ABSTRACT
This book collectively presents anthropological approaches to women and second-language use in a wide range of cultures. It deals with the experience of women in different situations of language contact. Applying Appel and Muysken’s historical typology of such situations, the cases fall into two main categories: those in which language contact has occurred through European colonial conquest, and those in which individual pockets of speakers of minority languages are cut off by the surrounding national languages. Though there is ample cross-cultural evidence of formal and informal constraints on women’s access to powerful second languages, there is also a widespread belief that women are naturally ‘good at languages’. In any beleaguered linguistic minority, women’s continued use and transmission of the vernacular may be a demonstration of loyalty to the group, as well as a strategy for survival. In considering linguistic loyalty, it might be argued that women share the status of the speech community to which they belong.
