“Women's Language” or “Powerless Language”?

The understanding of language and sex in American culture has progressed far beyond Robin Lakoff s influential and provocative essays on “women’s language” written only a few years ago. ¹ The rapid development of knowledge in what had been so significantly an ignored and overlooked area owes much to both the development of sociolinguist interest in general and to the woman’s movement in particular. But as a recent review of anthropological studies about women pointed out, this interest has grown so quickly and studies proliferated so fast that there is frequently little or no cross-referencing of mutually supportive studies and equally little attempt to reconcile conflicting interpretations of women’s roles. ² A similar critique of the literature on language and sex would no doubt reveal many of the same problems. But in one sense, these are not problems—they are marks of a rapidly developing field of inquiry, of vitality, and of saliency of the topic.