With the increase of, on one hand, interest in gender issues, and the rise of feminist voices calling for more exploration of the various arenas related to gender and gendered expectations, and, on the other hand, questions about the effect of the increasingly globalized world with significant, extensive use of new technologies and media, research dealing with the relationships between language, gender, globalization, and media is needed. Language in its socio-cultural context: New explorations in gendered, global and media uses aims at responding to these new queries. It is a pioneering book that crosses different research areas—notably sociolinguistics, gender studies, cultural studies, media studies, and comparative linguistics.

With its twelve chapters, this book is a collection of a wide range of articles that closely examine language in relation to gender and globalization and that are in line with more recent perspectives on linguistic change and reforms regarding gender. These research papers present a variety of gender-related perspectives, ranging from the local, as in Friederike Braun and Geoffrey Haig's “When are German ‘girls’ feminine?” (69–85), which presents the results of an investigation designed to uncover the role played by the semantic factor of age in the way speakers select agreement forms associated with the German word Mädchen, to the global, as in Markus Bieswanger's “Gendered language use in computer-mediated communication typography in text messaging” (157–73), which focuses on gendered patterns in typographic variation among text messages written by female and male senders, taking a closer look at the use of shortened forms in this technologically mediated environment. Other papers focus on language change and reforms in different contexts, as in Anne Pauwels' “Socially motivated language reform in a global lingua franca: The case of gender reform in English” (21–34), which addresses the issue of finding a balance between a universal desire for linguistic equality between sexes and local sociocultural conditions in the context of English. Janet Holmes' “Gender, leadership and discourse in New Zealand workplaces” (85–109) investigates how New Zealand women and men demonstrate stylistic diversity and sensitivity to context in the ways in which they enact their leadership roles at work.

An interesting investigation of how gender and language variation influence one another in Creole communities is Bettina Migge's “Variation and change in a Creole community: An assessment of social and linguistic processes” (219–36), which explores the notion of the Creole continuum in an urban context. A similar focus can also be found in Susanne Mühleisen's “Variation and change in Caribbean Creole pronominal system: What does allyuh mean?” (237–51), where the researcher takes up Marlis Hellinger's (1985, 1998) research on variation and change in Creole pronominal systems. Mühleisen studies the meaning of second person plural pronouns in Carribean Creoles, with particular reference to the Trinidadian Creole second person plural pronoun allyuh.