This book is a translated and updated version of Nakamura's doctoral thesis, first published in 2007 in Japanese under the title Onna kotoba wa tsukurareru [Constructing women's language]. The new book consists of ten chapters divided into four parts: the premodern, early modern, war, and post-war periods.

In the Japanese language, masculine and feminine speech are clearly differentiated, and many Japanese see this as one of their language's most crucial characteristics. Dating back to the nyōbō kotoba ‘court-women speech’ of females working in the Imperial Palace in the fourteenth century, the differences include tone, vocabulary, the polite prefix o-, the sentence-final particles yo and wa, gendered first person singular pronouns, certain interjections, and many other phonological and grammatical distinctions. Nakamura challenges the widespread and firmly held belief among her compatriots that this is how women speak, and suggests instead that the notion of a separate female language is largely an ideological construct, promulgated by the popular media and prescribed by the texts and grammar books taught in schools, but not in fact reflective of reality either past or present.

At the heart of Nakamura's thesis is her questioning of the assumption that ‘women's language’ derives from women's actual speech, and the fact that researchers take for granted that the observed linguistic features can simply be accounted for by the speaker's gender—what Deborah Cameron has termed the ‘correlational fallacy’. Most Japanese people continue to claim today that women have always spoken this way; however Nakamura provides many examples from ancient literature where female characters do not speak the traditional women's language. She draws on Ozaki's research into women's conversation in the workplace to show that modern females do not actually speak this way either. It seems that everyday evidence is simply ‘ignored as deviation, exception or marginal’ (p. 22), keeping the common belief intact.

Nakamura also asks why it is that only women's language has developed a normative function. Japanese parents often tell their young daughters to speak more politely because they are female, but do not tell their boys to speak more roughly. Nakamura suggests that this is because Japanese men are seen as using standard Japanese, while the special ‘men's language’ is used only on certain occasions connected with sports, war, or fighting. By implication then, having a feminine variety performs the useful negative function of sustaining standard Japanese as the unmarked variety, implicitly masculinised.

In short this is a brave and iconoclastic investigation into a cherished and long held notion central to Japanese culture and society that is still at the forefront of public attention in modern Japan today. The author has successfully demonstrated that the historical discourse approach is a valid method for deconstructing and analysing the complex web of interrelationships between gender and language. It would seem then that the whole ideological construct of onna no kotoba might be based on norms and values and be more parts myth than hard sociolinguistic evidence.