If the mind boggled at the sheer amount of labour that went into Jennifer Coates’ paper in this book*, it was still more amazed at the kind of negotiation that must have preceded the tape-recording and transcribing of another series of conversations.

These are described in Linguistic Variation and Social Function by Jenny Cheshire. She managed to record some hours of conversation of adolescent boys in an adventure playground in Reading, taken down when they should have been in school. These were analysed for nine non-standard vernacular features, most of them common to other dialects (e.g. Birmingham) but two at least peculiar to the local dialect in Reading. These were “we goes shopping on Saturdays” and “we has a little fire, keeps us warm”. Cheshire related the frequency of these grammatical features to the degree to which the different boys showed allegiance to the anti-school vernacular culture of their peer group. The boys that were most delinquent (on a “vernacular culture index”, compiled, the reader infers from the recorded conversations) used the most non-standard grammatical features.Recorded and transcribed conversations by adolescent girls confirms other research in this field – the girls used fewer non-standard features than the boys. There was an interesting difference between the speech of three “good” girls (i.e. non-delinquent) in the group and the nine others. There was a very marked tendency to use standard forms by the “good” girls compared with the others.

Some of the difficulties of this pioneering sociolinguistic inquiry can be seen in that the two groups of girls were not evenly matched (3 as against 9). Furthermore, there was a lack of data in recordings of the boys in a school setting, as some dropped out and others were interviewed by different teachers. Sometimes there were no instances of the grammatical form under scrutiny.

One must admire the sheer stamina of the sociolinguists who collected the data for this kind of study, which has done so much to illuminate how choices in the linguistic system are related to sociological factors, including gender.

*Language and Gender ed. Jennifer Coates