Vowels and Nail Polish: the Emergence of Linguistic Style in the Preadolescent Heterosexual Marketplace1

The challenge of a theory of linguistic practice is to locate the speaking subject within a social unit in which meaning is being actively constructed, and to investigate the relation between the construction of meaning in that unit and the larger social structure with which it engages. It is for this reason that Sally McConnell-Ginet and I (Eckert and McConnellGinet 1992) have called for using the community of practice as the site for the study of language and gender. A community of practice, as defined by its originators, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991), is an aggregate of people who, through engagement in a common enterprise, come to develop and share ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values Ñ in short, practices. For the sociolinguist, the value of the construct Ôcommunity of practiceÕ resides in the focus it affords on the mutually constitutive nature of individual, community, activity, and linguistic practice. For the student of language and gender, it offers the possibility to focus on the local construction of genderÑto see how gender is co-constructed with other aspects of identity, and to identify what one might abstract from this as gender.