Men's Identities and Patterns of Variation 1 Introduction

The sex pattern in language variation, in which men use non-standard variants more than women, has proven to be one of the most widespread phenomena in variation research. While many explanations for men's linguistic behavior have been proposed, few have been based on in-depth social science research, and even fewer on research on men's identities. Because people communicate identity through language use, it is important to consider research on social identity when constructing explanations for language use. When studying the sex pattern and men, then, we should ask what it is about men's identities that leads them to value aspects of non-standard language varieties. In this paper, I attempt to connect men's everyday identities, the surrounding cultural forces helping to shape those identities, and their use of the non-standard variant of one linguistic variable. Research on language and gender and gender studies in general suggests that power is central to men's identity, and it is in the notion of men's identities as powerful that I find the explanation for men's non-standard usage.! Socioeconomic status, or prestige, is the normal conception of power in variation studies. These studies make the basic assumption that socioeconomic power is indexed through standard language use (as shown by a correlation between socioeconomic status and variant use, following Labov 1966). But power may come in forms other than structural socioeconomic status; in fact, research on men's identities suggests that men who lack socioeconomic power often construct identities that are powerful in other ways, sometimes destructively so (see Connell 1995). One common alternate source of power employed by men is physical power. I propose that when men use more non-standard variants, they do so to help create a powerful identity based on physical power rather than structural power.2 I demonstrate in detail how this process works through an analysis of the (ING) variable in the speech of members of a small, homogeneous community of practice: a college fraternity. Even within this homogeneous community, men's identities vary with respect to their constructions of powerful identities. I focus on two men who use more of the non-standard variant, [m] (which I will refer to as N), than other men in a more formal and public meeting activity type. In meetings, most fraternity men shift toward the standard variant ([II)], or G); in contrast, these two men actually shift toward N in the meeting