Summary: | This article is focused on gender expectations linked with girl‘s speech. Stereotypical ideas regarding gender-specific behavior are still prevalent in today’s society and preconceptions which define “lady-like“ character, as well as what constitutes the appropriate speech of a “polite girl”, still exist. This article detects the expectations linked with girls‘ speech as perceived by young people in contemporary society and describes the ways in which girls live up to these expectations. Mixed methods were used to investigate this thesis; those included a questionnaire distributed to one- hundred students and twelve semi-structured interviews with both male and female subjects who participated in the quantitative part of this research. The research found that the opinion that girls’ speech is subject to greater social control is widely held by young people. Even though the rules of speech for “polite” girls have shifted nowadays and are less explicit than in the past, girls still have to balance and watch their speech more than boys. Furthermore, despite the fact that conversational partners expressed a fair amount of egalitarian opinions and highlighted the diffusion of male and female “worlds”, it was still apparent that their upbringing in a gender-separated society has had an effect on their gender-separated thinking.
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