Language and Gender

In the past several years the subfield of sociolinguistics known as language and gender has developed a sophistication that could not have been predicted from the research of the early 1970s. While this area of study has evolved along many of the same lines as other branches of sociolinguistics, the lessons of language and gender research have informed the wider field by producing an awareness of the subtlety of such categories as sex and gender (along with class and ethnicity); it has forced a reevaluation of these categories, once assumed to correlate in a straightforward fashion with language variation.