Variation and gender in urban Sango

William Samarin

Sat. 11:00-12:40 C

The study of language change in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, challenges the claim of J.K. Chambers, after an examination of only a few studies in non-western societies, that "The female advantage in verbal abilities apparently overrides the sociocultural differences" (1995:144). Nor does W. Labov's attempt to explain cross-cultural differences (1982:79) seem to apply to the present case. We examine here evidence for Sango, the 100-year-old African-based pidgin which began to experience change of different kinds since independence.

Unlike most studies of language change, this one reports on more than one aspect of gender differences.

Linguistic variables. The variables are phonological, five related to specific words undergoing 'contraction' and two to phonological features. (1) From tape-recordings of 104 speakers, 598 instances of the copula/auxiliary reveal no gender correlations in the nineteen forms of this word. (2) In one of the most important changes taking place, both in the variety of the realization and also in the morphological consequences-the reduction of the preposition tí -- there are no gender differences in 1,275 tokens from 628 from 64 male subjects and 637 from 35 female subjects. (3) There is no difference for the locative preposition nà, females more frequently contract the determinant ní, but men in the contraction of álà 'second and third person plural pronoun.' (4) In purely phonetic changes females are more likely to palatalize the consonants /t/ and /d/ before [i] and use some form of the uvular (so-called 'Parisian') [R], in Sango words with an apical tap as well as in French loan words.

Folk linguistics. (1) Two hundred and sixty subjects were asked among other things, whether men or women spoke Sango fastest: male subjects were almost unanimous whereas female subjects almost random (52 percent) in saying that women spoke faster. (2) When 171 subjects were asked to judge the provenience of 18 tape-recorded speakers, 9 from Bangui and 9 from rural areas, male and female subjects judged in no significantly different manner.

Nativization. Three kinds of data reveal patterns of nativization, that is, the acquisition of Sango as the primary language in childhood instead of any ethnic language of the country: 7,956 adult, adolescent, and pre-adolescent subjects selected randomly; 174 subjects school children between the ages of 10 and 15; and parents of 1,065 preschool children aged 3 to 6 from five different ethnic groups, two of them studied twice. Only in the case of adolescents are females more frequently Sangophone than males.

Friendships. In an attempt to find reasons for nativization and language change 106 children of ages 10 to 15 were interviewed randomly in Bangui about the ethnicity of their best friends. These tended to be different ethnicities, more frequently among boys than among girls: i.e., 30 percent vs. 25 percent.

Obviously, more cross-cultural studies of gender differences need to be undertaken before universally applicable generalizations about this matter can be made.