Linguistic Society of America

Male/Female Language: With a Comprehensive Bibliography by Mary Ritchie KeyReview by: Edwin BattistellaLanguage, Vol. 74, No. 2 (Jun., 1998), pp. 456-457Published by: Linguistic Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/417958 .Accessed: 26/05/2012 11:14

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998)

tered and showing that children's narratives have considerable stylistic and linguistic flexibility in terms of both style shifting and code shifting. YVETTE HYTER and CAROL WESTBY (247-84) describe how oral narratives are used to assess language, reviewing notions of communicative competence and the cod- ing of linguistic and kinesthetic narrative features that denote perspective and developing strategies to foster written as opposed to oral narrative styles; the chapter concludes with four appendices which pro- vide supporting material and information for assess- ing oral narratives. APRIL MASSEY (285-306) treats cultural influences on language assessment and inter- vention and develops clinical guidelines based on sociocultural research. CHERYL SCOTT and LISA ROG- ERS (307-32) discuss written language abilities of African American children, a topic which has re- ceived less attention than speech but which is cru- cially related to issues of spoken language difference. In the final paper, WANDA MITCHENER-COLSTON (333-50) takes up issues involving older children and youth, focusing on the perceptions of young adults about language and code switching and on holistic approaches to intervention and assessment.

The book is primarily directed toward clinicians and speech researchers, and the contributors are all from programs in speech/language pathology and communications disorders in the US. While there is some overlap among the papers and while some have more to do with linguistics than others, all are inter- esting and detailed and supplement the treatment of AAVE provided in introductory linguistics or speech pathology texts. Communication development and disorders in African American children will be an excellent resource for both generalists and those in- volved in research on AAVE. [EDWN BATrISTELLA, Wayne State College.]

Male/female language: With a compre- hensive bibliography. 2nd edn. By MARY RITCHIE KEY. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996. Pp. xxxv, 324. $36.00.

The first edition of Key's Male/female language, published in 1975, developed out of a course she taught in 1968 and a paper presented at the American Dialect Society in 1970. As she notes, much has changed since then, and her second edition is directed to the audience of undergraduates who were just being born in the 70's.

The book begins with a new introduction to the second edition (xi-xxxiii), followed by the fifteen chapters of the original book (1-144) and chapter notes (145-70). The new introduction touches on such topics as language and power, the legal concept of 'reasonable man', the definition of 'work', and

tered and showing that children's narratives have considerable stylistic and linguistic flexibility in terms of both style shifting and code shifting. YVETTE HYTER and CAROL WESTBY (247-84) describe how oral narratives are used to assess language, reviewing notions of communicative competence and the cod- ing of linguistic and kinesthetic narrative features that denote perspective and developing strategies to foster written as opposed to oral narrative styles; the chapter concludes with four appendices which pro- vide supporting material and information for assess- ing oral narratives. APRIL MASSEY (285-306) treats cultural influences on language assessment and inter- vention and develops clinical guidelines based on sociocultural research. CHERYL SCOTT and LISA ROG- ERS (307-32) discuss written language abilities of African American children, a topic which has re- ceived less attention than speech but which is cru- cially related to issues of spoken language difference. In the final paper, WANDA MITCHENER-COLSTON (333-50) takes up issues involving older children and youth, focusing on the perceptions of young adults about language and code switching and on holistic approaches to intervention and assessment.

The book is primarily directed toward clinicians and speech researchers, and the contributors are all from programs in speech/language pathology and communications disorders in the US. While there is some overlap among the papers and while some have more to do with linguistics than others, all are inter- esting and detailed and supplement the treatment of AAVE provided in introductory linguistics or speech pathology texts. Communication development and disorders in African American children will be an excellent resource for both generalists and those in- volved in research on AAVE. [EDWN BATrISTELLA, Wayne State College.]

Male/female language: With a compre- hensive bibliography. 2nd edn. By MARY RITCHIE KEY. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996. Pp. xxxv, 324. $36.00.

The first edition of Key's Male/female language, published in 1975, developed out of a course she taught in 1968 and a paper presented at the American Dialect Society in 1970. As she notes, much has changed since then, and her second edition is directed to the audience of undergraduates who were just being born in the 70's.

