Feminist scholars have begun to ask how existing conceptual schemes and organizational structures in academic disciplines have excluded women and feminist ideas, and to provide suggestions for transformation. One strand of this work has been the exploration of how canons of thought are constructed in such fields as economics, sociology, and sociocultural anthropology. This article begins such an investigation for sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology by reviewing how gender correlates with publication and citation over a 35-year period (1965–2000) in five key journals, and in 16 textbooks published in the 1990s. It describes some marked differences in the publication of works by women and on gender in the five journals, as well as some significant differences in the degree to which men and women cite the work of women. It also considers how the rate of publication of articles on sex, gender, and women is correlated with publication of female authors. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of this study for changing institutional practices in our field.

This article describes the development of a data bank of 25 male voices spanning the range from very gay-sounding to very straight-sounding, according to listener ratings. These ratings allowed the researchers to examine the effects of different discourse types (scientific, dramatic, and spontaneous) and listener groups (gay males vs. a mix of males and females of unknown sexual orientation) on how listeners perceived the voices. The effects of lexical and pragmatic content were explored by a comparison of spoken and written presentations of the same spontaneous speech samples. The effect of asking participants to rate the voices using different constructs (e.g., masculine/feminine vs. gay-sounding/straight-sounding) is discussed. The ultimate goal of this research program is to examine correlations between these ratings and a range of phonetic variables in order to shed light on the specific features to which listeners attend when judging whether a man's voice sounds gay or straight.

This article brings the study of language to the social phenomenon of gender-related violence as it is currently being dealt with in institutional settings. It investigates the social significance of 2nd person pronoun variation and alternation in 26 professional-victim interactions in two parallel institutions created to address violence against women in Brazil: a police station with an all-female staff, and a feminist crisis intervention center. A quantitative analysis of patterns of use is complemented by a qualitative analysis of the interactional strategies of 2nd person pronoun alternation in the two settings. Pronoun switching is innovatively analyzed under the theory of code alternation developed by Auer 1995. The qualitative analysis demonstrates how pronoun alternation functions as a contextualization cue in face-to-face interactions. In particular, it shows the different ways in which pronoun alternation is used to contextualize phenomena such as preference organization and changes in frames and footings, and locally to exercise power and/or solidarity.

This article argues that an androcentric Basque nationalist pedagogy is enacted in secondary schools in San Sebastian (Donostia), Spain. Textbooks present men as the exemplary Basque speakers and cultural agents by erasing women's contributions to Basque language and culture. Schools also contribute to a recursive language ideology, linking “authentic” ethnic identity, “naturalness,” and solidarity with vernacular Basque, of which the most pragmatically salient marker is the familiar form of address hi. Hi, in turn, indirectly indexes male speakers and masculinity, thereby creating an iconic relationship between authentic Basque identity, Basque culture, and masculinity. However, many women in Basque society have challenged this male privilege in various domains, thereby opening up the possibility of a Basque nation that embraces its female as well as its male members. As such, the Basque case has interesting implications for theorizing the relationships among language, gender, and nation.

In this extraordinary book, Jackendoff proposes nothing less than a new way to understand the architecture of language and a new way to view the relation of language to the brain, to the mind, to behavior, and to the evolution of our species. It is, among many other things, an invitation for cooperation from one of the world's leading formal syntacticians to linguists of diverse orientations and to those from adjacent fields, including sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. If we don't want to be left behind, we had better pay close attention.

This is the second edition of a very impressive handbook that was published first in French in 1983, and subsequently in English in 1989. This new edition was prepared directly in English. Josiane Hamers is Professor of Psycholinguistics and Bilingualism at the Université de Laval, Québec, and Michel Blanc is Emeritus Reader of Applied Linguistics and Bilingualism at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Although it is easy to do so, The sociolinguistics of sign languages (henceforth SSL) is not to be confused with Ceil Lucas's other books, The sociolinguistics of the deaf community (1989) and its sequels, the Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities series. Whereas the latter volumes aim to present new research in the area of sociolinguistics pertaining to Deaf people and other users of sign languages, the book under review presents almost no new (to those already familiar with this field) information on aspects of sociolinguistic research on members of this language community. Instead, this book should more accurately be seen as a companion volume to her book (with Clayton Valli) Linguistics of American Sign Language: An introduction (2000; henceforth LASL). Like LASL, SSL is intended as a textbook for use in college-level courses dealing with linguistics (or a stand-alone course in sociolinguistics, as was Lucas's intention) of sign languages and Deaf communities.

