Research into male and female language

This Language Log post collects some interesting statistics from a couple of corpus studies into the empirical differences between male and female language use. The caveat at the end about the culturally bound, public-space construction of appearances -- rather than any 'natural' differences -- is important to note. 

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=13873

Language and Facebook

After the world's most unsurprising headline, there's some interesting research about language trends in Facebook correlated to social identity.

http://mashable.com/2012/01/06/facebook-emotions//

Young Women Often Trendsetters in Vocal Patterns

Language change happening now, folks, and here's who's leading it. Some phonological change as well as, like, lexical/pragmatic.

Young Women Often Trendsetters in Vocal Patterns
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-trendsetters-in-vocal-patterns.html?_r=1

Vintage Ad Sexism

I'm almost loath to post this, but it's such a goldmine of loaded language, I can't resist. It's certainly funny - but at least in equal parts scary, that this seemed okay not so long ago. Things are subtler today, but keep your eye out for assumptions in advertising language now. 

Vintage Ad Sexism
http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/2011/06/vintage-ad-sexism/

Spoken style correction: the iPeeve™

There's like, loads of articles about 'like' today. 

Spoken style correction: the iPeeve™
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3223

"Like” youth and sex

This is like, a really cool article. 

"Like" youth and sex
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3226

The Epicene Pronouns

The who? The huh? Epicene means 'gender-neutral' - so it describes the pronoun you want, which English doesn't have, when you want to refer to a person of either gender instead of saying 'he or she' in full, or calling a person 'it'.

Here's a list compiled by Dennis Baron of all the proposals that have been made over the last hundred years or so for a pronoun to serve this purpose. You'll notice none of them have caught on. (My favourite is h'orsh'it.)

http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/essays/epicene.htm

Between you and me, the answer to this conundrum is undoubtedly to say 'they', which everyone does anyway. If anyone tells you this is hard to understand or leads to terrible ambiguity, point out that no-one has had trouble with the plural/singular 'you' since 'thou' died out.

The Naipaul test: Can you tell an author's sex? | Books | guardian.co.uk

Lots of posts today. Try the The Naipaul test: Can you tell an author's sex? By what criteria will you do so? How do you separate the gender of a character from the gender of the writer creating it?