Gender representations

In this picture women are represented as weak. The question 'You mean a woman can open it?' is emphasising that women would not normally be strong enough to open the jar. It's allowing the audience to look at it and assume that they have made it easier to open so a woman can do it. It is suggesting that if a woman can do it anyone can.

This picture is showing exactly what people believe their child should be associated when they are a girl or a boy. As Tannen said the diffrence in he genders language starts at childhood, the magnets are even labled 'boy talk' and 'girl talk' as if girls have to talk using the words on the girl magnets and thr boys have to talk using the words on the boy magnets. Tannen sugested that boys are fed more verbs and this is strong supported by the magnets as the 'boys talk' has words such as 'swinging', 'climbing' and 'running'. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCyw3prIWhc

This video show Ellen talking about Bic For Her pens, she talks about the idea of the pen that is just for women. The pen is meant to be better for 'lady hands' and comes in colours such as pink and purple. Just from the packaging of this pen it is representing the image that most gils have to like the colour pink or purple because they are 'girl' clolours. On the packet of one of the pack of pens it says 'beautifully smooth', the adverb 'beautifully' is sterotypically a feminine word. the idea that now there is a pen for women all other pens were for men and now women have these pens that are pretty colours and fitted for a more feminie hand.

Analysing 7 years by Lukas Graham

It was a big big world, but we thought we were bigger
Pushing each other to the limits, we were learning quicker
By eleven smoking herb and drinking burning liquor
Never rich so we were out to make that steady figure

Once I was eleven years old my daddy told me
Go get yourself a wife or you'll be lonely
Once I was eleven years old

I always had that dream like my daddy before me
So I started writing songs, I started writing stories
Something about the glory, just always seemed to bore me
Cause only those I really love will ever really know me


This song is about growing up, how the writer experienced it and how he is looking towards the future,questioning it. The way the writer is portraying himself is more of a general vision, this may be to allow those listening to relate and think back to their childhood. I think a lot of it is showing the pressures of growing up and to grow up faster. 

Later in the song he says 'soon ill be 60 years old' this could be him telling everyone life is short as he sings about key stages in life. The idea of his dad telling him to find a wife at eleven is showing the pressure and how fast people want children to grow up. The repetition  of 'once i was eleven years old' is like he is reminiscing, this could suggest he may miss being that young.

When he talks about it being a big world but he thought he was bigger is the idea that all children think they know everything . This idea may have influenced how he grew up, it could show that he was a bold child who thought he was bigger than the world, like nothing could drag him down.

He says 'the glory, just always seemed to bore me' which could suggest that he is a down to earth person. The idea of fame and glory is not appealing and as a child he may have been someone who was always in the background and didn't want to be center of attention.

Accents are still a problem

Guardian paper

People have multiple attitudes to accent that can make them very opinionated. 

When people talk about accents they can have very strong views that not everyone agrees with. There are many accent over the UK that are very diffrent from one another, there are people with strong accents to their area or ones that are a mixture. A lot of people love their accent and how it is different from other places in UK and the thought of it spreading is a horrible thought. 

We are judged by how we speak every day, whether its just in a conversation with friends or in a job interview. In the past accent were very separated and you could easily tell where they were from due to their dialect and accent. However, as social media is growing bigger the differences in dialect are becoming smaller and things that used to only be used in one place are now all over the UK. In this day an age those with the wronger accents are either old or they're trying to show pride in where they come from and showing it off whenever they talk to someone. People sometimes change their accents when speaking do different people whether its converging or diverging them. 

A study in the west midlands show that people in places such as Liverpool, Bristol and Newcastle choose their dialect and accent forms self-consciously. Although people may change their accent they also may not want to completely discard them as some suggest that it is a connection to their family and home town.

Even though the strictness of accents have loosened up influential places still have a problem with some. An example is Granny Weatherwax said "my cousin being told when he got a job at the Natwest bank that if he didn't lose his Lincolnshire accent he would never do well in the company". This comment just shows that accents still play an important role in people lives. To some accents may not matter but to others it could show intelligence and that could be very important to employers.

Class survey: Accents & Dialect

                                        Very   Fairly    Neither...nor..   Not very    Not at all
Received Pronunciation
Friendly                           0         3           3                       6                1
Intelligent                        10       4           0                       0                0
Trustworthy                     1        6            6                       1                0
Brummie
Friendly                          0         8            4                       2                0
Intelligent                       0         0            2                       9                3
Trustworthy                    0         4            7                       2                1
Scouse
Friendly                          0         7            4                       1(from Liverpool) 0
Intelligent      (From Liverpool)1        4            5                        4                 0
Trustworthy                    1        6            4                        2                 1

The recieved pronunciation (RP) came across as more intelligent compared to scouse and brummie. The results of the class survey also suggests that the majority believe that they are not friendly. This could indicate a connection between intelligence and friendliness as it seem that people find RP to sound intelligent but not too friendly and brummie to sound friendly but not intelligent. The trustworthiness of RP is a little in the middle with a sway to the positive side.

In the scouse section it is more middle/positive. When it comes to the friendliness of the scouse accent most people were positive but there was an anomaly with a single per on saying that they did not find the accent friendly. However, this may be because she is from Liverpool which is allowing her to have experiences with that accent that others don't, thus the different idea of the accent. This happens again with intelligence, there was one person who voted scouse to sound very intelligent. Although this was different to the others decision it wasn't that different as the rest were very middle orientated not really picking one side from the other.

