Sex-Linked Variation in the Responses of Dialect Informants Part III: Grammar

In this, the third of a three-part series concerned with the influence of an informant’s sex upon the response to an inquiring field investigator, attention is given to what a number of researchers in the wide area of women’s speech have customarily considered standard English usage. The accepted generalization, backed by a long history of popular feeling, is that more women than men use &dquo;standard English&dquo;. They have &dquo;better grammar&dquo;. A caveat, however, comes from Philip Smith, who, in his Lon.fua.fe, the Seses and Society (1985 :80), wrote: &dquo;The generalization about the relative use of the standard features by women and men is premature in several ways, and these should be discussed in order to pre-empt the misguided expense of time and resources that the aforementioned endeavour [to enquire into the masculine and feminine connotations of standard and nonstandard speech variables] would entail.&dquo; There is indeed some risk involved in setting up an arbitrary standard before undertaking such research. But that risk can be avoided if a quantitative study is based upon the classification of the subjects by non-linguistic criteria. Fortunately, the material for such a study is available in the field records of the several American dialect atlas projects. The materials of one atlas, that of the Upper Midwest, are at present the only ones immediately accessible, either in the published second volume of the Linfuijiic ~4tlas olllle llpper Midwest (1975) or, for a few items, in the files themselves. As was described in the first article of this series, the data were obtained between 1947 and 1953 by fieldworkers interviewing 208 lifelong residents of their communities in Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska. On the basis of their age, amount of schooling, and social life and status they are placed in the three categories familiar to students of dialectology: Type I, seventy years of age or older with no more than grade-school training; Type II, middle-aged, with a high-school education or equivalent and a somewhat wider social background; Type III, with a regionally obtained college or university education and with fairly wide social contacts.