I was just reading in a quasi-Psychology magazine, unscientific, that women are more likely to introduce new words and pronunciations into a language. Are there any scientific studies to back that up that you are aware of?

I was just reading in a quasi-Psychology magazine, unscientific, that women are more likely to introduce new words and pronunciations into a language. Are there any scientific studies to back that up that you are aware of?

Off the top of my head, no. I can probably answer that when I get my free review copy of a Psycholinguistics book this week (although, technically, this question is, imo, more sociolinguistics).

 

I think that would be a true statement, though, because if you look at linguistic studies (corpus analysis, and spoken word analysis for dialect, words, etc) they typically use older males because their language is more invariant. Women tend to take on some characteristics of the people to whom they are talking, whereas men's accents and talker specific attributes are more static.

 

When my text comes I'll look into that. . .