Language in sport teams: expressing gender identity and creating group cohesion

Abstract

This thesis investigated the informal talk of a top level men's and a high level women's sport team. The aim was to identify language features that contributed to team cohesion and/or the expression of gender identity. With participants' consent, the teams' changing room talk was recorded before and after home games, over a competitive season. Approximately one third of the talk recorded for each team was transcribed, producing a corpus of approximately 120 pages. Qualitative analyses suggested that talk that emphasised similarities between team members, provided social rewards, indicated intimacy and equality, and created a low pressure environment appeared to contribute to team cohesion. From these results, suggestions for team building interventions in interactive sport teams are made. Members of both the men's and women's teams appeared to index gender identity through their interactive styles. Both teams framed the opposite gender as 'other'. The men's team simultaneously performed masculinity and indicated a lack of respect for femininity, through talk that consistently derogated women. The women's team displayed more ambivalence in their talk about men, indicating that they admired some aspects of masculinity but rejected others. The men's team used some traditionally masculine language, and appeared to avoid most stereotypically feminine language features. Conversely, the women's team used some traditionally feminine language, and appeared to avoid most stereotypically masculine language features. However, where these linguistic choices could interfere with team cohesion, team members appeared to attend to the maintenance of social relations before the expression of gender identity. For instance, the men's team's high use of affiliative tags conflicted with a masculine identity, but appeared to enhance cohesion by facilitating conversation and emphasising similarities of opinion and perspective. These findings indicated that a 'communities of practice' model, which takes into account the local, interpersonal, and sociohistorical contexts in which talk occurs, provides the most promising approach to the study of the difference that gender makes in language use.