The book begins with a new introduction to the second edition (xi-xxxiii), followed by the fifteen chapters of the original book (1-144) and chapter notes (145-70). The new introduction touches on such topics as language and power, the legal concept of 'reasonable man', the definition of 'work', and

the 'queen bee syndrome'. The focus of the original book was the social construction and differentiation of the concepts male and female; the linguistic as- pects of this differentiation in terms of labeling, nam- ing and reference, syntax, phonology, and semantics; and wider aspects of communication such as the roles of silence and of nonverbal communication, and the characterization of women's writing. The original work culminated by making the case for an androgy- nous language (with Shakespeare viewed as the ex- emplar); the second edition preserves that message but also weaves in the idea that many voices that have participated in the discussion of language and gender and many perspectives are to be considered and evaluated. K also ends most of the chapters of the original 1975 essay with a short coda of material for further study, which briefly expands on her earlier comments and provides some additional references.

Two new appendices follow the essay, one on guidelines for nonsexist usage and one, titled 'MLA female studies', containing the syllabus for K's 1968 course. The bibliography (181-307) is expanded to about 1200 entries (from 240 in the first edition). K preserves citations for manuscripts and works in progress in the first edition, with information about later publication. Entries include work from various languages and range from articles on gender in differ- ent languages; to styles of writing and speaking; to acoustical, phonological, and grammatical differ- ences in male/female speech. Journals represented in the bibliography range from Anthropological Lin- guistics and Language in Society to Women and Lan- guage to Ms. Magazine and the Radcliffe Quarterly. In addition to books and journal articles, K includes theses and dissertations, book reviews, general texts that have sections or chapters on male/female lan- guage, conference papers, and sources outside lin- guistics (such as material on human relations, law, education, humor, and creative writing). Also in- cluded, as in the first edition, are sources of general relevance to the topic: Simone de Beauvoir's The second sex, Germaine Greer's The female eunuch, Carolyn Heilbrun's Reinventing womanhood, Betty Friedan's The feminine mystique, Susan Brownmill- er's Femininity, and Catherine MacKinnon's Only words.

There are some drawbacks to the book. It would have been preferable for the bibliography to be or- ganized according to topic rather than alphabetically. It would have been good also, I think, to have anno- tated the entries, though perhaps this is a project for a future third edition. And the second edition drops the cartoons which were included in the first (K notes this but does not say why they were dropped). Such quibbles aside however, this is a valuable work. K's book provides a history of much of the earlier work on language and gender, citing material with a tre- mendous historical value, and it is an invaluable

the 'queen bee syndrome'. The focus of the original book was the social construction and differentiation of the concepts male and female; the linguistic as- pects of this differentiation in terms of labeling, nam- ing and reference, syntax, phonology, and semantics; and wider aspects of communication such as the roles of silence and of nonverbal communication, and the characterization of women's writing. The original work culminated by making the case for an androgy- nous language (with Shakespeare viewed as the ex- emplar); the second edition preserves that message but also weaves in the idea that many voices that have participated in the discussion of language and gender and many perspectives are to be considered and evaluated. K also ends most of the chapters of the original 1975 essay with a short coda of material for further study, which briefly expands on her earlier comments and provides some additional references.

Two new appendices follow the essay, one on guidelines for nonsexist usage and one, titled 'MLA female studies', containing the syllabus for K's 1968 course. The bibliography (181-307) is expanded to about 1200 entries (from 240 in the first edition). K preserves citations for manuscripts and works in progress in the first edition, with information about later publication. Entries include work from various languages and range from articles on gender in differ- ent languages; to styles of writing and speaking; to acoustical, phonological, and grammatical differ- ences in male/female speech. Journals represented in the bibliography range from Anthropological Lin- guistics and Language in Society to Women and Lan- guage to Ms. Magazine and the Radcliffe Quarterly. In addition to books and journal articles, K includes theses and dissertations, book reviews, general texts that have sections or chapters on male/female lan- guage, conference papers, and sources outside lin- guistics (such as material on human relations, law, education, humor, and creative writing). Also in- cluded, as in the first edition, are sources of general relevance to the topic: Simone de Beauvoir's The second sex, Germaine Greer's The female eunuch, Carolyn Heilbrun's Reinventing womanhood, Betty Friedan's The feminine mystique, Susan Brownmill- er's Femininity, and Catherine MacKinnon's Only words.

There are some drawbacks to the book. It would have been preferable for the bibliography to be or- ganized according to topic rather than alphabetically. It would have been good also, I think, to have anno- tated the entries, though perhaps this is a project for a future third edition. And the second edition drops the cartoons which were included in the first (K notes this but does not say why they were dropped). Such quibbles aside however, this is a valuable work. K's book provides a history of much of the earlier work on language and gender, citing material with a tre- mendous historical value, and it is an invaluable

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BOOK NOTICES BOOK NOTICES

source for research (it is easy to imagine, for exam- ple, using the bibliography as a resource for a survey of work on language and gender appearing in Ameri- can Speech or for a project on differences in male/female language in other languages). By ex- panding the bibliography to include the history of the last twenty years, K has-true to her goal-pro- duced a work that will be useful to a new generation of students and their teachers. [EDWIN BATTISTELLA, Wayne State College.]

