’s role in

changes from above. The labor market both exploits and reproduces female
dependence on symbolic capital, channeling women into jobs that place emphasis on
interpersonal communication (e.g., nursing, social work, customer service) and/or
require a high level of standard language competence (e.g., school teaching,
secretarial work). As Gordon (1997) has observed, too, an important form of
symbolic capital for girls and women across classes and ethnic groups is sexual
reputation. In a subjective reaction study carried out in New Zealand, Gordon found
attributions of “looseness” to female speakers to be associated with nonstandard
speech. She proposes this as a potentially powerful motivation for women’s
behavior in relation to Principles I and Ia above, i.e., women avoid stigmatized
linguistic variants in an effort to avoid a kind of social stigma that is specific to their
gender.

Labov’s principles have provided a starting point for many more recent
empirical variationist studies, and while some of these have offered further support
for his generalizations, it has also been noted that specific local conditions may

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 192 DEBORAH CAMERON

produce divergence from the expected patterns. Dubois and Horvath (2000), for
instance, report on a study involving three generations of Cajun English speakers in
Louisiana. The generations represent different phases of a historical process
whereby originally monolingual French speakers became first bilingual and
ultimately monolingual in English. The oldest speakers’ English is strongly marked
by the phonological influence of L1 French, whereas the middle generation, whose
upbringing and education made them conscious of the stigma attached to French-
influenced pronunciation, uses a less markedly Cajun English. Among the youngest
speakers, however, for whom English monolingualism is the norm, Cajun variants
have made a dramatic comeback—particularly among young men. This “recycling”
of French-influenced variants is a way of asserting Cajun identity via English (the
only language available for the purpose, since the younger speakers have no
command of French itself); but since it is a case of change from below, the question
arises why men rather than women are leading it. Dubois and Horvath explain this
by noting that the revival of Cajun variants accompanies a resurgence of ethnic pride
(the Cajun Renaissance) whose most important public symbols are traditionally
masculine activities such as boating, hunting, fishing and performing Cajun music.
At the same time, language shift has eliminated the important role traditionally
played by women in passing on the community’s ancestral language to children. In
the particular sociohistorical conditions of this community, then, it is young men who
have the greater motivation to acquire and display symbolic capital as Cajuns.

Gender as an Influence on Language Shift

Dubois and Horvath’s study demonstrates that language shift may have
consequences for the subsequent sociolinguistic positioning of women and men (in
the Louisiana case, men have become torchbearers for Cajun language and culture).
The reverse is also true: gender relations in bilingual communities may be
consequential for the process of language shift. This emerges clearly from Susan
Gal’s classic study of the Austrian town of Oberwart (Gal, 1978; 1979). Here
Hungarian-German bilingualism was in the process of yielding to German
monolingualism, and young women were most advanced in their preference for
German. Hungarian had come to be associated with a “peasant” identity, while
speaking German only was associated with a “worker” identity; the linguistic choices
of young women reflected their calculations regarding which category of man it
would be preferable to marry. Many or most viewed the role of peasant’s wife as
less desirable than that of worker’s wife, and planned to marry German-speaking
workers from outside the community. This also implied that young bilingual men
would have to seek marriage partners outside their own community, making German
the de facto choice for the dominant language of their own future households.

In Oberwart, the symbolic association of Hungarian with peasant status and

German with worker status caused the languages to be evaluated differently by
women and men because of the greater unattractiveness of peasant life to women.
But in some cases, gender may be part of what a language actually symbolizes, and
this may affect the way it is evaluated by the whole community. One such instance
is discussed by Don Kulick (1992; 1998), who studied language shift in a small and

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 GENDER ISSUES IN LANGUAGE CHANGE 193

remote village, Gapun, in Papua New Guinea. Gapuners were until recently
bilingual in the local vernacular Taiap and the creole language that serves as a lingua
franca across the country, Tok Pisin. At the time of Kulick’s original fieldwork in
1986–87, however, Tok Pisin was in the process of superseding Taiap, and when he
returned a few years later he found that no villager younger than 14 had an active
command of Taiap. Kulick analyzes the underlying reasons for shift in ideological
and symbolic terms, noting that the contrast between Taiap and Tok Pisin has come
to symbolize a series of other contrasts. For instance, Taiap is associated with the
ancestral past whereas Tok Pisin is associated with modernization, development, and
Christianization. The contrast between the languages has also come to symbolize an
important local contrast between hed (willfulness, which may lead to unthinking or
unguarded expression of one’s thoughts and feelings) and save (knowledge, which
implies the ability to control and manage the expression of potentially dangerous
ideas and emotions). Gapuners associate the control that is central to save with men
and the dangerous emotional excess that is part of hed with women. Oratories in the
men’s house, which are delivered in a highly indirect language and have the
production of consensus and avoidance of conflict as primary goals, are
predominantly in Tok Pisin. Taiap predominates, however, in the angry, obscene,
and abusive monologues known as kroses, which are virtually always delivered by
women. The association of Taiap with hed and Tok Pisin with save both underwrites
and reinforces their symbolic gendering, i.e., Taiap is associated with women and
Tok Pisin with men, even though both sexes use both languages. Kulick argues that
the intertwined negative symbolic associations of Taiap—with women, hed, anger
and the past—are at the root of the actual language practices that propel the shift
towards Tok Pisin.

