JĘZYKOWA „ZMIANA PŁCI”. NARRACJA MĘSKA I KOBIECA W WYPRACOWANIACH LICEALISTÓW
The linguistic “genderswap”. Male and female narration in upper-secondary school students’ stories

Summary/Abstract: Differences in the linguistic communication of men and women have been studied since the beginning of the 20th century, with the focus on English. Research on gender issues in Polish has been scarce, with only several published works, usually based on the authors’ informal and random observations of oral communication between males and females [e.g. Handke 1986; 1990; 1995]. There are only a few detailed empirical studies carried out in groups of sociolinguistically homogeneous participants and with the use of reliable research methods. The present paper offers the first analysis of Polish teenagers’ views and ideas on the language used by the opposite gender on the basis of an innovative language experiment. 20 female and male upper-secondary school students were asked to give a written account of either a party they had recently attended or a school trip. Afterwards, theparticipants were requested to describe the same events from the perspective of a person of the opposite gender. A comparison of the pairs of texts written before and after the “gender swap” enabled us to identify the major features of male and female language as seen by the participants while an examination of the original stories revealed their genuine characteristics. The obtained results imply that in writing the second version of the text the subjects were guided mainly by gender-related cultural and linguistic stereotypes, which rarely corresponded to the actual properties of the language used by girls and boys in the analysed works.

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