The role of age and gender in grammatical variation in world Englishes

Young speakers and women have been identified as leaders of language change in the English language. However, sociolinguistic studies addressing grammatical variation according to the age and gender of speakers are infrequent in world Englishes mainly due to the dearth of corpora with explicit detai...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:World Englishes 2023-06, Vol.42 (2), p.327-343
Main Authors: Suárez‐Gómez, Cristina, Seoane, Elena
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age differences
Creativity
English language
Gender differences
Grammar
Language change
Language shift
Language Variation
Meaning
Relative clauses
Sociolinguistics
World Englishes
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Young speakers and women have been identified as leaders of language change in the English language. However, sociolinguistic studies addressing grammatical variation according to the age and gender of speakers are infrequent in world Englishes mainly due to the dearth of corpora with explicit detailed metadata. In this paper we explore the effect of these two factors on language innovation and creativity as represented in the International Corpus of English (ICE). For that purpose, we have selected two high‐frequency grammatical phenomena: (i) the expression of perfect meaning, which exhibits variability between different forms; and (ii) relative clauses, with variation in the use of relativizers. A preliminary analysis of the variable age shows that young speakers behave differently as regards both the expression of perfect meaning and the choice of relativizers. With this study we hope to contribute to this still small but growing body of sociolinguistic research on grammatical variation in world Englishes.
ISSN:0883-2919
1467-971X
DOI:10.1111/weng.12546