Language and gender stereotypes in transition: the Polish context
Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak and Joanna Pawelczyk
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
Recent political and economic change in Poland has brought about a wave of social changes involving the re-appraisal and redefinition of people's social roles. One such change affects gender attitudes and expectations. On the one hand, there exists the traditional concepts of femininity and masculinity drawing on both Catholic and communist ideologies. On the other hand, a new set of values has started to emerge, represented by new stereotypes.
In the first stage of our project we elicited gender stereotypes about language use and conversational strategies. These gender stereotypes were further researched through a questionnaire administered to two groups of informants representing, in our opinion, the old and the new thinking. The questionnaire results revealed the most salient gender stereotypes regarding language use among the Polish women and men of two generations. As a second part of the project, we looked into the role gender stereotypes play in how people perceive speakers' language use and communicative strategies. We aimed at determining whether perceptions reflect the changing stereotypes.
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