Whose speech is more standard?

Penelope Eckert 2003

The linguistic forms we consider "feminine" actually indicate something else, like refinement, and that only indirectly indicates femininity.

But at Belten High in Detroit, bad grammar is associated with rebelliousness. Burnouts sue it a lot more than jocks. Jock girls use use almost no negative concord; burnout girls use it almost exclusively. It signals their rebellious attitude toward authority and school.

Nonstandard grammar is associated with toughness, and lower class girls must be tough. In "the halls of the academe or government," women cannot convey a folksy demeanor because they are more easily discredited as professionals than men. They cannot chance it.

Gender and Sociolinguistic Variation

by Eckert

We cannot consider gender an independent variable, but must consider it in relation to other variations such as socioeconomic status, identity, and regional variation.

Eckert challenged Labov's generalization that women's speech is more conservative than men's by examining two groups of white teenagers at a Detroit high school. The groups were the jocks and the burnouts, who together accounted for about half the school's populations.

Eckert examined phonological variation among jock and burnout males and females. She found that there was a complex relationship between nonstandard vowels and identity, concluding that we cannot look at gender differences without examining the communities of practice in which the women and men use language.