Robin Tolmach Lakoff is a feminist and Professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most famous work is Language and Woman's Place (1975), which introduced many ideas about women's language into the field of sociolinguistics that are now commonplace, such as women's greater use of tag questions as compared to men's speech. Further research on tag questions has cast some doubt on this proposition though.

Robin Lakoff's article entitled 'Women's Language', combined with her book 'Language and Woman's Place', have served as the basis for much research on the subject of women's language. In her 1975 article she published 10 basic assumptions about what she felt constituted a special women's language. Much of what Lakoff proposed agreed with Otto Jespersen's theories.

External links

• UC Berkeley faculty page
• Gender and tags
• Language Log

American linguists | Sociolinguists | University of California, Berkeley faculty