Abstract
This volume is composed of 12 contributions concerning the combination of global, media and gendered uses of language in the 21st century. In the first contribution, the editors point out that gendered, global and media uses of language are particularly important in exploring the interface among society, culture and cognition.
The following three studies concern the interface between gender and global uses of language. Anne Pauwels focuses on gender-inclusive language reform as a form of language planning and comments on how it is being tackled in some language communities other than English-speaking ones. Heiko Motschenbacher deals with ‘female and feminine generics’ which has been neglected so far. Motschenbacher sets up a typology of female and feminine generics by adducting examples from an array of different languages. From the analysis of the data, patterns are identified and explained in terms of discursive materialization. Friederike Braun and Geoffrey Haig present the results of an empirical investigation designed to uncover the role played by ‘age’ in the way speakers select the agreement forms associated with Mädchen. The results show that not only does the semantics of gender impact on the choices speakers make in the grammatical forms they deploy, but it is also subtly graded, interacting with the semantics of age, and showing considerable cross-speaker variation.
Identity has always been a central term in discussions of language in its socio-cultural context. In fact, the most visible type discussed in this volume is gender identity. These studies illustrate the trends in the theorization of identities that have surfaced in decades of sociolinguistic research. Janet Holmes explores different ways in which men and women construct their roles as leaders in workplace interaction. Stephanie Schnurr focuses on decision-making styles in Hong Kong workplaces and shows that women’s linguistic choices index their professional identities and their gender identities. These discursive strategies thus enable them to simultaneously ‘do leadership’ and ‘do gender’ in workplace interactions.
Based on a corpus of 646 private text messages written in German, Bieswanger focuses on gendered patterns in typographic variation among text messages written by male and female senders, taking a closer look at the use of shortened forms in the same technologically mediated environment. The study finds that shortenings of various types are common in private text messages in German, but as far as the individual types of shortenings are concerned, the results do not point to clear gender-related preferences.
Rita Kupetz and Maxi Kupetz describe a special procedure in which the organization of interaction in the early classroom can be analyzed from both a linguistic and a pedagogical perspective and suggest the possibilities of integrating these insights into teacher education. The analysis has shown the interrelationship among the linguistic resources deployed by the participants, the organization of interaction and pedagogical context, just as Seedhouse has claimed: ‘[i]n order to understand the relationship between interaction and the process of language learning, it is vital to understand how the interaction is organized’ (2005: 172).
Britta Schneider addresses the issue of national identity. She presents some examples of the conceptions and uses of language and identity in contemporary social contexts to illustrate the problematic assumption of ‘given’ identities. The study shows why a language rights epistemology might reproduce exclusionary, hegemonic practices if it does not take into account the non-essential nature of identities, groups and languages.
Rainer Schulze explores a particular linguistic expression for a better understanding of stored information in both spoken and written communication, paying special attention to moments when the speaker or writer reconsiders prior events or decisions. The study shows that ‘frozen’ strings of words exhibit experiential and expressive readings in addition to the re-evaluation of some prior knowledge.
The last two studies concern research on Creoles. Bettina Migge investigates a Creole community and finds that language variation and change, including the emergence of new varieties, is conditioned by a complex set of intersecting social and linguistic forces and processes similar to those that operate in other non-Creole contact settings. Mühleisen looks at the meaning of second person plural pronouns in Caribbean Creoles to explore the significance of gender in Creole pronominal systems.
It is widely accepted in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology that language is not only situated in, but also shaped by, the social and cultural environment in which it is used. This volume is devoted to exploring how language is used in social and cultural contexts.
In spite of different topics and diverse research focuses, the 12 studies in this volume well illustrate the close interrelationship among society, culture and cognition. Most importantly, all the research studies in this volume are in line with the most recent perspectives on their topics. For example, articles deal with gender from perspectives ranging from the local (e.g. Holmes’s and Schnurr’s studies of negotiation of gender identities in workplace contexts) to the global (e.g. Pauwels’s discussion of gender-fair language reform in English as a global language). I am sure that readers who are interested in gender research will benefit from the range of perspectives presented in these articles.
In sum, I found the volume inspiring and I believe it will be attractive to scholars and students interested in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, computer-mediated communication and cognitive linguistics, as well as discourse analysis.