Two please? Speech differences between men and women in a simple service encounter

Abstract

Social roles which have a profound effect on a range of behaviour such as occupational choice, relations between friends, participation in political life, and the like, obviously have potential for determining language behaviour. Males and females speak as they do because they feel a particular pattern of speech to be appropriate to their sex. On the basis of utterances produced in buying a cinema ticket, an investigation was made of whether there is a statistically significant difference between men and women in certain aspects of their language use. The typical sequencing of speech acts involved in this simple service encounter was examined. In addition to the independent variable of speaker sex, another variable was introduced: sex of seller/addressee. The results of the investigation indicate that, for the dependent variables selected, there are significant differences between the language used by men and that used by women in this particular situation. The study also shows that sex of addressee did not seem to affect any of the variables under consideration. It is confirmed, then, that sex-specific speech patterns do exist and that, as a result, speaker sex should be
adopted as a separate, valid and important sociolinguistic variable.