ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that language and gender studies, like other subfields within sociolinguistics, have tended to neglect theoretical questions about its 'socio' side. The language is an attribute of the person, the woman or man. Modern gender scholarship is an interdisciplinary enterprise. Language and gender research, no less than other kinds of discourse on gender, has had effects outside the academy. Oversimplified notions of the relation between language and gender are increasingly having an impact on women's lives, as academic research findings are taken up in popular media, and applied institutionally for practical purposes. Verbal hygiene is a collective term for a diverse set of normative metalinguistic practices based on a conviction that some ways of using language are functionally, aesthetically or morally preferable to others. It is interesting that the popular preference for difference over dominance models mirrors developments in language and gender studies.
