The Influence of Gender on Dialect Speakers’ Speech Behaviour

In the article, the gender approach is used in the context of a dialectological study in order to identify the features of dialect discourse that could be caused by the gender characteristics of informants. Russian dialect data collected in the Middle Volga region became the source of the material for this study. First of all, attention is drawn to the thematic content of male and female dialect texts, which is connected with the circle of male and female occupations. Women’s interest is directed inside the “inner circle”, her own microsociety. Thus, the female dialect discourse includes the house, the way of life, economy, family, local traditions, rites, holidays, games, etc. Subjects of male texts cover the “distant” human environment. The main topics of the male dialectal discourse are agricultural activities, building, crafts, and fishing. The texts of male informants are on the history of the village, family, local microtoponyms, the ethnic and confessional history of the land, features of local nature. The informativity of male texts is manifested in different spheres of language. In the lexical sphere, men mostly use dialect units with concrete meanings often introduced by metalinguistic explanatory commentaries; substantives with objective meaning and verbs of concrete action prevail. Women mostly use evaluative adjectives and adverbs, verbs of sense perception. Records of female dialect speech are a very valuable source for the replenishment of the dialect dictionary with expressive vocabulary, which is not always possible to fix in conversations about rural labour. Syntactically, women use more complex, generally polypredicative utterances with explanatory inserts, quotations of direct speech in their texts; men generally use simple utterances. The dialect speaker’s gender potential can be used more efficiently when collecting the dialect data. However, the study of male and female dialect texts has shown that the gender factor in dialect discourse interacts with other social parameters, such as, for example, informants’ level of education and pattern of social activity, which can level out and neutralise the influence of the gender factor on the organisation of the dialect text.

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