Giggle, Shriek or Guffaw? How to Speak like a Girl, or a Boy

Fictional people in children’s literature speak in clearly gendered patterns in terms of how characters’ speech is described, what it accomplishes and how the speech acts used to relate to relationships of power and familiarity. Sets of verbsverbs and adverbs are associated with one gender or the other, such as bellowed or giggled, and the meanings found within the representations of speech tend to support traditional stereotypes of appropriate female and male behaviour. Typically, the verbsverbs applied to female speech are associated with trivial emotions and a high pitch, while male verbs are associated with loudness and power. Adverbs relating to speech also tend to support traditional conceptions of gender, with more supplication and emotionality, as well as adverbs of warmth, for female characters, and greater degrees of aggression, but also honour, visible in male modifiers. These differences in representation are important because they contribute to the process of socialisation, giving the child readers information on how to speak as a female or as a male, and the social attitudes attached to these ways of speaking.