Social Class, Sex and Linguistic Coding

Abstract

It was hypothesized that specific styles of linguistic coding would be evident along the dimensions of both social class and sex. Individual structured interviews were undertaken with 96 sixteen-year-olds, divided into equal social class/sex groups. The verbatim transcripts were examined along selected aspects of linguistic coding: structure, elaboration, prepositional and pronominal usage, and speech disruptions. Discriminant function analysis, extended and supplemented by analysis of variance, was used to test the hypothesis of differential coding patterns for the social class/sex groups. The discriminant analysis showed that the 28 linguistic variables, in combination, distinctly separated the social classes on Discriminant Function I and that Discriminant Function II separated the groups in terms of the sex dimension.