Paper 2

Language Diversity and Change

Example Paper 2 Exam

Section A

Diversity and Change

Answer one question in this section.

Either

1. Evaluate the idea that social groups use language in order to exclude others (30 marks)

Or

2. Evaluate the idea that the English language has been been decaying over time and continues to do so (30 marks)

Section B

Language Discourses

Answer both question 3 and 4 in this section.

Paper 2 Section B : Language Discourses

Q3. Text A is the start of an article from The Guardian online on gendered language. Text B is an article from The Telegraph online about gendered language.

Analyse how language is used in Text AQ and Text B to present ideas about gendered language. In your answer you should

• Examine any similarities and differences you find between the texts

• Explore how effectively the texts present their views

Text A (abridged)

Allow me to womansplain the problem with gendered language

Arwa Mahdawi (The Guardian)

She is a #Girlboss. She is a mumtrepreneur. She is a SheEO. He is a manterrupter. A mansplainer. A manspreader. He is always bropropriating women’s ideas. She is a feminazi. He’s got a dadbod and the man flu. What is it with the growing popularity of overtly gendered neologisms? From chick flicks to dick pics, from boss babes to guyliner, there has been a proliferation of his or hers portmanteaux. 

Much of this is feminism’s fault, naturally. There has been more scrutiny of everyday sexism; words such as manspreading and manterrupting simply give a name to behaviour that was taken for granted before. There has also been more discussion of women in the workplace, leading to a rise in supposedly empowering labels such as girlboss, a term popularised by Sophia Amoruso, the founder of online retailer Nasty Gal. In 2014, Amoruso wrote a bestselling memoir/self-help book for entrepreneurially minded millennial women called #GIRLBOSS and the word entered the popular vernacular – it is now a Netflix show. 

Neologisms such as girlboss and SheEO are supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, of course. They are supposed to illuminate the fact that words such as boss and CEO are not actually gender-neutral, but implicitly coded as male, that language is “man made”, as the feminist Dale Spender put it, and reinforces a male world view. However, I can’t help feeling that, when it comes to girlboss, that subtlety has been lost. There are 5,491,625 pictures tagged with #girlboss on Instagram. It has become a cutesy girl-power phrase that is less empowering than it is patronising. It doesn’t tear down the sexism encoded in language, it reinforces it. 

The same is true of the manifold vocabulary for manshaming. Words such as manspreading or mansplaining are – or at least they were – useful. If you don’t have a name for something, then it is harder to talk about and it is taken less seriously. But mansplaining and the various other man-words have become overused and diluted. They have gone from making an important point to simply being lazy ways to reinforce gender binaries. Men are like this; women are like that. 

Text B (abridged)

The 'sexist' words your children are no longer allowed to use at school

Teachers are to be issued guidelines from the Institute of Physics detailing the words which are to be banned from the playground.

By Helena Horton

Children as young as five are going to be admonished for using language that enforces gender stereotypes as new guidelines are sent to every school in England this Tuesday.

School students are no longer allowed to use sexist language to bait each other in the playground, such as ‘man up’ and ‘go make a sandwich’, and headteachers are being urged to ensure that sexist language is taken as seriously as racist language. 

These guidelines come from a report by the Institute of Physics.

In response, some schools are creating volunteer squads of girls to police sexist attitudes and report back to teachers.

Schools are also being asked by the report to appoint senior teachers as ‘gender champions’, appointing them with the task of encouraging more girls to take traditionally ‘male’ subjects such as economics, computer science and physics at GCSE and A level and more boys to take ‘female’ subjects such as English Literature, foreign languages and psychology.

Stereotypes are blamed for the fact that there is a gender divide in the subjects taken at GCSE and A Level. Only 19% of girls who scored an A* in GCSE physics studied it at A level in 2011. This contrasts to the amount of boys - just under half of whom scored an A* in physics studied it at A level in the same year.

Boys are twice as likely to study maths, three times as likely to study further maths and more than four times as likely to take A Level physics.

The stereotypes hold true with the ‘female’ subjects  as well ; twice as many girls studied English A-level as boys in 2014 while 70%of psychology A-level students were women.

Clare Thomson of the Institute of Physics, who helped to draw up the guidelines, told The Sunday Times : ‘Even low-level comments are potentially an issue with teachers using phrases such as ‘man up’’

The subject choice  gender divide has been partially blamed for the pay gap - women currently earn 19% less than men, as the ‘female’ subjects are often thought of as ‘soft’ subjects and tend to lead to lower-paid careers.