Ethnographic methods for language and gender research

Ethnographic approaches to language and gender emphasize the complex yet richly textured relationship between linguistic practices observed in their naturalistic form and their social, cultural, and political context. The relationship between language and gender became the object of ethnographically informed research only in the 1970s, although it was informed by a rich history of ethnographic works on other aspects of society, culture, and language on the one hand and, on the other hand, by the emergence in the prior decade of gender as a primary object of inquiry in the social sciences, particularly anthropology. Contemporary ethnographic works on language and gender range in focus from the contextual to the textual, but all approach gender as a category that both emerges through interaction and informs linguistic practices.