Aging and gendering

Abstract

Unlike class or ethnicity, gender-based differences are assumed to result from social difference, not distance, yet across multiple societies, researchers find that gender separation is practiced to varying degrees. Such separation creates distance. Preference for same-gender affiliations emerges around age three, peaks in middle childhood, and lessens during the teen years, yet persists in the workplace and later life. Though reasons for this are many, Thorne (1993:51) identified one finding in these terms: "Where age separation is present, gender separation is more likely to occur." Because age segregation varies with stage of life, one may predict that gender segregation would wax and wane across the lifespan. This study investigates this prediction with three sociolinguistic variables of Puerto Rican Spanish. In turn, it explores the prediction across other varieties of Spanish, German, and English, focusing on variables that are stable, undergoing change, or in the end stage of loss. (Gender segregation, age segregation, variation.)*

Intensifiers on Tyneside

“…Indeed, the observed gender pattern in our 1990s corpus further supports a change-in-progress interpretation: whereas really is slightly more popular among the women (26% versus 22% male), the male speakers overwhelmingly prefer the conservative variant very (at 42% compared to 8% for the women). Hence, based on our knowledge about the mechanisms of language change (see Cameron 2005;Labov 1990), the observed facts -incremental frequencies across real time, younger speakers favouring the variant in apparent time, the female lead -suggest that really is a change in progress.…”

Old‐age language variation and change: Confronting variationist ageism

“…They may take on new meanings and intersect in new ways as individuals grow older. In his analysis of three stable variables (intervocalic (d), word‐final (s), direct quotation strategies) in Puerto Rican Spanish, Cameron () found a high degree of sex‐differentiation in early childhood, the teenage years and retirement, and low degrees of sex‐differentiation in the middle years (working life; see also Edwards [] for similar results in inner‐city Detroit). Cameron argues that in later life, it is the presence of both age‐ and sex‐segregation that triggers the expansion of quantitative linguistic differences between sexes relative to middle groups.…”

Heritage speakers of Spanish in the US Midwest: reported interlocutors as a measure of family language relevance

“…To the concept of gender socialization it is important to add here that of gender segregation or gender separation. We borrow this concept from Cameron (2005), who writes:…”