Hoi toide on the outer banks: The story of the Ocracoke Brogue. By WALT WOLFRAM and NATALIE SCHILLING- ESTES. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. xiv, 165.

The dialect of Ocracoke Island is a familiar attrac- tion for tourists going to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and the Ocracoke brogue, as it is known, has sometimes been associated in folklinguistics with Elizabethan English. In Hoi toide on the outer banks, Wolfram and Schilling-Estes report on their field- work with over 70 islanders (or O'cokers as they call themselves). Hoi toide, however, is aimed not at a choir of linguists-though linguists will benefit by reading it-but rather at the general public, and it is sold in island tourist shops as well as university press outlets. Commendably, a portion of the royalties go to the Ocracoke Preservation Society. Handsomely done with many photos and maps and clearly and crisply written, the book is a welcome departure from the usual representation of dialect in popular litera- ture and, for linguists, it provides a nice introduction to W & S-E's research on this dialect.

The book begins with an introduction to 'The roots of Ocracoke English' (1-28). Here W & S-E give some background on language change, the history of English, and the nature of dialects. They also dispel the idea that Ocracoke English is Elizabethan and discuss the settlement history of the island and its more recent history. In Ch. 2, 'What's in an O'coker word?' (29-49), W & S-E deal with the lexicon of the O'cokers, treating both recent island coinages (such as dingbatter, referring to someone from the mainland and supplanting the term foreigner) and older terms (such as momucked 'to bother' and qua- mished 'sick to the stomach'). The lexicon of Ocra- coke English also includes words used in other areas of the South (such as caterwampus meaning 'crooked or diagonal'), some of which have novel meanings on the island (such as wampus cat, which is generally a fiction to scare children but used on the island to refer to someone abnormal). The chapter includes an eleven-page vocabulary list.

Ch. 3, 'Sounding like a "Hoi Toider" (50-73), describes the distinct pronunciations of the dialect.

source for research (it is easy to imagine, for exam- ple, using the bibliography as a resource for a survey of work on language and gender appearing in Ameri- can Speech or for a project on differences in male/female language in other languages). By ex- panding the bibliography to include the history of the last twenty years, K has-true to her goal-pro- duced a work that will be useful to a new generation of students and their teachers. [EDWIN BATTISTELLA, Wayne State College.]

Hoi toide on the outer banks: The story of the Ocracoke Brogue. By WALT WOLFRAM and NATALIE SCHILLING- ESTES. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. xiv, 165.

The dialect of Ocracoke Island is a familiar attrac- tion for tourists going to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and the Ocracoke brogue, as it is known, has sometimes been associated in folklinguistics with Elizabethan English. In Hoi toide on the outer banks, Wolfram and Schilling-Estes report on their field- work with over 70 islanders (or O'cokers as they call themselves). Hoi toide, however, is aimed not at a choir of linguists-though linguists will benefit by reading it-but rather at the general public, and it is sold in island tourist shops as well as university press outlets. Commendably, a portion of the royalties go to the Ocracoke Preservation Society. Handsomely done with many photos and maps and clearly and crisply written, the book is a welcome departure from the usual representation of dialect in popular litera- ture and, for linguists, it provides a nice introduction to W & S-E's research on this dialect.

The book begins with an introduction to 'The roots of Ocracoke English' (1-28). Here W & S-E give some background on language change, the history of English, and the nature of dialects. They also dispel the idea that Ocracoke English is Elizabethan and discuss the settlement history of the island and its more recent history. In Ch. 2, 'What's in an O'coker word?' (29-49), W & S-E deal with the lexicon of the O'cokers, treating both recent island coinages (such as dingbatter, referring to someone from the mainland and supplanting the term foreigner) and older terms (such as momucked 'to bother' and qua- mished 'sick to the stomach'). The lexicon of Ocra- coke English also includes words used in other areas of the South (such as caterwampus meaning 'crooked or diagonal'), some of which have novel meanings on the island (such as wampus cat, which is generally a fiction to scare children but used on the island to refer to someone abnormal). The chapter includes an eleven-page vocabulary list.

Ch. 3, 'Sounding like a "Hoi Toider" (50-73), describes the distinct pronunciations of the dialect.

