COMMENTS: Omnia Ahmed Ali

The book manages to establish a relation between language, culture and gender. The language used by one person is greatly affected by many factors not only the person’s gender. That is why through out(throughout) the book both Angela Goddard and Lindsey Meân Patterson provide examples to prove that the difference in the language used by males or females depends on many factors such as the age of the speaker, their social class and their sexual orientation. This could be perceived through the example they offer from a recent study made on gay men and straight men which proved that “ age was significant for straight men” that the term ‘girlfriend’ is more frequently used among youth where as ‘partners’ is more serious and denotes permanence in the relationship, while ‘lover’ denotes something less serious. This however is different from the way gay men use these terms as for them ‘boyfriend’ denotes permanence. This proves the idea that both conceptions, age, culture and gender all together forms people’s language. At the same time it shows that language is flexible as new terms can emerge according to people's needs like the word ‘partners’ which was used as a result of a new social relation. The authors use all that to reflect the role of language “which is clearly to validate and legitimize a person’s behaviour”, something which the authors could have elaborated in a more extended way. It could have been used to link between(delete) the role of the language and the reason language is used differently by different speakers, as each language user has his own concepts, believes and behaviours that he wants to validate which in its tern reflects his cultural background. This however was completely ignored by the authors and they moved to a completely different topic which is anthropomorphism through which he tries to establish another relation between language and thoughts.The book uses some exercises to simplify the concepts to the readers and make them familiar with the different uses of language and its relation to the speaker’s culture. At the same times it offers a number of pictures to illustrate some points which was very effective and greatly simplified some new terms like anthropomorphism.

EXCELLENT.