ABSTRACT
Linguistic investigations into sex-differentiated language were a late development even within the sociolinguistic field of enquiry, which focuses on the relation between language and society. Sex as a variable was not regarded as significant enough, in contrast to class, age, status, region, ethnicity, etc. which were the major factors seen to influence language use. The fact of linguistic sex differentiation had been noted in linguistic studies as early as 1922 by Otto Jespersen whose Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin had a section on ‘The Woman’, drawn from early twentieth-century anthropological work in non-Western cultures. But there were also foremothers, women like Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (1908) and Elsie C.Parsons (1913), who had drawn attention, even before Jespersen, to the actualities of sex discrimination nearer home in the use of ‘man’ in law, for instance, and the assumption of male superiority this presupposed.
