Sekseverschillen In Het Franse Taalgebruik: Een Exploratief Onderzoek Naar Lexikale Verschillen.

Quantitative research has been done on sex differences in French spoken language. A corpus of 51 interviews was fed into a computer with sex and age as independent variables.Approximately the same word categories were examined as Gerritsen & de Jong tested in Dutch: categories that reflect the polite, correct and insecure behaviour of women and categories of "female" words (adorable, etc.) and "male" words (pompous words), categories of words referring to special subjects (house, sports, etc.).Some other catagories, not studied by Gerritsen & de Jong, were introduced, like personal pronouns (subject).The results in French confirm the Dutch results. Significant differences are found in so far as it concerns the subject people talk about. Other significant differences were found concerning abstract words ("male" words) and personal pronouns (used more by women than by men). No other signifi-cant differences were found.