The publication of Robin Lakoff’s seminal book Language and Woman’s Place in 1975 sparked scholarly interest in women’s language. Since then, the influence of gender on language use has been widely researched. Over the years, different approaches to the study of language and gender have been adopted, ranging from the now out-dated deficit approach to the dynamic approach, which considers gender identity as a social construct rather than a person’s inherent characteristic.
In this class, participants will explore the impact of gender on language variation and change on different linguistic levels (e.g. morphology, lexis and pragmatics) in both present-day and historical English varieties.
- Teacher: Christine Elsweiler