Gal and Kulick studied language shift in communities which had not, or at
least not recently, been displaced from their ancestral locations and ways of life. In
contemporary global conditions, however, language shift is also often observed and
studied in migrant and diasporic communities. In such communities the question is
less about what motivates shift than it is about the course the process takes in
particular circumstances: i.e., how quickly and extensively an additional language is
adopted, and how far migrants and their descendants seek, or are able, to maintain
heritage languages over time. A related question is whether patterns of shift and
retention vary among different groups within the community. Research has shown
that gender may be one source of variation, since opportunities for contact with the
majority community (e.g., through participation in the labor market, or through
intermarriage) may be markedly different for women and men. Once again, though,
the effect is mediated by the particular form gender relations take in a given
community; researchers pay attention to the local particularities of gender rather than
treating it as a global category whose influence will be the same in every context.

In an analysis of Australian census data, Clyne and Kipp (1997) observe that
different minority communities show different gendered patterns of shift to English.
In the more established communities (e.g., Greek Australians), first generation
migrant women have higher rates of L1 retention than men; but there are also cases
(e.g., migrants from the Philippines speaking Tagalog, Ilokano, and Cebuano) where

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 194 DEBORAH CAMERON

women are ahead of men in shifting to English. The most obvious explanation
concerns exogamy rates. Women are a relatively large majority (65%) of Australians
born in the Philippines, and a high proportion of them are married to Australian-born
or European immigrant men. Clyne and Kipp report, however, that among the
children of migrants in Australia (the second generation), gender differences are
greatly reduced or eliminated for most groups.

Joanne Winter and Anne Pauwels (2000) note that the interpretation of
patterns based on large-scale survey or census data often relies on generalizations
about gender that recent scholarship has called into question. The finding that, in
many communities, first generation migrant women have higher L1 retention rates is
typically explained as a consequence of deficit (women have restricted access to
instruction in L2 and so experience a “linguistic lag” relative to men (see Ehrlich,
1997) and/or difference (women are cast within their communities as the primary
guardians of ethnic and linguistic heritage). Investigating language maintenance
among German, Greek, and Vietnamese speakers in Melbourne, Winter and Pauwels
observed patterns similar to those reported by Clyne and Kipp, but they argue for a
more nuanced approach to explanation, which takes account of the complexities of
women’s and men’s experience within bilingual communities. They suggest that for
second generation speakers particularly, the analysis of survey or census data needs
to be complemented by in-depth interviewing and ethnographic research in order to
gain a better understanding of how women and men themselves perceive the
connection between gender identity and the retention or loss of a minority language.

Along somewhat similar lines, Aneta Pavlenko (2001a, b; 2002) has used
language-learning memoirs to illuminate the experience of migrant and minority
women in the United States, while Suzanne Sinke (1999) consulted literary and
autobiographical works, immigrant letters, community newspapers and the records of
religious and philanthropic organizations for her account of gendered patterns of
language shift among Dutch Americans at the turn of the (nineteenth to twentieth)
century. The use of these sources enables Pavlenko and Sinke to probe the complex,
often conflictual relationship between gender and ethnicity that is part of the hidden
history of language shift in migrant communities. Sinke presents evidence that
women in the communities she studied were at the extremes of both maintenance and
shift, thus underlining the need for methods that can shed light on differences within
gender groups as well as the differences between them.

