Language Variation: A Case Study of Gender Differences in Wolof-French Codeswitching

Research on how gender affects language have been long documented by several studies in the world. In many of these works, mostly done in variationist sociolinguistics, it has been claimed that women and men are different in their speech from one another. The paper investigates gender variation in Wolof-French codeswitching. More specifically it examines how male and female codeswitching are different in terms of frequency, types and other linguistic forms. The conversations of twelve Wolof-French bilingual students and office workers are analysed in this study. Results from this study show that women codeswitch more frequently than men. The study also indicates that intra-sentential codeswitching is the mostly used type in men’s and women’s speech. It has also been shown that the French discourse marker “quoi” is far more used in men speech and constitutes then a linguistic feature that differentiates men and women language. However, even if both genders prefer intra-sentential types of codeswitching, women tend to use it more 61,44% of their speech against 56,66% for men. Men, on the other hand, produce more inter-sentential codeswitching instances than women 13,02% against 12,53%.