What role does social factors like gender, age, class and ethnicity play in language use.

What role does social factors like gender, age, class and ethnicity play in language use.


There are many factors that can influence the language that a person uses in today’s society. There are many factors such as age, gender, class, ethnic and many more which are very important to develop the language being used. These factors are important for it plays the role to classify the group of a speaker through the language.

Gender is one of the factors which play an important part in language. Gender is divided in to two categories, male and female. A female and male tend to talk differently in many ways, which differentiates them from each other. The female tend to speak very softly and polite for they don’t have a deep and husky voice when they speak. For the male, they tend to talk very loud with a high pitch of voice. Due to the differences of gender the tone of speaking of a person is affected.

Thus age is one of the other factors which influence the language as well. The age is one of the main matters for there are many groups of people. There are the young ones, adult, teenagers, and many more. The teenagers tend to speak with a different slang to look cold. While the, older people tend to speak in an advising way. While the young children have their own way of speech, where they have just learn how to speak and have different ways to communicate.

Besides that, the classes are also on one of the factors, where they are divided in to high class, middle class and low class or categories as educated and non-educated. A high class person might talk very good English with proper grammar such as business man, lawyers, doctors and many more. The middle class people talk differently where they mix the language with other languages. The low class people language might be mix with the village style of speaking.

Lastly is the Ethnicity, which is an ethic group of character, background, or affiliation of a person. The classification of a population that shares a common characteristic, such as, religion, traditions, culture, language, and tribal or national origin. This influences the language because there are many different ethnic in Malaysia such as the Malay, Chinese, Indians and others. The ethnic is influence by the multi culture of this country. This is the reason why some individual might have different way of talking due to the mix tradition, culture and religion which affects the language we speak.

These roles is very important as it plays a important part in language and how a it affect the sociolinguistic way of speaking a language.