Gender differences in the development of language choice patterns in the Køge Project

Abstract

Children socialize each other linguistically, and this is very likely their only field for practicing certain linguistic skills which are not accepted by adults (although adults may use these skills themselves), such as swearing and codeswitching. The practicing of these skills goes hand in hand with the negotiation of social relations-perhaps including the celebrated difference in dominance among the gender. This paper studies the development of code-choice patterns and codeswitching skills among boys and girls during their grade school years as a phenomenon related to their social relations. The data are group conversations from grade 1 through grade 9. The conversations in the first grades show clearly Turkish-dominant children introducing Danish words, at first school words, later more generally related words and chunks, into their Turkish. Later again Danish utterances which are not chunks, appear, among the girls earlier than among the boys. In the middle grades, quantitative differences in language choice show that boys gradually introduce Danish into their conversations, but maintain a slight majority of Turkish-based contributions throughout the years. Girls use very little Danish until grade 7, and then much more Danish than Turkish. However, by grade 5 the girls perform differently in girls-only groups from what they do in gendermixed groups. The paper discusses this phenomenon as social group marking. Finally, in the older grades, we see the development of language choice as a means of social exclusion among the girls-something which the boys have not developed as a skill yet, or perhaps never will. When we combine these observations we do not see any evidence of boys acquiring dominant language behavior compared to girls. The girls and the boys seem to develop along the same lines, the boys later than the girls.