Sociolinguistic Artifacts

This image of “boys’ keypads versus girls’ keypads” shows ideologies about gender and texting. Apparently on a woman’s keypad, there are only three not-so-much-informative words: hm, ok, and oh, while boys seem to text normally, at least in words or sentences. It also shows a phonological feature of women’s texting habits like “hmmmmm, okkkkkk, ohhhhhh” which seems unnecessary when conveying information. In the place of the punctuation button, women apparently use two emojis: smile and wink. This may indicate two things: women’s talk is more cooperative, emotional and encouraging; or women’s talk is mostly not genuine, since whatever others text, women only reply with a happy emoji. Compared to the ideologies that women talk more than men, this keyboard image seems to show women scarcely text anything more than three non-informative words and emojis. However, they both portray a negative image of women’s talk: not too much content. The anecdote also portrays a binary distinction between girls’ talk and boys’ talk, and ignores the varieties of how women/men actually talk in real life.