Gender Influences on Pidgin and Creole Development

Pidgins are auxiliary languages used in contexts where there is a need for a
lingua franca to facilitate commerce or cooperative working between people with no
other common language. The activities that have been most associated with the
formation and use of pidgins historically include trade, plantation labor, and military
or police service—all of which are predominantly associated with men (McWhorter,
1996). In some communities, it appears that men sought actively to prevent women
from learning a pidgin, possibly because the use of pidgin among women was
associated with prostitutes and so was not considered respectable (this should remind

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 GENDER ISSUES IN LANGUAGE CHANGE 195

us that not all forms of commerce have been male monopolies).2 As with language
shift, though, the role played by women and girls in the language socialization of
children in many societies may be a significant factor in the ongoing development of
pidgins and creoles: creolization, like shift, is an intergenerational process (also see
McWhorter, this volume). Thus when women do begin to use pidgin languages, this
has potentially far-reaching consequences for subsequent linguistic change. In
Gapun, for instance, Kulick (1992) notes that Tok Pisin was originally introduced to
the village by men who had spent periods away working on plantations, and it
remained for some time a male language, which boys picked up from older men.
Only later did it come to be used regularly by women, but since this meant that
younger children in the process of acquiring language were exposed to Tok Pisin as
well as Taiap input, it was a crucial factor in the development of a fully bilingual
speech community, which in turn paved the way for the now far-advanced shift to
Tok Pisin.

Gender Ideologies as an Influence on Language Change

The last 30 years have seen major changes in the social position of women;
while the impact has undoubtedly been greater in some places than in others,
sociologists have noted that ideals of gender egalitarianism now have global currency
(e.g., Giddens, 2000). Changing ideologies of gender have affected language and
language-use just as they have affected many other social institutions and practices,
and their linguistic reflexes have been studied by a number of researchers.

One focus of interest is linguistic reform, enacted by state and other

institutions (e.g., educational, commercial, religious) in the context of policy
initiatives promoting equal opportunities. For example, legislation prohibiting sex
discrimination in the workplace creates a need for gender-inclusive or gender-neutral
occupational terms (e.g., chairperson, firefighter) in job advertisements, job
descriptions, employment contracts, and employment laws. Concern about the
effects of sexism in educational and other materials which play a role in the
socialization of children has led to the adoption of inclusive or nonsexist language by
many producers and publishers (for a recent discussion of inclusiveness in EFL
teaching materials, see Gray, 2002).

Whereas many early texts dealing with feminist linguistic reform were
oriented to practice and activism (cf. Miller & Swift, 1980), some recent scholarship
has taken a more theoretical and critical approach. Anne Pauwels’s Women
Changing Language (1998), for instance, not only provides comparative descriptive
material on reform efforts across a range of languages and societies (including some
non-Indo-European examples), it also advances the theoretical discussion by placing
feminist linguistic reform in the conceptual framework of language planning.
Pauwels notes that feminist reformers confront the same kinds of problems and
choices as other language planners: she examines the issues they must deal with
systematically, and in some cases criticizes their solutions as linguistically
uninformed or overly narrow in focus. One limitation she identifies is the focus on
replacing single items (words or morphemes), as if the goal were simply to substitute

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 196 DEBORAH CAMERON

one form for another, and not to alter the repertoire of meanings. A number of
researchers (e.g., Ehrlich & King, 1992; Kitzinger & Thomas, 1995) have examined
the discursive “afterlife” of planned changes, noting that it is in discourse—language
in use—that meanings are negotiated and contested. Consequently, substituted or
newly coined terms may acquire meanings that were not intended by their instigators.
Examples in English include the reinterpretation of Ms. so that it functions not as the
intended parallel to Mr. but as a third term alongside Miss and Mrs., applied to
anomalous women such as lesbians and divorcées; and the use of –person suffixes
with female referents only, while –man continues to be used for male referents.

Discourse patterns have been a long-standing concern of language and

gender researchers, with interest typically centering on gender differences in
preferred discourse strategies and styles, and the often negative consequences of
those differences for women (Lakoff, 1975; Tannen, 1990). Recently, however,
researchers have noted a new idealization of the cooperative, emotionally expressive
discourse styles popularly (if not always accurately) associated with women.
Cameron (2000) observes that feminine speech styles are being commodified in the
new globalized service sector, where they are frequently prescribed to workers
regardless of gender. Montgomery (1999) analyzes the reception of tributes to
Princess Diana following her death in 1997, arguing that in contemporary mass-
mediated public arenas, old-style (and symbolically masculine) oratory is now
devalued by comparison with a (symbolically feminine) speech-style foregrounding
sincerity and emotional openness. It appears then that language ideologies relating to
gender may be shifting, prompting a certain feminization of public discourse, and a
tendency to view masculine communication styles as problematic or dysfunctional
(see Cameron, 2003, for examples). In the view of both Cameron and Montgomery,
these developments have been prompted less by feminist critiques of patriarchal
values than by new management practices and the demands of media performance in
an age of global communication. But if, for whatever reason, feminine speech
patterns are gaining prestige, that may have implications for the direction of future
linguistic changes.

