Jennifer Lawrence

The context of this text is that Jennifer Lawrence had noticed after the Sony hacking scandal that she was earning significantly less than her male co-stars in one of the films that she starred in. She too was one of the main characters in the film but still manages to earn less. This is Jennifer explaining her view and actions she took in retaliation to the scandal. She is discussing that fact that she believes that men and women should be earning equal amounts and that there should be equal opportunities in the work place. She shows a lot of aggression in her text.
In this context, Jennifer Lawrence uses many 'male features' in this text. She uses swear words on several occasions. According to Lakoff, this is a predominately male way of speaking which contradicts her stereotype that women only use empty adjectives and emphatic language. However, in the text, Jennifer does use one of Lakoff's stereotypes throughout the text, she always uses correct grammar features such as commas, quotation marks and full stops where men perhaps wouldn't have taken the time to do so. Another of Lakoff's 'female' features of speech Lawrence manages to contradict is that women use hedges in order to soften or weaken something, Jennifer simply wrote the sentence 'Fuck that'. Nothing about this sentence suggests that she is trying to weaken or soften her point. She is quite clearly getting straight to the point. Lawrence does not use humour at all throughout the text. She is very direct and serious which again is one of Lakoff's trends of female spoken language. If it was a male writing this in contrary to a female, then he might have tried to find the humour in the situation and get his message across in some what of a humorous way. Jennifer also uses another of Lakoff's typical female speaking features when she uses a tag question at the end of one of her sentences, 'I should have written a check, but I fucking forgot, okay?' She displays male features here as well however as she is showing clear aggression and swears but Lakoff believes that the use of the tag question at the end is a typical female thing to do in spoken language. All of these effects make the reader look at Jennifer as a more empowering and strong woman. Perhaps this is because men are predominately thought of as leaders and strong figures in society so when a female such as Jennifer Lawrence appears and uses stereotypical male features in her language, it makes the reader think of her in the same way that they might think male leaders to be.
I do not agree with Lakoff's conclusion in the way that male and females speak in spoken language as quite clearly, her stereotypes of the way women speak have been mostly contradicted in this case. Also, in most cases I think that her opinion is completely untrue as she claims that women have no sense of humour, however there a multiple women all over the world that are very well known and proclaimed comedians in their own rights.

How are dialects changing?

Dialect is a particular form of a language that is particulate to a specific region or social group. It varies depending on where about you are from. Because of the huge diversity of cultures and religions in different cities, there is not just one dialect per city. Because of the amount of foreign people living in different cities to their home towns, the number of dialects is rapidly increasing.

We all know the stereotypes for the way in which English people speak. Everyone seems to think that we as English people speak in a received pronunciation accent. They seem to think of English people as being very posh and this is how we are widely thought as across the world. What they don't seem to realise is that in England alone we have so many different dialects and more and more are coming about throughout the years.

Because of all of the developments of the travel industry, people are able to travel around the world more quicker and easier than ever before, even just travelling around your own country from city to city. This has led to people picking up different phrases and words from other cities and bringing them home with them and then these words are becoming apart of their everyday language. Also, this then starts to spread within the hometowns. Not only is travel affecting our dialects, but other things as well. One of the biggest other affecting factors on our dialects is social media. Now a days, we can speak to people all around the globe from the comfort of our own bedrooms and can watch all different types of people on things such as YouTube. Also, music culture affects our dialects with so many popular singers and rapping performing in American accents. People in countries that do not speak English still listen to artists who sing in English, this also affects their dialects.



www.decodedscience.org/dialects-reveling-in-linguistc-freedom/7365