Gendered Language Attitudes toward Language Varieties amongIranian People

The concept of language attitude as an exploratory variable has been the focus of many social psychology studies from 1920 and this field has gone under extensive theoretical and empirical developments since then (McKenzie, 2010). Language attitude studies proved the tendency of female listeners toward evaluating the non-standard speakers less favorable than male raters (Cavallaro and Chin, 2009). However, far too little attention has been paid to this issue in the context of Iran. Hence, this study extracted the language attitudes by means of Matched-guise Technique and open guise. Seventy participants (40 females and 30 males) living in Golestan province, a northern city of Iran, were selected to evaluate standard and non-standard varieties of Farsi. The results proved a new trend of evaluation in Matched-guise Technique, that is, female judges were more positive toward the non-standard variety than males. The possible reasons for the new current of these results can be attributed to the cultural roots that are discussed finally

Keywords:

Language attitude , Matched-guise Technique , Open guise , Gender , Speech style