Gender Related Variation In The Speech Of English And Romanian Adolescents

This book represents a synchronic sociolinguistic analysis of gender-related variation in the speech of English and Romanian adolescents. It is motivated by the belief that variation is a characteristic of natural language, and that a comprehensive understanding of language must include a grasp of the nature and function of variation. The book analyses sociolinguistic features of adolescent speech that occur in natural, spontaneous, everyday speech, thus representing a major contribution to the study of language in its social context.

The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of the gender-related differences between the speech of men and women in a variety of languages spoken all over the world, to discuss gender variation in English and in some varieties of English and to identify gender-related stereotypes in Romanian. The Romanian analysis focuses on adolescents and reveals that there are certain sociocultural norms in their speech behaviour. The use of swearing and taboo language by Romanian adolescents is investigated and analysed.

This book includes a selection of papers in linguistics presented at the 14th Conference on British and American Studies. Its tripartite structure reflects the main topics around which the nineteen contributions cluster. The first part, “Native language profiling: explorations and findings”, displays a variety of methodological approaches aimed at highlighting syntactic, morphological, and lexico-semantic aspects of, primarily, English and Romanian. The papers in the second section, “Aspects of language change, bilingualism, and cross-linguistic variation”, bring to the fore some of the topical issues falling within the ambit of language contact, such as mixed languages, bilingualism, and code-switching, as well as contrastive investigations of language structure. The research strand in the final part, “Meaning and communication within and across cultures”, relates to lexico-pragmatic inquiries into the construction of meaning, focusing on the “language beyond language”, as well as on the extent to which the lexical and pragmatic repertoires of various languages can be made to overlap.

More than 20 years of rapid political, economic, social, and cultural change have turned Southeast Europe into a laboratory of transformative processes - processes that have deeply affected the structures of everyday life and that have resulted in a variety of (post-)modern life styles. The contributions by native and foreign researchers to this first of two volumes shed light on the changing practices and patterns of everyday life in Southeast Europe, many of which differ from those in other parts of Europe. The concepts of multiple modernities and post-modernity appear to be highly appropriate for a region in which - under the combined impact of post-socialist transformation, globalization, and EU integration - everyday life is marked by sharp dichotomies and tensions. Understanding these paths to (post-)modernity is relevant for those interested in the Balkans, as well as for those generally interested in processes of socio-cultural change. (Series: Ethnologia Balkanica - Vol. 15)

Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2 (B), University of Bonn (Rhein. Friedrich-Wilhelms-University, Bonn), course: Proseminar, language: English, abstract: Language is one of the most powerful emblems of social behavior. In the normal transfer of information through language, we use language to send vital social messages about who we are, where we come from, and who we associate with. Since the 1960s, a number of sociolinguistic studies have been carried out to reveal the significance of the interplay between language variation and language change and the effects of social factors on the language of different speaker groups within a speech community. Regional variation and variation due to social class and gender differences have been much discussed in those studies. To a lesser extent sociolinguists have focused on age, ethnicity and networks as social factors. In the following, I will try to describe such differences and the effects of age on the language of speaker groups, namely children and adolescents. I will deal with the linguistic characteristics of both age groups as a steady and continuous development rather than comparing both stages of life with each other. [...]

This collection brings together Peter Trudgill's essays on the sociolinguistic aspects of historical linguistics for the first time.