Conclusion: Recent Advances and Future Trends

Modern sociolinguistics is based on an understanding of language change as

something other than random drift or functional adaptation: it is the product of
choices made (not always consciously) by social actors using linguistic variation as a
symbolic resource. In recent years, researchers working on various aspects of gender
and language change have been challenged to engage with the argument that gender,
too, is a form of social and symbolic practice. While responses to this challenge
have varied, few researchers or research paradigms have remained untouched by it.

Yet this is not to say that a consensus has emerged on every subject. There
is, for instance, ongoing discussion of appropriate research methods. While no one
disputes the utility of quantification per se—the use of census data to map language
shift/retention, or the statistical analysis which is central to variationist studies of
sound change in progress—there have been calls for these techniques to be combined

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 GENDER ISSUES IN LANGUAGE CHANGE 197

with ethnography and/or other qualitative methods to provide a more nuanced

understanding of gender relations in specific communities and so illuminate the why
as well as the what of gendered behavior.

Another issue that is likely to be the focus of continuing debate is the status
of generalization in research carried out within a social constructionist framework.
For some researchers, “looking locally” means that generalization is no longer an
important goal, and may even be suspect. Others appear willing in principle to move
from detailed observations of gender in particular communities of practice to more
abstract and general statements, such as the proposal that women are in general more
dependent than men on symbolic capital. This does not depend on presupposing
some essential characteristic shared by all women in all times and places, but it does
imply there may be some virtue in attending to larger structural factors shaping
gender relations across communities. It is my own view that generalization remains
a legitimate goal for social science, and is not necessarily incompatible with
contemporary feminist views of gender as social construct and social practice.
However, future attempts to generalize about gender and language change must be
judged not only on their theoretical and political merits, but also on their ability to
accommodate the complexity that recent empirical research has revealed.

Notes

1. Gordon and Heath (1998) believe that the tendency for women to favor certain
kinds of vowel shifts (those that lead to an overall dispersion of vowels in phonetic
space) while men tend to favor others (centralizing changes that concentrate vowels
in a more restricted space), may be rooted in a “natural” sound symbolism which is
ultimately linked to physiological sex differences. Labov (2001, p. 291) treats this
proposal sceptically but seriously, noting empirical counterexamples but suggesting
we should not be too quick to dismiss the general line of argument.

2. I owe this point to Miriam Meyerhoff (personal communication, December,

2001), who observed the persistence of the association firsthand in field research
among Bislama speakers in Vanuatu. I am also much indebted to her for more
general guidance on the literature on pidgins and creoles. I should note however that
this is very far from being a comprehensive survey of recent research on gender and
language change in pidgin and creole speaking communities. Such research raises
interesting and complex questions about, for instance, the applicability of Labov’s
1990 principles to the kind of fluid multilingual situation in which pidgins and
creoles typically arise (what, in such a situation, does one count as the prestige norm,
or as change from above?) Limitations of space prevent me from doing justice to
these issues, however, and they will not be considered further here.

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 198 DEBORAH CAMERON

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eckert, P., & McConnell-Ginet, S. (1999). New generalizations and explanations in

language and gender research. Language in Society, 28, 185–201.

This article is an important recent theoretical statement, summarizing and

explicating the now influential approach to language and gender research
that makes use of the concept of the ‘Community of Practice’ (CoP).
Focusing mainly though not exclusively on the application of this concept to
variationist studies of language change, the article contains a usefully
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Labov, W. (2001). Principles of linguistic change, Vol II: Social factors. Oxford:
Blackwell. (See especially Chs. 8–11.)

At the time of writing, this is Labov’s most recent examination of the

relationship of gender to sound change, continuing the discussion of his
influential 1990 principles, and offering a useful (if densely written)
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Pauwels, A. (1998). Women changing language. London: Longman.

This full length book is the most comprehensive recent study of the
phenomenon of feminist/anti-sexist linguistic reform, which is treated here
as an instance of language planning. Pauwels provides valuable comparative
information on feminist reform efforts across a range of languages and
societies.

Pavlenko, A., Blackledge, A., Piller, I., & Teutsch-Dwyer, M. (Eds.). (2001).
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This is a wide-ranging collection whose primary focus is not gender and

language change but gender and second language learning. However,
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shift for women and men, particularly in contexts of migration; this is a
theme that is increasingly emphasized in other research on gender and
language change.

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