Changing Femininities: The Talk of Teenage Girls [1999]

Abstract

In this chapter,¹ I shall ask the question: When do girls start to talk like women? There is little research which focuses on developmental aspects of language use in relation to gender, and we therefore know very little about the ways in which children become gendered speakers. I shall make the assumption that ‘talking like a woman’ is something that speakers learn to do, not something we are born with. I shall also assume that we now have a reasonably clear idea of the speaking practices of women (see, in particular, Coates 1996a; Holmes 1995) and that girls do not share these practices. Girls’ talk has been studied in a variety of cultures and from a variety of perspectives (see Eckert 1993; Eder 1993; Goodwin 1990), but these studies are synchronic. They present us with a snapshot of girls’ speaking practices but do not help us to answer the question of how — and when — these practices are modified in the direction of the adult norm.²