ABSTRACT
The concept of gender allows for describing masculine and feminine behaviours in terms of scales or continua rather than absolute categories. Gender-exclusive speech forms reflect gender-exclusive social roles. Gender differences in language are often just one aspect of more pervasive linguistic differences in the society reflecting social status or power differences. Social dialect research has provided a great deal of information about patterns of pronunciation and grammar, and more recently discourse particles. The linguistic features which differ in the speech of women and men in Western communities are usually features which also distinguish the speech of people from different social classes. In every social class where surveys have been undertaken, men use more vernacular forms than women. Women as a subordinate group, it is argued, must avoid offending men – and so they must speak carefully and politely.
