Gender and language studies

A long road already travelled, yet longer (and curvier) roads ahead

Abstract

In the present paper we analyze how divergence in language use across genders has received increasing scholarly attention since the late 1960s and –especially– early 1970s. While early research on the field is of-tentimes based on researcher introspection (Lakoff 1973), at this time we already find certain scholars that ap-proach the matter from a purely empirical perspective (Labov 1966). Since the very early precursors of gen-der and language studies, such preliminary analyses were pivotal in paving the path to more methodological-ly complex insights into the gender-language relationship (Nichols 1978, Trudgill 1988, Goodwin 1988). In more recent years, gender has started to be regarded as a complex dynamic social construction, which has prompted the use of more refined methodologies based upon the idea that stylistic
variation occurring within every speaker’s vernacular is not random but rather systematic.