 Is gender always relevant to language? Our course you know is about language and gender. It shows that there is one-to-one link between language and gender and it raises the question whether this one-to-one relationship is always intact, is always desirable, is always possible. Feminist language like lack of, these are the languages which we refer to right in the beginning in the early modules. We talked about Robin Lackoff's work and Deborah Cameron's work and Tennant's work. These people are known as feminist languages. One of them is Lackoff. Lackoff makes one-to-one, she is among feminist languages. So these languages make one-to-one link between language and gender. Here gender means natural gender, sex. Conversation analysts like Shagaliff, how this link is challenged or how this link is maintained, this point of view would be understood if we include in our discussion conversation analysts. Because our concern is with relationship of gender and language and this relationship can be understood with the help of conversation. So we should have to involve conversation analysts to take their position on this point. And one of the famous conversation analysts is Shagaliff. He is from the field of sociology. These people make one-to-one link between language and social identity. When you talk, you talk your identity. This is their point of view. So it shows that language and gender, they are always linked with each other. Gender and language, gender is always relevant to language. Conversation defines identity of the participants, not gender talk. Different speech styles, as we discussed previously, that when people talk with each other, they indicate their gender identity from their speech style. We can say that this is language of women and this is language of men, as was discussed by Deborah Cameron in her book, Language of Women. Here the point of view is different. Here we are talking about participants' identity on the basis of conversation, not on the basis of their particular speech style. Conversation tells whether the talkers are language, whether they are Pakistanis, whether they are politicians, Muslims. This is the point of view of conversation analysis. Oaks, one of the same fields says that only a few expressions are directly linked with gender or sex. For example, in English, he, she, her, him, mister, misses and mis. They are such expressions which are related with biological sex. Otherwise we don't have any exact relationship between words of a language and biological sex. So, on the basis of this talk in this module, we were trying to answer the question whether gender is always relevant to language. We can conclude that language is not directly linked with a social group. There is no men's or women's language, number one. It is the speaker and hearer who give meaning when they are involved in conversation. They, they interpret the meaning of linguistic features when they talk about particular topics in a particular real-time situation. They make tag questions, for example, you know Cameron said that women use tag questions. So, she related tag questions directly with women. But here the point of view is that is offered by conversation analysts that it depends not on the biological sex, rather it depends on how the conversationalists interpret certain linguistic features, how they take tag questions. For them tag questions may be a strategy to look less harsh when you say someone, I love you, don't I? So, this, this is the style and this is not, this is not associated with a man or woman. Rather it is communicative strategy. Similarly, in this task that you will do now, you will support, you will support or you can disagree with this new point of view on the relationship between language and gender. In this task, the requirement is that you observe an informal talk. Informal talk means in some casual environment, not in some formal environment of office or classroom, rather at some canteen, etc. So, in some informal talk, you will observe male and female class fellows, for example, at the canteen, note utterances in which they use tag questions. Again, some examples for your help that would help you in answering this question. I have given some examples of tag questions. You are my friend, aren't you? I should not be there, should I? I help you in writing assignments, don't I? These are tag questions. So, we just take this one linguistic feature. And with the help of this, you will see that how the conversationalist, the friends talking about something in a canteen, how they understand, how they give meaning to tag questions, interpret the use of tag questions in their context of talk and write about it.