P. Burton, Women and Second-Language Use: An Introduction - A. Spedding, Open Castilian, Closed Aymara? Bilingual Women in the Yungas of La Paz, Bolivia - P. Harvey, The Presence and Absence of Speech in the Communication of Gender - C. Humphrey, Casual Chat and Ethnic Identity: Women's Second-Language Use among Buryats in the USSR - N. Chinchaladze and T. Dragadze, Women and Second-Language Knowledge in Rural Soviet Georgia: An Outline - M. McDonald, Women and Linguistic Innovation in Brittany - E. Constantinidou, The `Death' of East Sutherland Gaelic: Death by Women? - J. Burke, French: No One's Language, Therefore Everyone's Language: Convent Speech Lower Zaire - S. Mascarenhas-Keyes, Language and Diaspora: The Use of Portuguese, English and Konkani by Catholic Goan Women - L. Hong, A Note on My Experience as a Student, a Teacher and an Interpreter of English in China - K.K. Dyson, Forging a Bilingual Identity: A Writer's Testimony - E. Tonkin, Engendering Language Differences

Pauline Burton Lecturer in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences,City Polytechnic of Hong Kong Ketaki Kushari Dyson Writer and Research Associate, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women, University of Oxford Mrs Shirley Ardener Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women,University of Oxford

This book studies women's language use in bilingual or multi-lingual cultural situations. The authors - social anthropologists, language teachers, and interpreters cover a wide variety of geographical and linguistic situations, from the death of Gaelic in the Outer Hebrides, to the use of Spanish by Quechua and Aymara women in the Andes. Certain common themes emerge: dominant and sub-dominant languages, women's use of them; ambivalent attitudes towards women as translators, interpreters and writers in English as a second language; and the critical role of women in the survival (or death) of minority languages such as Gaelic and Breton.