Language Variation: A Case Study of Gender Differences in Wolof-French Codeswitching

Abstract

Research on how gender affects language have been long documented by several studies in the world. In many of these works, mostly done in variationist sociolinguistics, it has been claimed that women and men are different in their speech from one another. The paper investigates gender variation in Wolof-French codeswitching. More specifically it examines how male and female codeswitching are different in terms of frequency, types and other linguistic forms. The conversations of twelve Wolof-French bilingual students and office workers are analysed in this study. Results from this study show that women codeswitch more frequently than men. The study also indicates that intra-sentential codeswitching is the mostly used type in men's and women's speech. It has also been shown that the French discourse marker "quoi" is far more used in men speech and constitutes then a linguistic feature that differentiates men and women language. However, even if both genders prefer intra-sentential types of codeswitching, women tend to use it more 61,44% of their speech against 56,66% for men. Men, on the other hand, produce more inter-sentential codeswitching instances than women 13,02% against 12,53%.

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“…However, the total number of code-switched instances in woman-oriented magazines exceed approximately twice the quantity of CSs used in men-oriented publications. Our research results are similar to Chan (2012) and Kane (2020) who suggest gender variation in bilingual data. However, the findings contradict the previous study indicating that there is no significant gender difference in CSs (e.g., Gardner-Chloros 2009).…”

“…However, Chan demonstrates that there is a big difference in the frequency of CSs used by male and female speakers during discourse. Women switch much more often than men (Chan 2012, Kane 2020. Kane investigates gender variation in Wolof-French CSs.…”

Pragmatic Features of Code-switches in Gender-oriented Glossy Magazines

“…. Overall, our research contributes to the field of gender and pragmatic analysis of CSs in bilingual speech (Jagero and Odongo 2011, Chan 2012, Huang et al 2020, Kane 2020. The gender dimension of our research can offer insights into the perspectives of conducting a sociolinguistic study focused on ethnicity and age.…”

The Effect of Dual Language Activation on L2-Induced Changes in L1 Speech within a Code-Switched Paradigm

“…The difference between males and females was also apparent in the individuals who exhibited significant shifts in code-switched speech, where the males clearly outnumbered the females (with 4 males as opposed to 1 female shifting [w] towards [v] and 11 males versus 2 females shifting [s] towards [S]). It may be that adult women (the pattern is less clear in children) are more "experienced" code-switchers, as they are sometimes reported to code-switch more often than men in various social contexts (Alicea 2001;Hafissatou 2020;Wong 2006). Experienced code-switchers, in turn, have been found to exhibit less short-term cross-language phonetic interaction (Šimáčková and Podlipský 2015), which may provide a tentative explanation of the observed shifts between males and females in our study.…”