Gender as a Social Construct in the Use of Dental Fricatives /θ/ and /d/ in Ghanaian English

Abstract

Studies on linguistic variation between males and females have shown that in general, women tend to use standard speech more than men. Many linguists have associated standard speech with femininity. In Victorian era, for instance, ‘speaking properly’ was associated with ‘female’ and with being a ‘lady’; you are a lady if you speak ‘posh’ (Mugglestone, 1995). Some, however, believe that the high preference for standard speech by women is due to their awareness of its social significance; since women are denied social status by the society, they make use of the standard speech to achieve the status they are denied. Unfortunately, this appears not to be universal as it varies in different cultures. According to Romaine (1998) this phenomenon is more of social and culture than biological. In non-western societies, particularly in Africa, women are noted to be the heaviest users of nonstandard language. What this paper sought to do was to find out how men and women in a multilingual society such as Ghana, where English is learned as a second language together with other indigenous languages vary in their use two RP phonemes [θ], [ð]. The study used a face-to-face interview to collect a sample of speech from 60 participants. Using both auditory and acoustic analyses, coupled with a statistical tool, an independent sample test (t-test), it was realised that both gender groups realised the standard [θ] and [ð], and the nonstandard [th], [t], [f], [d] and [d] variants of the two RP phonemes. And although both groups recorded different scores for each variant, the differences were statistically insignificant, suggesting that both genders are likely to use the two variants equally.