IntroductionResearch on differences between women's and men's speech has expanded enormously in the past 20 years. As well as contributing to sociolinguistic knowledge, it has also been an important catalyst of interdisciplinary communication. Before 1970 there were unrelated studies in a variety of areas: anthropology, sociology, psychology, child development, linguistics, speech communication and literature. Since then the feminist movement and women's studies, in particular, have provided a framework for research, as well as a meeting point for the overlapping interests of researchers from many disciplines. As a consequence the scope of language and gender research has extended dramatically, and its focus has changed.Before the second half of this century, descriptions of speech differences between women and men were relatively sparse, and they tended to treat male forms as the norm for a language. Between 1975 and 1983, by contrast, the size of the most comprehensive annotated bibliography on language and gender almost doubled (Thorne & Henley, 1975; Thorne, Kramarae & Henley, 1983), with most researchers adopting a feminist perspective on gender-based speech differences. There are now extensive collections of readings on language and gender (