The Concise encyclopedia of language and religion is distilled from the Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, published in ten volumes in 1994. In their preface, editors John F. A. Sawyer and J. M.Y. Simpson note that more than 110 new articles have been written for this concise edition, presumably to shift the focus from language alone to the nexus of language and religion. Unfortunately, the book reads like a philological encyclopedia that has seen a monk scribbling in the margins, adding “religion” bits copiously but not integrating them fully into the corpus on language.

This book combines culture, philosophy and linguistics by examining everyday language. It concentrates on the semantic interrelations between aspects of epistemic, moral and aesthetic values of a person's life in Yoruba society. The book contains six chapters and an appendix of Yoruba-language quotations.

It would be unjust to say that languages of ethnic minorities of Siberia and the Far East of Russia have not received the attention of linguists and anthropologists, yet until now there has been no book that has gathered, classified, and compared data on the sociolinguistic situation of these minorities over the whole Soviet period. This is the topic of Vakhtin's new book. It deals almost exclusively with the exterior aspect of the history of the languages; it does not analyze structural changes in the languages themselves.

This book presents a semantic study of Chinese physical action verbs from a cognitive perspective. The study seeks to understand the cognitive basis of language by uncovering the relationship between language structure and cognitive structure, and to demonstrate “how cognitive, perceptual, or experiential facts constrain or otherwise determines the linguistic facts” (p. 230). In its semantic analysis of physical action verbs, the study illustrates the role of body parts in the semantic construction of the verbs depicting the physical actions performed by those body parts. In the discussion of relationships between language construction and human body action, the book's central argument is that the event structures of physical action verbs are constructed not arbitrarily but through systematic cognitive processes in relation to both human physical reality and concrete reality in the world. By explicating linguistic structure on the basis of human cognition and human experience, the author attempts to verify that the categorizations of language entities reveal, to a large extent, the nature of human experience and perception of physical reality. The assumption is that the nature of linguistic richness in both semantic and syntactic structures is a reflection of the development of human perception of the experiential reality.

This volume, a product of the First National Conference on Heritage Languages in America, held in Long Beach, California, in 1999, opens with the editors' introduction, followed by fourteen chapters within five thematic sections: “Defining the field,” “Shaping the field,” “Educational issues,” “Research and practice,” and “A call to action.” Together, they make a compelling case for the need to preserve and exploit heritage languages in the US as a national resource. The book provides a comprehensive overview of pressing issues and challenges within the growing field of heritage language (henceforth HL) education, and it successfully demonstrates “why those who are involved in the heritage language movement believe that it is important for the United States to preserve its non-English languages” (5). The volume is intended primarily for “educators, community leaders, researchers, grant makers and policymakers” (5), though its clear, nontechnical language makes it accessible to any reader interested in the subject. Its effective thematic organization, likely to appeal to both novice and expert readers, and its overall coherence, accentuated by ample cross-referencing, testify to careful editorial preparation and suggest the desire of all involved to speak with one voice as they build their case and issue a call for action on behalf of heritage languages in the US.

This book is the revised version of Hazen's 1997 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill). In it, Hazen investigates the linguistic behavior of three ethnic groups in Warren County, North Carolina, both individually and collectively, with respect to copula absence and leveling of past be, with the aim of ascertaining the linguistic boundaries that delineate the ethnic groups. These ethnic groups are African Americans (comprising 57% of the overall population in the 1990 Census), European Americans (38%), and Native Americans (4%). In addition to ethnicity, Hazen considers the influence of age, sex, and cultural identity. He situates his data and findings in the broader sociolinguistic context by discussing, for example, the contributions that they make to the origins debate and the divergence/convergence debate surrounding African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Perhaps the two most significant contributions of the study, however, are the discussion of wont as an innovative variant descended from wasn't, a past-tense corollary of present tense ain't (cf. Hazen 1998), and the discussion of the influence of cultural identity on sociolinguistic variation (cf. Hazen 2002).

The current issue of Language in Society features four articles with a single topic in common – gender and language. For this issue, I realized that by jumping one paper already in hand over a couple of others I could achieve the felicitous result of a relatively unified issue – and now that Language in Society is at five issues a year, the “jumpees” will only have to wait two months for publication in any case. My usual practice is that articles are published in strict order of acceptance – very occasionally, an author will take so long to get the very last revision – the i-dotting and t-crossing and reference-checking – done that the article will lag in publication. Extremely long articles sometimes get delayed an issue. And once or twice I have speeded up publication of an article which languished an unfairly long time in the review process.