ABSTRACT
So far I have used the term language in the narrow sense of grammar and phonology, the formal structure of language. The gender differences in language described in Chapters 4 and 5 were differences in women’s and men’s syntax, morphology and pronunciation. This focus on linguistic form, with the sentence as the highest unit of structure, was established in linguistics and has been carried over into sociolinguistics: there are many sociolinguists who consider studies of social variation in grammar and phonology to be ‘sociolinguistics proper’. It is becoming more and more apparent, however, that this view of language is far too narrow. The sociolinguist has to deal with real language data from a wide variety of situations; you will know if you have ever studied conversational interaction that you cannot deal adequately with it if you restrict yourself to sentence grammar.
