Updating "gender" as a sociolinguistic variable

Quantitative approaches in the study of language variation have been strongly influenced by the sociolinguistic methodologies established by Labov's (1966 [1982]) study of the speech community of New York's Lower East Side. The sociolinguistic variables that have been pursued and studied in subsequent work have often used the non-linguistic variables that Labov investigated as their primary focus. This has led to some valuable findings both within and across cultures, and perhaps more importantly provided the field of linguistics with a model for reaching out and co-opting the methods and existing insights from other fields as a means of enlightening and furthering linguistic praxis. Indeed, much of the essential early work in sociolinguistics research was conducted by extending the frameworks and interests of other fields such as anthropology and sociology. There has been a recent reemphasis in sociolinguistics, led by researchers working on the interaction of language and gender, to renew this tradition of reaching out to other fields in order to benefit from what they can tell us about the interpersonal functions of languages and communication. Sociolinguistic studies have for some time standardly adopted the methodologies of participant observation or network sampling that are drawn from anthropology and sociology. Recently this has been accompanied by a resurgence in interest in the methodologies and theory that underlie much of the work that has been pursued in social psychology over the last two decades. In this paper1, I will try to bring some of these elements together with some previous findings on how language is used as a social marker. In particular, I will use examples that illustrate speakers' use of linguistic markers as markers of group identity, where the in-group/out-group boundary is drawn on the basis of the speaker's sex. I will attempt to show that previous variationist findings have already shown us the complexity of the notion of sex or gender as a group identity, and that the complexity of a speaker identification like gender or sex lies in its own status as a variable. I will argue that identities vary in their salience from person to person, and even within the same person from one communicative situation to another. I will conclude by presenting a proposal for a model of speaker identity that reflects some of the more important characteristics of speakers' identities that I will have presented, namely: (1) Speakers possess many different identities some personal; some group (or social). (2) Identities vary in their salience in different communicative events, but all of a speaker's different identities are always present and available to them in a communicative event.