Bilingual women

de Ketaki Kushari Dyson, Shirley Ardener

Throughout the world, women mediate between cultures as bilingual and multi-lingual speakers, teachers, translators, and interpreters. They may be seen as the guardians of minority languages or be perceived as 'good at languages'. However, very little has so far been published on women and language use in bilingual or multi-cultural situations. There is a considerable body of work both in bilingualism as a general phenomenon, and on language use and gender; in this collection of papers, these issues are combined. The authors are, in the main, practising social anthropologists; language teachers, interpreters, and writers have also contributed. The papers in this volume cover a wide variety of geographical and linguistic situations: from the death of Gaelic in Scotland, to the use of Spanish by Quechua and Aymara women in the Andes. Certain common themes emerge: dominant and subdominant languages, women's use of them (in Bolivia, Chile, Zaire, Mongolia and Goa); 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.