The Analysis Of The Sociolinguistic Gender Pattern

The sociolinguistic gender pattern, a universal phenomenon shown up in most sociolinguistic studies, can be put in this way: in any society where males and females have equal access to the standard form, females use standard variants of any stable variable which is socially stratified for both sexes more often than males do. The term -the Sex/Prestige Pattern, introduced by Hudson, is well-accepted and thus function as the opening of my dissertation. However, the term, though seemly reasonable, fails to distinguish some vague concepts. Thus. It is replaced by another term, the sociolinguistic gender pattern in my dissertation.Then, in my dissertation those vague concepts will be focused on. Among them are sex and gender, universal prestige and local prestige, overt prestige and covert prestige, standard, prestige, the standard variant and the prestige variant. The sociolinguistic gender pattern, being a striking feature in common, has attracted a great deal of attention and there have been a number of attempts to explain it. Of those attempts, the status-consciousness and social-network explanations spread widely.Both the status-consciousness and social-network explanations are revalued in the thesis. Considering the improvement of women's social status, and its preconception of women's inferior social position, the former explanation is proved to be out of date and thus unreliable. Comparatively, the social-network explanation is more convincing. In my thesis, it is informed that any single explanation cannot explain the sociolinguistic gender pattern alone. Thus, other important factors contributing to the sociolinguistic gender pattern are also introduced in the last part of my thesis. The aim of my paper is to enlighten the future studies with reference to women's preference for standard variants.