In earlier chapters our focus has been on how gender interacts with what people do with the resources provided by the linguistic system (or systems), and with norms for deploying those resources. We have noted that the resources themselves may be transformed in the course of social practice. A form like Ms. is introduced and adopted and responded to, and over time the repertoire of English address options and their significance shift in structured yet unpredictable ways. And norms for speech get challenged and reshaped: a young woman who begins to say shit in situations that would draw shucks from her mother is helping change the gendered significance of tabooed expletives.

But changes like these are against the backdrop of a speaker's overall dialect. Speakers can decide to interrupt, avoid apologies, stop swearing, and start talking about women as active sexual agents without really changing their basic dialect, the system whose resources they are using to further their various projects. Speakers can do very different things in talking with one another, can pursue quite different communicative goals, while using essentially the same linguistic variety. As we will see, linguistic varieties are linked to people in a unique way – they are seen very much as reflecting who people are, where they come from. They carry a good deal of baggage as a result, and they figure in the construction of gender in a myriad of ways.