35 Sociolinguistic correlations: Gender
Our gender is a social acquisition that comes about through socialization over our lifetime (and sometimes even prior to our start of life… I’m looking at you ‘gender reveal’ parties). Sex on the other hand is something that is assigned to us based on aspects of our (usually external) biology at birth. You’ve probably heard that “gender is the socially-constructed counterpart of biological sex” (Cheshire 2002: 427). That’s only half true though: binary sex is also a social construct (see Eliot 2011 and Fausto-Sterling 2012). Although sex is colloquially spoken about as a biological binary, its anatomical, endocrinal, and chromosomal criteria all exist on continua; the two discrete categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ are split at a socially-constructed and fuzzy boundary. For cisgender people, their gender identity (i.e., as a man, as a woman, as masculine, as feminine) is (largely) consistent with the sex that they were assigned at birth (i.e., male, female). For transgender people, their gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth and often differs from the gender identity they were socialized into earlier in life. For nonbinary and genderqueer people, their gender identity does not (always) map to the spectra of masculinities and femininities. In cultures across the world, gender is not restricted to a binary (e.g., two-spirit people in some Indigenous communities in North America and hijras in India).
Understanding the distinction between gender and sex is important because past variationist sociolinguistic research often collapsed the difference. As Eckert (1989: 246–7) observed over 30 years ago: “Although differences in patterns of [linguistic] variation between men and women are a function of gender and only indirectly a function of sex …, we have been examining the interaction between gender and variation by correlating variables with sex rather than gender differences.” Eckert’s main point here is that although variationists frequently talk about two groups based on ‘sex differences’, the linguistic difference between men and women is not a biological fact but a social one: men do not use certain variants in a certain way because of their particular anatomy, hormones, and chromosomes but because they have been socialized into using language ‘like a man’. In the early years of the field, little attention was paid to the complexity of gender and the normative binary was taken for granted. Moreover, participants in earlier variationist work were typically categorized based on their gender presentation (i.e., how the researcher perceived the participant’s gender) rather than their self-identification.
Gender and vocal pitch. One aspect of spoken languages that seems to have a clear link to our anatomy is vocal pitch. People with larger, heavier vocal folds have lower pitched voices because their vocal folds require more energy to vibrate and thus, vibrate less quickly than smaller, l