Project overview
This experimental sociolinguistic project investigates the implicit attitudes relating to female football commentators. A number of high-profile sports-media figures have claimed that women’s voices are “too highpitched” for football commentary. However, results from our pilot study show that listeners judge female commentators with lower-pitched voices less favourably than higher-pitched female voices. This suggests that both implicit and explicit attitudes lead to a strict policing of women’s linguistic behaviour: women are penalised for being feminine and for not being feminine enough. This study builds on these preliminary findings by examining how the penalties evident in ratings of women’s voices are affected when combined with class-based linguistic variability, expanding the experiment to include variations in pitch levels (gender) and between standard and non-standard speech (class). This work will contribute to our understanding of linguistic discrimination at the intersection of class and gender, within the traditionally male-dominated sphere of sports media and beyond.
Staff
Other researchers
Research outputs
Matthew Hunt, Louis Strange & Sophie Holmes-Elliott,
2024, Gender and Language
Type: article