Colloquial modernizations in Taiwanese gendered ‘Spouse talk’

This study explores conventional and current gendered discourses, showing the impact that feminism has had on use of language. Students in two English classes at a teacher preparation college worked with us as facilitators or observers and collected conversations between spouses with the purpose of investigating the social vicissitudes evident in colloquial expressions of couples. A total number of 53 students cooperated with us as facilitators or observers to observe conversation patterns of spouses or what we refer to as ‘spouse talk’ in their own familial and social circles. Thereafter, we interviewed them and began with the open-ended question, “How do contemporary Taiwanese couples talk to each other?” In these interviews, our facilitators or observers largely used Bem’s (1981) sex role inventory to describe the characteristics of conversations between spouses. However, they suggested seven additional adjectives that were not in Bem’s inventory and these were added to our descriptors. The purpose of ...