This article analyzes the dichotomization of two opposing approaches to studying sex differences in language use: the “difference/cultural” approach, which treats women and men as having “different but equally valid” rules of conversation, and the “dominance/power-based” approach, which focuses on male dominance and sexual division of labor in talk. I critique the stance taken by the difference approach. First, its notion of women and men as belonging to different “cultures” is too simplistic to account for everything that occurs in mixed-sex conversation. Second, the dichotomization of “power” and “culture” as two separate, independent concepts is inappropriate, because social interaction always occurs in the context of a patriarchal society. As a direction for further research, I propose that the relationship between gender and language should be approached from the viewpoint that we are doing gender in interaction. (Sociolinguistics, communication, conversational style, gender, sex differences)

Although there exists an extensive literature on mediation, little attention has been given to the close analysis of talk in actual mediations. This article applies various analytic techniques, particularly those of conversation analysis and sociolinguistics, to provide a culturally contexted account of a mediation. At issue is the division of a rice harvest between a sharecropper and the owner of a ricefield in a Northern Thai village. Practices with regard to accusation and criticism, defense and denial, expression of anger, formulation of parties, and perspectival shifting are central to the analysis.

In order to understand what is taking place, it is necessary to have some knowledge of a variety of cultural and “contextual” matters, for example, genres and styles of local speech, traditional and current share-cropping practices, the national law regarding sharecropping, and local administrative practices, as well as the history of relations between the parties to the negotiation. On the other hand, a close analysis of the talk reveals a good deal about general cultural contexts, as well as about Northern Thai mediation. (Mediation, conversation analysis, Thailand)

Secularization has played a significant role in the revival of Hebrew. Use of words and phrases from the religious domain in secular contexts, so natural to the native Israeli, may at times shock students who have studied Hebrew outside Israel, especially those trained in Jewish day schools. The growing secularization of Israeli life-style and the increasing influence of foreign languages, as manifested in the local media, indeed have given rise to new forms of language secularization. These have split modern Hebrew into two varieties: on the one hand, a language clinging to its historical roots, spoken and understood by observant Jews in Israel and studied abroad in religious day schools, and on the other hand, a secularized variety, separated from its ancient culture, adopted by many circles of Israeli Hebrew speakers. (Semantic change, language varieties, Hebrew)

The bibliography following the body of this paper contains a total of 1,092 entries on the subject of diglossia. Entries dealing with diglossia in the classical sense of Ferguson (1959) and in the sense of functional compartmentalization of distinct languages are represented approximately equally. Scholarly publication in the area of diglossia continues unabated as indicated by the fact that approximately one-half of the entries in the bibliography were published between 1983 and 1992. However, there remains a need for a comprehensive integration, comparative analysis, and socioevolutionary interpretation of diglossia research. (Bilingualism, diglossia, functional variation, literary languages, registers, standard languages, standardization)