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Reductionist explanations for gender differences in language use continue to occupy much research attention. However, such approaches cannot explain when or why people might change their gender-marked language use. This article reviews and critiques several of these approaches and tests an alternative from the perspective of self-categorization theory. Male-female dyads (N = 42) discussed a gender-neutral controversial issue under conditions of low or high gender salience. When a shared student identity was salient, males and females used tentative language with equal frequency; but when gender was salient, women used more tentative language than men and held the floor longer. Furthermore, women who used more tentative language were more influential with men, but only when student identity was salient. The article suggests that women's tentative language use is influential with men when it serves to unconsciously confirm men's wider, socialstructural advantages over women.

An experiment tested hypotheses derived from self-categorization theory's explanation for gender-based language use. Under high or low conditions of gender salience, men and women sent e-mail to an ostensible male or female recipient yielding either an intra-or an intergroup setting. Gender salience was manipulated so that the stereotypically feminine characteristic of supportiveness was the sole attribute that defined the prototype of intergender relations. Messages were examined for references to emotion and tentative language. Women referenced emotion significantly more than men in the high gender salience condition, but this gender difference was reduced when salience was low. Moreover, women with high gender salience in an intergroup context referenced emotion more than women with high salience in an intragroup setting or men with high salience in either an intra-or an intergroup context. Tentative language use, however, was similar across all conditions as anticipated.Significant scholarly attention in the area of language and gender emerged in the mid-1970s (e.g., Lakoff, 1975). Since then, numerous empirical investigations on the topic have been published, along with several books directed at both academic and popular audiences. Most extant publications on language and gender, however, highlight dichotomous differences between men and women (e.g., Gray, 1992;Tannen, 1990). These accounts focus on main effect differences whereby men tend to use certain language features more than women and vice versa (e.g., Mulac, 2006). Notwithstanding that research, such differences are more dynamic and inconsistent than they are static and stable (Aries, 1996;Hyde, 2005Hyde, , 2006a. In fact, scholars increasingly have underlined linguistic similarities and differences and assert that many contextual factors over and above gender can determine the language of men

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