Robin Tolmach Lakoff - Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries

LANGUAGE AND WOMANS PLACE

LANGUAGE AND WOMANS PLACE

Mary Bucholtz, General Editor

ADVISORY BOARD

Penelope Eckert, Stanford University

Kira Hall, University of Colorado

Janet Holmes, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Miyako Inoue, Stanford University

Don Kulick, New York University

Sally McConnell-Ginet, Cornell University

Marcyliena Morgan, Harvard University

Deborah Tannen, Georgetown University

Ana Celia Zentella, University of California, San Diego

Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse

Edited by Mary Bucholtz, A. C. Liang, and Laurel A. Sutton

Pronoun Envy: Literary Uses of Linguistic Gender

by Anna Livia

Language and Womans Place: Text and Commentaries

Revised and Expanded Edition

by Robin Tolmach Lakoff

Edited by Mary Bucholtz

TEXT AND COMMENTARIES

REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION

EDITED BY MARY BUCHOLTZ

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lakoff, Robin Tolmach.

Language and womans place / Robin Tolmach Lakoff; edited by Mary Bucholtz.Rev. and expanded ed.

p. cm. (Studies in language and gender ; 3)

Originally published: New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-19-516757-0 (pbk.); ISBN 0-19-516758-9 (cloth)

1. WomenLanguage. 2. Sex role. 3. Sexism in language. 4. English languageSex differences. I. Bucholtz, Mary, 1966- II. Title. III. Series.

HQ1206.L36 2004

305.4dc22 2003056479

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

To my students, past and present,

who have been an inspiration for all my work. RTL

And for Barbara Bucholtz,

who refused to know her place. MB

The way we understood things twenty years ago

is not how we see them now; yet that understanding

was fruitful and led to todays deeper understanding.

Robin Tolmach Lakoff, Talking Power

Language and Womans Place

Annotations

MARY BUCHOLTZ

BONNIE MCELHINNY

SALLY MCCONNELL-GINET

ANNA LIVIA

JANET HOLMES

DEBORAH TANNEN

PENELOPE ECKERT

KIRA HALL

SACHIKO IDE

CATHERINE EVANS DAVIES

JENNY COOK-GUMPERZ

SHARI KENDALL

MIRIAM MEYERHOFF

SUSAN C. HERRING

SUSAN EHRLICH

SCOTT FABIUS KIESLING

JUDITH MATTSON BEAN AND BARBARA JOHNSTONE

YOSHIKO MATSUMOTO

MARCYLIENA MORGAN

NORMA MENDOZA-DENTON

SARA TRECHTER

WILLIAM L. LEAP

RUDOLF P. GAUDIO

ROBIN QUEEN

RUSTY BARRETT

Rusty Barrett teaches in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research has examined the relationship between queer theory and sociolinguistic theory, popular conceptions of gay language, and expressions of identity in performances by African American drag queens.

Judith Mattson Bean is an associate professor of English at Texas Womans University. Her essays on twentieth-century sociolinguistics and discourse appear in Discourse Processes, Language and Society, SECOL Review, and Southwestern American Literature. She also has written articles and chapters on the discourse of nineteenth-century writer Margaret Fuller.

Mary Bucholtz is an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is coeditor of Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self (1995) and Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse (1999). Her research focuses on language, gender, race, and youth.

Jenny Cook-Gumperz is a professor of education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A sociologist and sociolinguist, she is well known for her work on literacy theory and the social context of childrens language learning. She is the author of The Social Construction of Literacy, Social Control and Socialization, and Childrens Worlds and Childrens Language (with William Corsaro and Jurgen Streeck), as well as numerous articles on literacy and language socialization.

Catherine Evans Davies studied with Robin Tolmach Lakoff at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an associate professor in the English department at the University of Alabama. Her research explores gender issues, cross-cultural interaction, language socialization, humor, media and popular culture, and the discourse of the American South.

Penelope Eckert is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. She is the author of Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School (1989), Language Variation as Social Practice (2000), and Language and Gender (2003; with Sally McConnell-Ginet), as well as numerous articles on language, gender, sexuality, and adolescence.

Susan Ehrlich is a professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, York University. Her areas of research include language and gender, language and the law, and second language acquisition. Her work has appeared in journals such as Discourse & Society, Forensic Linguistics, and Language in Society. Her most recent book is Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent (2001).

Rudolf P. Gaudio teaches anthropology at Purchase College of the State University of New York. His research focuses on the moral and political economies of language, gender, sexuality, and space in northern Nigeria and the United States. His work has appeared in American Speech, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Socialist Review, and several edited volumes.

Kira Hall is an assistant professor in the Departments of Linguistics and Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her publications include the edited collections Gender Articulated (with Mary Bucholtz) and Queerly Phrased (with Anna Livia). She is currently completing a book on the linguistic and cultural practices of Hindi-speaking hijras in northern India.

Susan C. Herring, a leading expert on gender and computer-mediated communication, is a professor of information science and linguistics at Indiana University. She has edited three collections on computer-mediated communication and has written numerous articles on gender and the Internet. Her current research focuses on the representation of women and men in multimedia computer interfaces.