I've called this concluding chapter an anti-conclusion because of the reality that the issues and situations discussed in this beginner's guide to language use and gender cannot be concluded. There can never be a conclusion to this critical area of inquiry. Because time and place are so transient, no reasonable conclusions are ever possible.

Very broadly speaking, this book has focused on two things:

• 1. How language reveals, represents, constructs and sustains attitudes to gender, and

• 2. How language users speak in ways that contribute to their gendered-inflected lives.

Both of these topics include historical influences, past views of what makes a good woman or man, and a recognition that language is used to control or connect everyone in some way. Studying language can and must be objective insofar as we can assess, record and reflect on language, even though studying gender can be so subjective and personally experienced.

The issues of nature or nurture, or heredity/biology and environment, connect with the media, education, workplace, religious communities, family patterns and social conditioning. Each individual is a mysterious and unique combination of compounding social factors. However, there seem to be some persistent language patterns that are somehow associated with gender. Studying gender and language is interesting in large part because we often want to find support for our developing views or life experiences. It can be very easy to use the claims made by linguists in the past to explain our present circumstances, but such ventures can also be unsatisfactory because research done in specific communities from the 1960s to the 1990s may not relate to our current circumstances. Though so much more research has emerged in the last 20 years or so, foundational feminist work in this area of inquiry does seem to emerge earlier.