The Influence of Age and Gender on an Individual’s Speech.

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LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY Q1. THE INFLUENCE OF AGE AND GENDER ON AN INDIVIDUAL’S SPEECH. In trying to evaluate which one of the two social variables of age and gender is more influential over an individual’s speech, we would perhaps be required to somehow quantify the effects of both in some uniform standardised way to allow us to compare. This of course is not easily attainable and is further complicated by the fact that examining each variable independent of each other in isolation is often difficult, due to the influence of other external social variables which can have a marked effect. To make any judgements on the magnitude of their influence, we need to look at each of these variables in more depth and expose some of the ways they affect the spoken language. Perhaps from this examination we can draw some conclusion as to whether one variable is prima facie having a greater influence than the other. Our age is of course one of the ways we can classify ourselves as part of society and is a factor which causes language variation. When comparing conversations of speakers of different ages we can observe differences in characteristics such as the topic, complexity and type of language used, pronunciation and grammar. Vocabulary differences are usually the most easily identifiable with other characteristics such as pronunciation far more subtle in nature. It is recognised that some of this differentiation occurs between ranges of age groups and these are referred to as age-graded patterns. An example of this can be seen in middle-class Glaswegians who are taught to substitute [t] for the vernacular glottal stop variant in words like ‘water’ and ‘matter’ in the age group 10-15 years (Holmes, 2008). When examining these age related speech patterns however, we need to be able to distinguish them from language change patterns which obviously
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