Women, Men and Language has long been established as a seminal text in the field of language and gender, providing an account of the many ways in which language and gender intersect. In this pioneering book, bestselling author Jennifer Coates explores linguistic gender differences, introducing the reader to a wide range of sociolinguistic research in the field. Written in a clear and accessible manner, this book introduces the idea of gender as a social construct, and covers key topics such as conversational practice, same sex talk, conversational dominance, and children’s acquisition of gender-differentiated language, discussing the social and linguistic consequences of these patterns of talk. Here reissued as a Routledge Linguistics Classic, this book contains a brand new preface which situates this text in the modern day study of language and gender, covering the postmodern shift in the understanding of gender and language, and assessing the book’s impact on the field. Women, Men and Language continues to be essential reading for any student or researcher working in the area of language and gender.

From the author of New York Times bestseller You're Wearing That? this bestselling classic work draws upon groundbreaking research by an acclaimed sociolinguist to show that women and men live in different worlds, made of different words. Women and men live in different worlds...made of different words. Spending nearly four years on the New York Times bestseller list, including eight months at number one, You Just Don't Understand is a true cultural and intellectual phenomenon. This is the book that brought gender differences in ways of speaking to the forefront of public awareness. With a rare combination of scientific insight and delightful, humorous writing, Tannen shows why women and men can walk away from the same conversation with completely different impressions of what was said. Studded with lively and entertaining examples of real conversations, this book gives you the tools to understand what went wrong -- and to find a common language in which to strengthen relationships at work and at home. A classic in the field of interpersonal relations, this book will change forever the way you approach conversations.

In this Second Edition, Jennifer Coates has thoroughly revised and updated the text, incorporating new material in the field of language and gender. She provides an overview both of traditional lore about the linguistic behaviour of women and men, and also of recent research findings in sociolinguistics and related subjects.

A detailed look at language-related myths that explores both what we know and how we know it.

Bringing together a selection of some of the author's key papers on language and gender, this book provides an overview of the development of language and gender studies over the last 30 years, with particular emphasis on conversational data and on single sex friendship groups.

The 1975 publication of Robin Tolmach Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place, is widely recognized as having inaugurated feminist research on the relationship between language and gender, touching off a remarkable response among language scholars, feminists, and general readers. For the past thirty years, scholars of language and gender have been debating and developing Lakoff's initial observations. Arguing that language is fundamental to gender inequality, Lakoff pointed to two areas in which inequalities can be found: Language used about women, such as the asymmetries between seemingly parallel terms like master and mistress, and language used by women, which places women in a double bind between being appropriately feminine and being fully human. Lakoff's central argument that "women's language" expresses powerlessness triggered a controversy that continues to this day. The revised and expanded edition presents the full text of the original first edition, along with an introduction and annotations by Lakoff in which she reflects on the text a quarter century later and expands on some of the most widely discussed issues it raises. The volume also brings together commentaries from twenty-six leading scholars of language, gender, and sexuality, within linguistics, anthropology, modern languages, education, information sciences, and other disciplines. The commentaries discuss the book's contribution to feminist research on language and explore its ongoing relevance for scholarship in the field. This new edition of Language and Woman's Place not only makes available once again the pioneering text of feminist linguistics; just as important, it places the text in the context of contemporary feminist and gender theory for a new generation of readers.

This is the second of a three-volume comprehensive reference work on “Gender across Languages”, which provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical, lexical, referential, social) in 30 languages of diverse genetic, typological and socio-cultural backgrounds. Among the issues discussed for each language are the following: What are the structural properties of the language that have an impact on the relations between language and gender? What are the consequences for areas such as agreement, pronominalisation and word-formation? How is specification of and abstraction from (referential) gender achieved in a language? Is empirical evidence available for the assumption that masculine/male expressions are interpreted as generics? Can tendencies of variation and change be observed, and have alternatives been proposed for a more equal linguistic treatment of women and men? This volume (and the previous two volumes) will provide the much-needed basis for explicitly comparative analyses of gender across languages. All chapters are original contributions and follow a common general outline developed by the editors. The book contains rich bibliographical and indexical material.Languages of Volume 2: Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, Hindi, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Vietnamese, Welsh.