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Modern Speech Should Be Less Gender Specific Than Speech

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Abstract
Going into this research product I had a hypothesis involving the way men and women talk today, and the way they talked in the past. Specifically, I hypothesized that modern speech should be less gender specific than speech was in the past. This is based primarily on the fact that we have greater equality between the sexes than we did in the past. So how does this present itself, or does it not? These are the main questions that are addressed in this research project. My approach involved choosing a setting that would accommodate natural conversation, and then recording the interactions between individuals from both genders. I then carefully analyzed the data and compared it to the expected results set forth by the sociolinguistic community.

Any social hierarchy will have a discrepancy between how the dominate and the subordinate perceive the environment they live in. Gender inequality is an example of how a hierarchy creates a “gap” in which the genders are at the opposite spectrum of the social ladder. Eisikovits (1988, 45) clearly pointed out that not only the perception, but also the norms in regards to behavior, are different between the two genders. These perceived norms make a distinction between what is thought of as right or wrong for each sex. It essentially limits what an individual can do based on their gender, and creates two different subcultures in the process. With this logic, it’s easy to understand why there would be a

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