W & S-E appropriately rely on user-friendly tran- scriptions such as hoi toide on the saind soid ('high tide on the sound side'). They point out that some of the pronunciations of the island, such as the vowels oy in high and ay in sound are characteristic of the Outer Banks while others are more generally high- land Southern (such as ee and er for uh, as in Virginee and feller, and the use of a low back vowel in words like bar and far for bear and fire). Ch. 4, 'Saying a word or two' (74-96), discusses some syntactic patterns including a pattern of negative concord found in some British dialects (The dogs was . . . contrasting with I weren't), double modals, a-prefix- ing, the novel use of some in forming adjectives like uglysome or nastysome, and the use of bare plurals of measure words.

The remainder of the book deals with some broader issues. In Ch. 5, 'No dialect is an island' (97-116), the authors discuss the similarities be- tween the Ocracoke dialect and other American dia- lects. They note a particular affinity between Ocracoke pronunciation and syntax and that of the Appalachian region, but they also find that the vocab- ulary of the island is closest to that of the geographi- cally nearer lowland Southern dialect.

In Ch. 6 'Ebb tide for hoi toide?' (117-36), the authors discuss the problem of endangered dialects (which is often overlooked, as opposed to the issue of endangered languages), the scientific and cultural reasons for dialect preservation, and the prospects for a revival of the Ocracoke brogue. The final chap- ter, 'The voices of Ocracoke' (137-48), allows the islanders to speak eloquently for themselves, and we hear from Essie O'Neal, Rex O'Neal, Elizabeth Howard, and James Barrie Gaskill. There is also a twenty-item vocabulary quiz at the end of the book where readers can test their recall about the meaning of such items as doast: Does it mean (a) sick, espe- cially with the flu; (b) a square dance step; (c) a small crab; or (d) toast, especially white bread?

The book fills several functions. It provides novice readers with a solid introduction to a number of im- portant sociolinguistic concepts without losing read- ers in a lot of academic prose or drifting too long from the main topic of the book. Readers learn about language change, the regularity of dialects, age and sex variation in the use of dialect features, and their use to signal identity and to preserve community. The book is also important in that it celebrates dialect diversity, provides a nice model of how to do com- munity-based research, gives us a welcome perspec- tive on the islanders' views of their being the object of tourist attention (one O'coker reports tourists com- ing up to her and saying "Speak!"), and even de- scribes in passing some of the important work being done on dialect awareness in schools. [EDWIN BAT- TISTELLA, Wayne State College.]

W & S-E appropriately rely on user-friendly tran- scriptions such as hoi toide on the saind soid ('high tide on the sound side'). They point out that some of the pronunciations of the island, such as the vowels oy in high and ay in sound are characteristic of the Outer Banks while others are more generally high- land Southern (such as ee and er for uh, as in Virginee and feller, and the use of a low back vowel in words like bar and far for bear and fire). Ch. 4, 'Saying a word or two' (74-96), discusses some syntactic patterns including a pattern of negative concord found in some British dialects (The dogs was . . . contrasting with I weren't), double modals, a-prefix- ing, the novel use of some in forming adjectives like uglysome or nastysome, and the use of bare plurals of measure words.

The remainder of the book deals with some broader issues. In Ch. 5, 'No dialect is an island' (97-116), the authors discuss the similarities be- tween the Ocracoke dialect and other American dia- lects. They note a particular affinity between Ocracoke pronunciation and syntax and that of the Appalachian region, but they also find that the vocab- ulary of the island is closest to that of the geographi- cally nearer lowland Southern dialect.

In Ch. 6 'Ebb tide for hoi toide?' (117-36), the authors discuss the problem of endangered dialects (which is often overlooked, as opposed to the issue of endangered languages), the scientific and cultural reasons for dialect preservation, and the prospects for a revival of the Ocracoke brogue. The final chap- ter, 'The voices of Ocracoke' (137-48), allows the islanders to speak eloquently for themselves, and we hear from Essie O'Neal, Rex O'Neal, Elizabeth Howard, and James Barrie Gaskill. There is also a twenty-item vocabulary quiz at the end of the book where readers can test their recall about the meaning of such items as doast: Does it mean (a) sick, espe- cially with the flu; (b) a square dance step; (c) a small crab; or (d) toast, especially white bread?

The book fills several functions. It provides novice readers with a solid introduction to a number of im- portant sociolinguistic concepts without losing read- ers in a lot of academic prose or drifting too long from the main topic of the book. Readers learn about language change, the regularity of dialects, age and sex variation in the use of dialect features, and their use to signal identity and to preserve community. The book is also important in that it celebrates dialect diversity, provides a nice model of how to do com- munity-based research, gives us a welcome perspec- tive on the islanders' views of their being the object of tourist attention (one O'coker reports tourists com- ing up to her and saying "Speak!"), and even de- scribes in passing some of the important work being done on dialect awareness in schools. [EDWIN BAT- TISTELLA, Wayne State College.]

457 457