ABSTRACT
Many words have been spent on the subject of “women’s speech.” Perhaps because women are so readily identifiable as a group it is assumed that women speak as a group. Women’s experiences have much in common throughout the world, to be sure. And it is possible that we may identify certain common patterns in women’s lives and in women’s speech. But women are members first and foremost of their own small speech communities, and it is in the daily context of their lives, as speaking members of a larger group that their language must be examined. Without this contextual grounding, we are doomed to repeat the stereotypic nonsense of past generations about the language use of women.
