Jan 5 ===== Cheshire:2002 ------------- This paper was written in 2002, almost 20 years ago. Since then, a lot has happened in regards to gender and sex (i.e. more widespread awareness of intersex people, recognition of more than two genders etc.). Could this additional general focus on sex and gender help with identifying both concepts? Does todays definition of sex and gender differ from the one given in the paper? What could future trends look like? This is not so much a critique of Cheshire, but of the single-faceted explanations for gender patterns, esp. those mentioned on page 5 (Gordon 1997, Fasold 1990, Deuchar 1988, Trudgill's 1972 etc.). I think as a SOCIO-linguist, you should be much more aware of the overall social patterns in a society (and how this might differ from other societies, and therefore many explanations may only be valid for a very specific group). While I think all these studies are not completely unaware of this fact, I am surprised how many sociolinguistic studies seems to miss more nuanced explanations that take the complexity and intersectionality of the social factors (including gender) into account. What is the definition of feminism used by the author here? Webster dictionary defines feminism as follows: "the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities" or "organized activity in support of women's rights and interests". But these definitions don't seem to fit the authors use of the term. Lookin at historic studies regarding sex and gender is always difficult, since the usage of those terms has changed so much over the last decades. Looking at these variables and comparing them between papers and studies is difficult at best and can be misleading, since the assumptions made by the researcher and the possible choices for the participants can alter the data significantly. For for a deeper insight in this topic, see Brian Larson. 2017. "Gender as a Variable in NLP: Ethical Considerations." What changes in gender/sex treating have we seen over the past decades (since 2002)in different languages? Is there any evidence to report changes influenced by feminism, LGBT or any other factors? Standard vs nonstandard variants (p.5): I totally agree with the point about prestige, i.e. that standard variants are "overtly prestigious" and signal social status and that nonstandard variants carry covert prestige as they are associated with the working class. However, I think this has less to do with gender, nowdays, and more with skill levels. As they say themselves, social categories are performed not static. I've observed this in my own speech and in my own interpretation of others' speeech: I admire craftsmanship, and consequently I tend to be more impressed by speakers of nonstandard variants. Also, I deliberately use nonstandard variants to signal that I have at least some connection to the working class. Also, I've just recently observed a very interesting case of "code switching" in my cousin. During a TV interview, her speech became less regiolectal when she was talking about her plans to attend university compared to when she was talking about her current apprenticeship. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6wJ8loRhX4 at 4:36 compared to 2:55) In my opinion, Principle 1a and Principle 2 as proposed by Labov seem to be a bit contradictory. Cheshire argues that both principles can be reconciled by taking into account that sex differentiation is usually very small during the first stages of sound change, but increases as the change becomes more established within a speech community. However, this means that at some point predominantly female speakers start to use the new variant which probably cannot be described as being a standard form because it was only recently caused by a sound change. Is "gender" really a factor to include in research about speech processing? With different cultures, different generations interacting constantly, and - most importantly - individuals living lives that correspond to typical gender stereotypes in highly different ways, converging all these potential factors into "gender" seems to toss away a lot of information. If "sex" captures all relevant physical, biological factors, I don't see the reason for "gender" as an appropriate variable. We kown that sex and gender in variationist research are main social factor driving variation and change, can man in the quantitative analyse only consider gender instead of sex? How to understand the social and cultural elaboration of the sex difference? How is the same social class of men and women determined when investigating the use of standard variants? By income and profession? What range of age is investigated because people in their 20's could differ from those in their 40's when it comes to securing and signaling their social status. As a general thought, I appreciated how this article emphasized that gender is culture dependent and a social construct and was careful to distinguish between sex and gender - which was not done in the Johnson or Strand papers. What is the difference between change from above and change from below? Regarding the ethnographically centered studies - Are the vowel realizations associated with certain genders in certain social groups (e.g., Jocks in high school) also seen in those speakers where it's not necessary to perform to be a part of that social group? E.g., in more formal settings, with their families, etc. Regarding Labov's Principle I, is there even such a thing as a stable sociolinguistic stratification? Or is it rather a process that can be faster or slower? Labov's principles deal with causal relationships, which seem like they would be extremely difficult to establish. How have different studies dealt with trying to establish what is actually driving language change? On page 15 Cheshire talks about how it is often difficult to pinpoint an area of investigation in language variation studies, makes me think it may be difficult to find funding in this field using the broad approach I listened to this podcast years ago, so I don't remember how accurate it is, but it seemed relevant (information for a layperson): https://www.iheart.com/podcast/stuff-mom-never-told-you-21123631/episode/are-young-women-ruining-american-speech-30231632/ 1. Some of the citations given seem like they would not fair well as a research paper anymore; if this were recreated in 2022, are there any immediate changes that you would like to see with the paper or things you would like to see removed? One example that seemed very dated was (see reason for asking 1) Gordon (1997) using promiscuity as part of the assessment of symbolic association when it doesn't seem like it fit with the other factors used (local accents and nonstandard accents). Reasons for asking: Pg 5: the paper on Gordon (1997) is brought up and how there are symbolic associations between local accents, nonstandard accents, and promiscuity with middle class women trying to avoid being associated with that stereotype. This seemed like it came out of nowhere as we previously were talking about not having a voice and the 2.5 principles before this (which spoke on standard forms used and innovators). Were men studied under this also gauged on their promiscuity in this cited study and did it have any symbolic association at all? (most likely not possible for presenters to study unless they dug into the citations, but it was interesting as a talking point) Afterthought: This study would probably fair better in 2022 as issues brought up with sex and gender—while still present are now at a point where there is more information on the topics. One particular one is how social class is presented nowadays that there are far more people who work from home and many more house-husbands and far more ambiguous names in the workplace (it was mentioned on pg 7 that men and women do not have equal status in or outside the home). Another one would be for a study to be fleshed out with the newer zeitgeist for gender and orientation being used as primary indicator and for sex to be put on the sideline for the study (as most of gender is far less binary as well as orientation). Labov's Principle II that relates to language change, why do you think that women are defined as the "language innovators"? Why are they defined as such if until not so long ago, being familiar only with the home environment, they were bearers of archaic and conservative linguistic characters? Generally, the innovators have always been men, since unlike women they were in contact with external working and multicultural environments. On the basis of what, then, are women defined as innovators, especially if alsoaccording to the first two principles they prefer standard and prestigious forms of the language?