This paper focusses on sex contrasts in language as revealed in recent sociolinguistic research. While there are relatively few differences in subjective language identifications and judgments, there are several clear differences in objective language data. In the Detroit Language Study, women show a greater "sensitivity" to multiple…

Many English language arts teachers consider the nonstandard English of their students as being "slovenly or nonverbal or inexact or lazy." These same teachers often have been trained in the "false assumptions of a single universally accepted norm of English." These positions, the author states, are both fallacious and…

Subjective judgments are useful in linguistic studies to supplement information from objective language data, enlarge our knowledge of public conceptions of social speech communities (such as Negro speech), provide techniques for discussion of social markedness of standard and nonstandard varieties of English, and provide techniques for…