Peter Trudgill did research in the 1970's on Norwich speech. He wanted to find out why people's ways of speaking varied. One thing that he studied was the final consonant in words, for example walking, running, talking, etc. He found out that in Norwich, the pronunciation of these words is heard without the 'g'. For example, they say walkin', talkin', etc.
However, Trudgill found that this pronunciation is not a unique thing and happens in more places that just Norwich. He states that "Nearly everywhere in the Eng-speaking world we find this alternation between higher-class/formal ng and lower class/informal n".
From this study, Turdgill discovered that, in all social classes, correct pronunciation of words such as walking and talking are due to how careful the person is when speaking, he found that people in a higher social class can still pronounce it as walkin', too. However, he did find that this type of pronunciation was more common among the lower classes.
He also found that this type on miss pronunciation occurs not only in social class division, but in gender, too. For example, he found that the non-standard pronunciation walkin' occurred a lot more in men's speech rather than in women's. This finding was true for all social classes.
Robin Lackoff also did research on language and gender. She was one of the first linguists to look into the differences and social implications and men's and women's speech. She argued that language is fundamental to gender inequality and she believes this could contribute to the lack of women's power in two different areas - language used by women and language used about women. Lackoff believed that the language used by and about women gives people the impression that women are weaker and have less power and status than men.
She stated that women's language was distinguished in several ways, for example: hedging, 'super' polite informs, hypercorrect grammar and pronunciation, tag questions, use of implication, sense of humour lacking, special lexicon, speaking less frequently, being apologetic, etc.
Bibliography:
http://www.putlearningfirst.com/language/research/norwich.html
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