Language is a communicative practice mediated by a linguistic system or systems. It is the systems, what we call languages, that preoccupy most of the field of linguistics. The fields of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, however, focus on communicative practice more broadly defined, and it is in this larger sense that we will be examining language and gender.

For many linguists, a speaker's linguistic competence is the knowledge underlying the ability to produce and recognize, for example, that the cat chased the rat is a sentence of English (with a certain meaning) whereas *cat the the rat chased is not. Sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, on the other hand, emphasize that knowledge of a grammar is not sufficient to participate in verbal practice — one needs to know the conventions by which people engage with each other in linguistic activity. People develop their linguistic competence in use, and along with the linguistic system or systems, they learn how to put the system(s) to work in social situations. What they develop, then, is not simply linguistic competence but also a wider communicative competence (e.g. Gumperz and Hymes 1972). In this chapter, we will introduce the reader to some concepts that will serve as the analytic basis for our discussions of language use: first the social locus of linguistic practice, then the linguistic system itself.