Peter Trudgill - English language- language and gender

Peter trudgill (1973) explored men’s and women’s attitudes to accent and dialect.

Men are more likely to use prestige pronunciation and use clipping more for example ‘goin’’ . men are more inclined to use non-standard forms such as ain’t or use non-grammatical forms such as double negatives such as ‘I didn’t get nothing’ or ‘I don’t go nowhere’ or irregular past formulations such as I done it. However women are more likely to use prestige pronunciation and Standard English.

Men tend to admit that they may use low prestige language than they actually do whereas women seemingly identified standard speech forms with the high status to which they aspired.

In the highest and lowest socioeconomic groups women’s talk was closer to men’s and vice versa.