A Sociolinguistic Study Of Language And Gender In Ten American Teenager Movies

With the rising of feminist movement in American in1960s, language and gender has been the focus of linguistic study. Over the years, the study of gender and language at home and abroad generally falls into three groups: the first is sexual discrimination of language to women and its innovation scheme; the second is gender differences of language, which is the differences of language use between males and females; the third is the study of the factors that lead to sexual discrimination and broader differences in language use. However, the previous studies pay much attention to and oversimplify the difference of gendered talk, and enhance the stereotype towards women. Based on Lakoff's(1975) assumptions about women's talk, this paper explores the similarities and differences of American teenagers' gendered talk and further to find the social changes that lead to the linguistic variation.Teenagers are the most active social community; their transitional feature was reflected in various linguistic levels. This paper analyzes the teen girls' and boys' language from the aspects of lexicon, syntax and discourse analysis and meanwhile study the teenager linguistic variation. The study materials are collected from ten popular American teenager comedies. In total, 50 conversations between the main characters were chosen from movies.The results show that some findings are contradictory to Lakoff's assumptions. In lexicon, gender differences in the knowledge and use of swear words and slang is narrowing in teens'language. In syntax, the significance of structures such as tag-questions and super-polite forms and of behavioral patterns such as interruptions will diminish for a determination of the differentiation of with respect to language use. In conversational styles, girls are not always obedient, cooperative and hesitant. However, the differences between teen girls and boys still exist. Girls use lots of emotional words as weak interjections, adverbial intensifiers and adjectives to show their rich feelings whereas boys like to use strong interjections, swear words and slang.