LIST OF FIGURES -- LIST OF TABLES -- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS -- 1 INTRODUCTION -- 1.1 Language, sex and gender -- 1.2 Women's and men's language use -- 1.3 Women's and men's language attitudes -- 1.4 The present study -- 2 THE INVESTIGATION IN AMSTERDAM -- 2.0 Introduction -- 2.1 Sample -- 2.2 Design and procedure -- 2.3 Language use component -- 2.4 Language attitude component -- 3 LINGUISTIC VARIATION -- 3.0 Introduction -- 3.1 Style shift and variation within styles -- 3.2 Language use by women and men -- 3.3 The standard/non-standard dimension -- 4 SOCIOLOGICAL FACTORS -- 4.0 Introduction -- 4.1 Language use by women and men revisited -- 4.2 Language use and social position: gender-related speech differences -- 5 LINGUISTIC ATTITUDES -- 5.0 Introduction -- 5.1 Self-evaluation of language use -- 5.2 Subjective reactions to standard and non-standard language use and to female and male speakers -- 5.3 Language use and social norms: gender-stereotyped attitudes -- 6 CONCLUDING REMARKS -- 6.1 Sociolinguistic differences between women and men -- 6.2 Explanations and explanations -- APPENDIX 1 Occupations of the informants -- APPENDIX 2 Reading style text -- APPENDIX 3 Word list -- APPENDIX 4 Phonetic-phonological test -- APPENDIX 5 Morpho-syntactic test -- APPENDIX 6 Lexical test -- APPENDIX 7 Amsterdam dialect test -- REFERENCES -- AUTHOR INDEX.