Gender Differences in the Evolution of Standard English

Abstract

This article focuses on a sociolinguistic issue that is for the first time evidenced on a nationwide scale in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is the supralocaliza - tion of a number of regional features that in the course of time became part of the morphology of Standard English. I will argue that the social variable of gender had an important role to play in the diffusion of these supralocal features. This is of con - siderable interest, especially as overt prescriptivism and normative grammar had little or no influence on these processes before the late seventeenth century. In present-day British English, processes of supralocalization are typically wit- nessed in phonology. These ongoing processes of dialect leveling include such well-known cases as the diffusion to Norwich and the rest of East Anglia of a number of London features. A case in point is the initial fricative merger in words such as thing and thought. The merger diffused rapidly: in Trudgill's (1986, 54) Norwich surveys, adolescents born in 1957 did not have it at all, whereas those born in 1967 used it extensively. Other processes of supralocalization may be slower. The loss of /h/, for instance, has been diffusing outward from London into East An- glia over the past 150 years and is now well established (Trudgill 1986, 44).