ABSTRACT
Chapter 12 focuses on gender and language. The first part documents early language and gender research, examining claims that women and men use language differently. The concepts of “women’s language” and gossip are critically discussed. A more dynamic approach to the analysis of social identity is then described, where linguistic features are considered as resources available for indexing gender identity or sexuality. The chapter also discusses sexist language and considers what this suggests about the way that different societies perceive and categorise women. The concept of the gender order is discussed in relation to the way that sociolinguistic data supports the view that women are often assigned subordinate status by virtue of their gender alone, and treated linguistically as subordinate, regardless of their actual power or social status in a particular context. A range of methods for collecting data to analyse the relationship between language and gender are summarised.
