The purpose of Part I of this book is to consider the ways in which women's and men's speech are similar and different in different languages and societies. Five languages and societies are treated in the chapters that make up this section: Japanese as spoken in Japan, Samoan as spoken in Western Samoa, English as spoken in the United States, Kuna as spoken by the Kuna Indians of Panama, and Mexicano as spoken by the Nahuatl Indians of Mexico.

Since the mid-1970s the bulk of the many studies of sex differences and language that have appeared in print have focused on sex differences in our own society, particularly on sex differences in language use associated with the possession or lack of power and authority (Lakoff, 1975) in the use of hedges and tag questions. As we shall see in this group of chapters, however, the nature of the society in which biological males and females sustain themselves as social men and women and the structure of the language they speak significantly affect the kinds of gender differences in language function and form that can be discussed and the ways in which they can be discussed.

A comparative view of gender differences in language form has existed within linguistic study since the early part of this century. Sapir's 1915 paper “Abnormal Types of Speech in Nootka” (E. Sapir, 1915) focuses on linguistic devices that imply something about the social identity of the speaker, devices he characterizes as “person implications.”