This issue of Language in Society has been designed to explore the relevance of the concept of Community of Practice (CofP) – as presented by Lave & Wenger 1991 and by Wenger 1998 – to research in sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on its value in language and gender research. The contents of the issue grew out of a symposium at the Sixth International Conference on Language and Social Psychology, held at the University of Ottawa in May 1997. I invited the contributors whose work is represented in this issue to join me in exploring the usefulness of the CofP framework in relation to their own research.

This article provides an introduction to this issue of Language in Society by exploring the relationship of the concept of Community of Practice (CofP) to related terms and theoretical frameworks. The criterial characteristics and constitutive features of a CofP are examined; the article points out how a CofP framework is distinguished from other sociolinguistic and social psychological frameworks, including social identity theory, speech community, social network and social constructionist approaches.

Gendered linguistic practices emerge as people engage in social practices that construct them not only as girls or boys, women or men – but also as, e.g., Asian American or heterosexually active. Adequate generalizations about gendered language use and explanations of such generalizations require understanding the place of particular linguistic practices in the life of what Lave & Wenger 1991 and Wenger 1998 call a Community of Practice: a group whose joint engagement in some activity or enterprise is sufficiently intensive to give rise over time to a repertoire of shared practices. Eckert's ethnographic/sociolinguistic workin pre-adolescent and adolescent communities of practice illustrates ways in which gender and other aspects of identity are co-constructed. We use these and other sociolinguistic data to suggest some of the many different kinds of generalizations, emerging from studies of language and gender, that look to communities of practice.

The introduction of practice theory into sociolinguistics is an important recent development in the field. The community of practice provides a useful alternative to the speech-community model, which has limitations for language and gender researchers in particular. As an ethnographic, activity-based approach, the community of practice is of special value to researchers in language and gender because of its compatibility with current theories of identity. An extension of the community of practice allows identities to be explained as the result of positive and negative identity practices rather than as fixed social categories, as in the speech-community model. The framework is used here to analyze the linguistic practices associated with an unexamined social identity, the nerd, and to illustrate how members of a local community of female nerds at a US high school negotiate gender and other aspects of their identities through practice. My thanks to Janet Holmes, Chris Holcomb, Stephanie Stanbro, and members of the Ethnography/Theory Group at Texas A&M University for comments on and discussion of the ideas in this article.

This article examines the distribution of speech acts based on the word sore ‘sorry’ in Bislama, the creole language spoken in Vanuatu. Three functions of these “apology” routines are identified and analyzed within the framework of politeness theory. Women are shown to use sore more frequently over all than men; they are also found to use sore to express empathy with the referent/addressee. Empathy is expressed in men's speech in other ways. The asymmetric distribution of sore is shown to make sense, given wider societal beliefs about and attitudes toward appropriate behaviors for women and men. Given a strict definition of a “community of practice,” it is clear that this shared speech behavior does not mean that women in this speech community can be said to form a community of practice. Analyses based on the speech community and intergroup distinctiveness are more useful in understanding this variation. This article has benefited from discussions with other members of the Language and Gender panel at the 6th ICLASP meeting, University of Ottawa, May 1997, especially Janet Holmes. Some of the data were also presented at the Second British Roundtable on Social Theory in Sociolinguistics, University of Wales, Cardiff, July 1997; discussions there with Ben Rampton and John Heritage were very helpful. My early thoughts were shaped in conversations with Herbert Morris and Gillian Sankoff. None of the aforementioned necessarily agree with the analysis presented here. Many thanks to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for their generous support in the field (#5742).

This article investigates the utility of Eckert & McConnell-Ginet's concept of “community of practice” for an analysis of the language used by women in a sexual assault tribunal. It is shown how the questions asked by two tribunal members (a male and a female faculty member), in a university sexual “harassment” tribunal, function to (re)frame and (re)construct the events in question as consensual sex. Although the female complainants (i.e. victims) in the tribunal characterize their experiences as sexual assault, two of the tribunal members – one of whom is a female faculty member – ask questions that presuppose the inadequacy and deficiency of the complainants' signals of resistance, suggesting that their so-called lack of resistance was tantamount to consent. Clearly, any homogeneous notion of “woman's speech style” or “woman's point of view” would fail to account for the differences between the discursive patterns of this woman tribunal member and the women complainants in this context. However, if (as argued by Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992a,b) our linguistic practices arise out of the kinds of community of practice with which we are involved, then an understanding of such local practices and activities should provide greater insight into the differential linguistic behavior of the women involved in this sexual “harassment” tribunal.

This article considers the usefulness of the community of practice framework (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992) to an analysis of women's pregnancy stories. The study reveals that the operative communities of practice in the lives of pregnant women are the communities comprised of doctors, health professionals, family members etc., all of whom have specific and well-defined opinions about pregnancy. Although pregnant women do not themselves constitute a community of practice, the framework leads to a variety of insights about women and pregnancy. From analyzing women's stories, it becomes apparent that others routinely construct for women what their pregnancy is to consist of – often trying to make of it a monolithic experience, whether or not this coincides with a woman's own experience. Women's stories provide data that explicitly address the intersection and collision of disparate communities of practice.I would like to thank Janet Holmes for suggesting that I apply the community of practice framework to my corpus of pregnancy stories. Thinking about this has led me to insights that I might not have otherwise had. I would also like to thank my colleague and friend, Alice Greenwood, for the very careful reading that she did of several earlier drafts of this paper. Her comments contributed significantly to the development of the ideas for this article. Of course I alone am responsible for what is presented below.

