PROSODY OF GENDER ON THE BRITISH ISLANDS

Abstract

Gender research is a new area of humanities that is now in the making. It focuses on the cultural and social factors that determine society’s attitudes towards men and women, the behavior of individuals in connection with belonging to gender, stereotypical perceptions of male and female qualities – all that transforms gender issues from the field of biology into the field of social life and culture.
The article deals with the difference between male and female voices within frequency, dynamic and temporal characteristics of various regional types of British pronunciation. Intonation appears as a multicomponent system formation in which social and regional peculiarities within individual groups of speakers are refracted in a complex, indirect way, being in constant dialectic unity. The author suggests that frequency of the main tone is one of the main factors which stipulates male and female voices’ specifics. The conducted experiment convinced us that for an objective reflection of the contemporary variation of English intonation on the British Isles, it is necessary to take into account the factors of social and situational variability of speech. A significant difference between male and female voices is observed in the frequency of the descending tones. Both men and women tend to increase descending tones, but women are ahead of men in this direction, increasing the frequency by 22% vs 13%. Accordingly, the frequency of ascending tones decreases, and this trend is largely manifested by women. Consequently, women are particularly sensitive to current trends in the use of tones and become agents of innovation.