Abstract
Research on how gender affects language have been long documented by several studies in the world. In many of these works, mostly done in variationist sociolinguistics, it has been claimed that women and men are different in their speech from one another. The paper investigates gender variation in Wolof-French codeswitching. More specifically it examines how male and female codeswitching are different in terms of frequency, types and other linguistic forms. The conversations of twelve Wolof-French bilingual students and office workers are analysed in this study. Results from this study show that women codeswitch more frequently than men. The study also indicates that intra-sentential codeswitching is the mostly used type in men’s and women’s speech. It has also been shown that the French discourse marker “quoi” is far more used in men speech and constitutes then a linguistic feature that differentiates men and women language. However, even if both genders prefer intra-sentential types of codeswitching, women tend to use it more 61,44% of their speech against 56,66% for men. Men, on the other hand, produce more inter-sentential codeswitching instances than women 13,02% against 12,53%.
Highlights
Codeswitching1 is generally defined as the use of more than one code or language in a conversation or speech act that can involve a word, a phrase, a sentence, or several sentences
To clarify the use of the term ‘codeswitching’ and other related phenomena, [3, 2] explain that code changing referred to using one code in one sentence and another code in the second sentence of the same speech event. This is different from code mixing which was defined as a use of free and bound morphemes from different codes in the same sentence while codeswitching was used as a cover term for both code changing and code mixing
The present study examines how male and female languages are different through WolofFrench codeswitching
Summary
Codeswitching (hereafter CS) is generally defined as the use of more than one code or language in a conversation or speech act that can involve a word, a phrase, a sentence, or several sentences This switch can be inter-sentential (between sentences) and intra-sentential (within sentence boundaries). To clarify the use of the term ‘codeswitching’ and other related phenomena, [3, 2] explain that code changing referred to using one code in one sentence and another code in the second sentence of the same speech event This is different from code mixing which was defined as a use of free and bound morphemes from different codes in the same sentence while codeswitching was used as a cover term for both code changing and code mixing. For the purpose of this study I refer to the use of free or bound morphemes from more than one source language in the same conversation as codeswitching
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