ABSTRACT
A study of wedding songs is of interest partly because it helps to illuminate the social significance of marriage and marriage rites within Gujarati society and to explain the role of women in this community. But a study of this kind is also of more general interest in that it helps to redress the predominantly male bias in the existing literature. It is commonplace for ethnographers and anthropologists, not to mention secondary commentators on the linguistic situation of women (cf. Keenan 1974; Ardener 1975, 1978; Labov l972c), to report that women tend not to be the main participants in highly valued speech events. This paper describes an exclusively female speech event accorded considerable status by the entire community. As such, it represents an important counterexample to the general assumptions about the role of women within the ethnography of speaking. It also leads us to wonder whether existing descriptions of speech communities have sometimes been guilty of oversimplification.
