A Sociolinguistic Reading: Susan Glaspell’s Trifles

The study of linguistics in various social contexts is known as “sociolinguistics”, which is the study of how language and society interact. Gender and language are one of the most contentious topics of sociolinguistics after the 1970s with the studies of Otto Jespersen, Robin Lakoff or Deborah Tannen. Within the variables of gender, based on the field of sociolinguistics, the “speech” between men and women possess the priority in research studies of linguists. The women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s brought the linguistic approach to gender, which in turn led to the development of feminist linguistics. Some sociologists and anthropologists have recently examined the ways in which men and women use their respective languages for communication, and they have seen this area as crucial to comprehending the differences between the sexes. Based on her theory, “genderlects”, Tannen states that men and women have different ways of speech because women utilize a “rapport style” that is more focused on establishing and preserving connections, while men tend to employ a “report style” that aims to convey information. This study, therefore, involves the analysis of “women’s speech” in Susan Glaspell’s one-act play Trifles within the theories of Deborah Tannen’s “genderlects” to exemplify the linguistic variants of female characters.