The acquisition of gender-differentiated language

Abstract

How does “gendering” (Coates, 1993) take place? It is the central question of my thesis, starting with providing a background on the process of how children acquire gender in general, including behaviour patterns and especially, language related to it. The major determining scene of this process, the family, deserves special attention, especially the gender differences in the models parents and other adults provide to children and in the way they treat them. In the last section I will investigate children‟s interaction outside home with same-age peers and the way they use gender-differentiated language in this environment.