Should there be an F in GALA?

[langworthy]

It sounds like there are alot of gender studies people and not so many
linguists on this list. I am interested in both grammatical and
sociolinguistic differences between male and female/masculineand feminine
uses of language. The language I work on, Garifuna, has many examples of
both these. For example, in Garifuna third person singular can be either
masculine or feminine, and a speaker usually uses masculine as the default
gender in grammatical agreement with referents not specified for gender.
For example, the expression "lahuya huya" ("it is about to rain") is
inflected with masculine, except for older conservative male speakers, who
by convention use feminine gender in such constructions: "tahuya huya".
Most speakers would use masculine agreement for transitive imperatives,
such as: adugubei "do it!", except for conservative male speakers, who
would say: adugubou.

Or, for example, my informants tell me that Garifuna women use
evidentiality more than men because "women are less sure of what they
say."

Sociolinguistic differences include things like language use (women speak
Garifuna more, men speak Creole more) and bilingualism (Garifuna men are
more likely to be multilingual than women).

 I think of these phenomena as gender linguistics, and there is no need
for feminism in this type of study (tho I'm certainly not anit-feminist).
It does seem to limit things to restrict GALA to feminist language and
gender issues.

Geneva Langworthy
Taos, New Mexico