ABSTRACT
One area of study in sociolinguistics has involved the extent to which one can correlate a person’s sex with his or her use of linguistic variables. 1 A finding reported by a large number of studies is that men use linguistic features which are stigmatized or nonstandard to a greater extent than women do. However, other studies have found no difference between the sexes in this respect, while still other studies have found the opposite pattern, in which women use stigmatized features to a greater extent than men do. Similar patterns have been found in communities in which more than one language is used and where one language has more prestige than the other. Men often use the less prestigious language to a greater extent than women do; however, the opposite pattern also occurs.
