Editing Indexicality (section)

==== Sex/gender indices ====
One common system of non-referential indexicality is sex/gender indices. These indices index the gender or "female/male" social status of the interlocutor. There are a multitude of linguistic variants that act to index sex and gender such as:

*''word-final or sentence-final particles'': many languages employ the [[suffix]]ation of word-final particles to index the gender of the speaker. These particles vary from phonological alterations such as the one explored by [[William Labov]] in his work on postvocalic /r/ employment in words that had no word final "r" (which is claimed, among other things, to index the "female" social sex status by virtue of the statistical fact that women tend to hypercorrect their speech more often than men);<ref name=wake>Wake, Naoko. Indexicality, Gender, and Social Identity.</ref> suffixation of single phonemes, such as   /-s/  in Muskogean languages of the southeastern United States;<ref name=shifters/> or particle suffixation (such as the Japanese sentence-final use of ''-wa'' with rising intonation to indicate increasing affect and, via second-order indexicality, the gender of the speaker (in this case, female))<ref name=wake/>
*''morphological and phonological mechanisms'': such as in [[Yana language|Yana]], a language where one form of all major words are spoken by sociological male to sociological male, and another form (which is constructed around phonological changes in word forms) is used for all other combination of interlocutors; or the Japanese prefix-[[affixation]] of o- to indicate politeness and, consequently, feminine social identity.<ref name=o>Kamei, Takashi.Covering and Covered Forms of women's language in Japanese.'Hitotsubashi JOurnal of Arts of Sciences' 19:1-7.</ref>

Many instances of sex/gender indices incorporate multiple levels of indexicality (also referred to as ''indexical order'').<ref name=indexicalorder/> In fact, some, such as the prefix-affixation of o- in Japanese, demonstrate complex higher-order indexical forms. In this example, the first order indexes politeness and the second order indexes affiliation with a certain gender class. It is argued that there is an even higher level of indexical order evidenced by the fact that many jobs use the ''o-'' prefix to attract female applicants.<ref name=o/> This notion of higher-order indexicality is similar to Silverstein's discussion of "[[#wine talk|wine talk]]" in that it indexes "an identity-by-visible-consumption<ref name=indexicalorder/> [here, ''employment'']" that is an inherent of a certain social register (i.e. social gender indexicality).