This study presents the results of a sociolinguistic experiment on language attitudes in Russian. The experiment aimed to identify stereotypes about the relationship between gender and politeness and to examine whether certain linguistic choices tend to be associated with male or female speakers. Moreover, it investigated whether and to what extent linguistic gender stereotypes influence individuals’ evaluations of linguistic (im)politeness, specifically, whether the same utterances are evaluated differently depending on the presumed gender of the speaker.

The study focuses, in particular, on formulations of requests and prompts to action in Russian. This choice is motivated by the fact that these communicative acts are particularly subject to discursive conventions and social expectations, and, therefore, the way they are formulated might be strongly associated with traditional gendered communication norms. Previous research in Russian gender linguistics shows that, as a result of traditional societal roles, men are generally expected to be more direct and assertive in interaction, whereas women are supposed to be more indirect and cooperative, especially when requesting others to do something. Based on these premises, the working hypothesis is that participants will tend to  associate direct, more concise, and unmitigated request formats with male speakers, and indirect, verbose and mitigated requests with female speakers. Moreover, the same utterance will be evaluated as more polite when imagined to be produced by a woman than when attributed to a man, reflecting the stereotype that women are more polite than men in interaction.

This experiment is based on two online questionnaires, containing 19 requests and prompts to action derived from the transcripts of two corpora of Russian spoken language (Odin Rechevoy Den’ and Rech’ Moskvichey). A total of 251 Russian-speaking respondents participated in the experiment. The majority resided in Estonia and Russia and had a multilingual profile, using up to five languages daily. 

In the main questionnaire, 125 participants were asked, for each request, to guess the speaker’s gender and evaluate the degree of politeness on a 5-point scale. This served to examine both linguistic gender stereotypes and politeness evaluation depending on imagined gender. The auxiliary questionnaire was designed to gather more neutral politeness evaluations. It included the same requests, but in this case 126 participants only evaluated the degree of politeness. The gender-guessing task and any reference to gender were removed.

The results confirmed both hypotheses. Participants’ responses revealed systematic associations between linguistic formulations and gender. They also highlighted the strong effect of these stereotypes on politeness perception, as in 17 cases, the same request was judged as more polite when imagined as being said by a woman.