The search for explanatory coherence in language and gender research has fostered a variety of research methods and analyses; this article evaluates the contributions of the Communities of Practice approach, with its focus on the constructive practices of a group – especially mutual engagement of learning a jointly negotiated practice of gender. Rather than presupposing gender differences as a starting point, CofP emphasizes the learning and mutability in gendered linguistic displays across groups; CofP theory thus naturalizes intragroup variation, not marking it as deviant. However, while the CofP approach focuses much-needed attention on the social construction of gender as local and cross-culturally variable, gender research must be augmented by critical study of two other facets of gender: ideology and innateness, which are critical components of a more comprehensive theory of gender for language research. I would like to give thanks to Janet Holmes for organizing the original forum in which the paper developed, and for her very helpful comments; to Sally McConnell-Ginet and Penny Eckert for their sustained support, through their work, of me and others in the field; and to all three of them – plus Alice Freed, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Susan Ehrlich – for stimulating comments and discussion of these issues. Thanks also go to Mary Talbot and Craig Waddell for comments on an earlier draft. All errors remain my own responsibility.

Linguistics, as one of the last academic disciplines in the US to adopt guidelines for gender-inclusive language (Thorne 1998), has not been in the forefront of the analysis of language and gender. Indeed, it has been slow to give – either to the social context of language use, or to the socially constructed concept of gender – the kind of serious analytic consideration that it regularly gives to the mental representation of language. This collection of articles edited by Bergvall, Bing & Freed signals a change within the profession itself in its re-examination of basic concepts to be taken into account in future research on language and gender.

Language use and attitudes in Egypt and the larger Arab world pose a challenge to much of the received wisdom among sociolinguists about the role of gender in sociolinguistic variation. More generally, they cast doubt on widespread assumptions in sociolinguistics about the nature of linguistic markets and language change. Haeri's recent sociolinguistic investigations in Cairo show clearly the difficulties raised by viewing linguistic resources as based on a vernacular/standard continuum, with women leading men in use of established “standard” forms – and also (on this view, somewhat “paradoxically”) leading in use of “non-standard” incoming variants introduced in the speech of working-class and lower middle-class speakers. As Haeri points out, there is a paradox here only if one assumes that some unchanging social meaning is attached to the “standard/non-standard” dichotomy. But she points to many problems both with the dichotomy and with the way it is often understood in linguistic discussions. Haeri cogently argues against the common assumption that members of a speech community recognize a single “standard” that (a) is required for performance in high-level jobs, (b) is taught and promoted in educational institutions, (c) is the medium of highly valued literature and other culturally valued activities, and (d) is associated with upper-class speech. Although such a conception may not seem too distorting in many Western urban settings (some of my students spontaneously came up with “richspeak” to designate a so-called American English “standard”), it is woefully inadequate for understanding the sociolinguistic dynamics of a place like Cairo.

It is unusual for a collection of articles to be as interesting and valuable (while simultaneously diverse) as are the articles assembled here. The papers in this excellent collection reflect the dramatic change that language and gender research has undergone in the past decade, and as such they provide an extremely useful source for anyone seeking a fresh view of the research in this field.

This, the fourth American anthology about language and sexual minorities, is more consistently professional, more focused on written texts, less focused on explicating rhetorical effects, and considerably more focused on gender than its predecessors (Chesebro 1981, Ringer 1994, and Leap 1995). Why “sexuality” is included in the subtitle at all is a mystery. In contrast to Leap's pioneering collection, sexual practices are almost entirely invisible (inaudible?) herein. The editors claim to have “collected a series of articles that approach the study of language from the twin perspectives of gender and sexuality, conceived as separate but intricately linked categories” (p. 5); but it seems that, in utero, gender throttled sexuality (while sex, either in the sense of biological differences or in the sense of tactile contact, was never conceived).

This book calls attention to an area of language and gender research that has been too long overlooked. Most studies in the field have centered either on women or on comparative analyses of women's and men's linguistic practices, while relatively few have focused primarily on the language use of men and boys. Such an enterprise is fraught with political peril, since feminists may object that making men more central to language and gender studies necessarily detracts attention from the study of women. However, as an invisible norm, masculinity frames the gendered lives of women as well as men. The study of language and masculinity is therefore a vital part of the feminist linguistic project – linked to the study of other categories rendered normative, and hence invisible to scrutiny, such as whiteness and heterosexuality. Although Language and masculinity gives little attention to the question of how the processes of racialization and gender are mutually constituted, two chapters explore the construction of heterosexuality as part of the project of normative masculinity. While the book focuses primarily on white middle-class English speakers, it includes a wide range of national contexts, genres, and social groups, as well as theoretical and methodological approaches.