The recorded voices were 2 men (brummie and scouse) and a women (received pronunciation). This may have swayed people opinions on how they felt about the accents. Something to take into account when looking at these results is that there is not an even ratio of boys to girls in the class which could have made a difference to the results as people may feel more positive or negative to someone who is of the same sex.

Labov's 1966 New York department store research

Labov studied people in department stores in New York it showed that speech patterns were something of a highly systematic structure of social/stylistic stratification. Labov studied how the letter 'r' is pronounced with a word and where it was placed in the word.The letter 'r' had only been reintroduced into the new york accent in 1960. He studied the language of employees in 3 different stores which were all different class. This was because he found that the pronunciation of 'r' occurred and its "frequent of use depended on the speakers’ membership to particular socioeconomic status"

The three locations he used were:

• Saks Fifth Avenue (Expensive upper middle-class store)
• Macy's (Less expensive middle-class store)
• S.Klein ( Discount store used mainly by working-class store)

He made each employee say 'r' four times by getting them to answer questions which lead them to say 'fourth floor'.

Findings: New York was found to be stratified in class, pronounciaion of the 'r' depended on their social status within the employees. People pronounced their 'r's more frequently if they were higher within their social class. 

• Does not work in this day an age as there has been a change within accents (accents merging due to the increase of technology and a change in time - language gradually changing as the years go on)
• Hard to generalise his results (multiple accents)

Bibliography:
http://www.ello.uos.de/field.php/Sociolinguistics/Exemplarystudylabov

http://www.putlearningfirst.com/language/research/labovny.html

Jennifer Lawrence - Why Do I Make Less Than My Male Co-Stars?

What are the important contextual features of this text?
The context of this piece is Jennifer Lawrence talking about how after the sony incident she found out that she earned significantly less that her male co-star workers even though she had a leading role as well as them. She shows how she extremely disagrees with the situation and suggests how some things girls say can come across completely different to if a man said it. For example, asking to be payed more could come across as 'spoiled' or 'difficult' but a man would not have to worry about this. Showing aggression in her text as she explains that men and women should get payed the same and have equal job opportunities.

Comment on the 'male' and 'female' language features in this text. What is their effect on the reader?
Jennifer Lawrence uses both 'male' and 'female' language features frequently in her text. The first thing i noticed was she swears multiple times and according to Lakoff's ideas that support the deficit model it is more of a male thing to swear loads in stead of things like empty adjectives which she suggested is more likely for a woman. Even though she does use 'male' language features she also uses 'women' language feature too. Throughout the whole text she lack humour which Lakoff says is a tendency in women's language features. The lack of humour however could just be because of the subject as it is obvious that she is not happy and is trying to prove a point. She also goes towards the male suggestions by Tannen and the difference model, Jennifer Lawrence is showing more conflict within her writing that compromise which is suggested as what women usually do. This is shown as the text comes across as pretty aggressive rather than a calm suggestive tone which you would expect if you believed Tannen's pairs. The use of both 'male' and 'female' features could show that she is trying to reach out to both sexes, the use of both features could relate to the reader and so it could allow them too understand and relate more.

Do you agree with her conclusion? Justify your answer making reference to the language and gender theories we have looked at in class.
I do agree with Jennifer's points as they are very true and i like that she has spoken in a way that agrees with Deborah Cameron's point on how men and women speaking differently is a myth. It is obvious that Jennifer has used both 'male' and 'female' language features according to Lakoff and Tannen's theories. In this text it is going against most of the ideas said by Tannen and Lakoff, For example, Tannen put the way men and women talk into pairs and one of them is 'orders and proposals'. The text goes against this suggestion as it is obvious that Jennifer Lawrence isn't just suggesting that this is happen and proposing we should do something about it, no, she is stating that its happening and ordering that people think about it.

Dialects are changing

Dialect is language variety in regions, a certain vocabulary and grammar belonging to a particular area (not to be confused with accents). However, dialects are changing, peoples distinct dialects are taking features of other dialect/sociolects. The local variations becoming less distinct is called dialect levelling. There are multiple reasons for dialect levelling, for example geographical mobility, social mobility, economic change and the children/young people of today. 

How much do you use technology? Did you know technology is also a cause for dialect levelling? When doing daily things such as watching youtube or a TV show you are coming into contact with other types of dialect. Listening to podcasts or the radio and even playing music is increasing your interaction with other speech varieties. These social medias are allowing people from young ages to grow up hear other dialects which they could adapt to their own changing it without even fully knowing that they are doing it. 

Other reasons for the change could be that the young people/children of today are conforming to peer pressure. If one person in a group of five talks differently than the rest they are more likely to change how they talk, they'll want to fit in meaning they lose some of their original dialect thats been adopted from parents.

Geographical mobility is people moving around and this allow people to come in contact with other types of dialect. Its a very popular thing to do nowadays; this allows a greater contact of language communities, meaning that it is easier to pick up parts of others dialect. People moving from one end of Great Britain to the other is introducing two different dialect. An example of this would be a person moving from London to Liverpool. Another is social mobility, this is when people moving within social statuses. A study in 1964 by Trudgill found that working class people had the stronger dialects. Even though language has always changed over time the mass in movement between countries and regions within country has created a faster movement of this development.