 Assalamu alaikum dear students, I am Dr. Muhammad Aslam, your resource person. I welcome you all to the course Language and Gender. Usually people say linguistics is a dry subject. But in this course, you will know that this is not the case. Linguistics is all about us, what is happening around us. So it is about our practical experiences as girls and boys, as men and women. Let's start it with the hope that you will enjoy it. You will learn about the relationship between language and society, and especially with reference to gender. Language and Gender, this is an interdisciplinary field. Interdisciplinary means many disciplines are involved in your study. This is not enough that you know linguistics, you know phonetics, phonology and syntax. Now, besides this, definitely we need them. You need to know some basic things about pragmatics. You need to know something about psychology, philosophy, gender studies, women's studies, psychoanalysis, literature, English literature and so many others including philosophy. So the common thing for which all these disciplines come together in the study of language and gender is that we want to know with the help of all these disciplines, because this is their common interest, that how language connects mind with society. This is the major theme that we will explore throughout this course in different modules and units. Language performs double functions. First, it refers to things in the real world. Words refer to a book, a word refer to a table, a word refer to a girl, real objects, real things, real persons. So this is its referential function. The other function is descriptive function. Language also describes things, persons around us. Okay, these descriptions, they serve as blueprints of what we see, what we do, what we say in our real life. These blueprints which are constructed by language, they are sent to mind. They go to mind. What happens over there? Mind has imagination and with imagination you can create anything. Imagination does work. It converts those blueprints into mental pictures, into images. These mental pictures together construct our mental world. See how language converts real world into mental world. This is how language connects mind and the real world and society. We call it word-building theory of language. But imagination, as I said, it is very powerful. It can create anything. So when this blueprint of the word goes to imagination, imagination can create different versions of the same blueprint. So this is called possible words theory of language. So mind can convert one image into many related images. One word into many possible words. So this is what we daily do. For example, we say what might have been. What would have happened if I did this? So this what might have been is the possible word. If we had, for example, you can say that if we had this course in a face-to-face class, what might have been? In some, language constructs are thoughts with the language constructs are thought, mental images, mental pictures with the help of imaginative power. And then expresses our thoughts in social interaction. So on one side, it builds our thought and on the other side, it expresses our thought. This is the function of language. This is how it connects. As I said in the beginning, this is how it connects mind with the world. Social language applied this theory of word building and possible word to understand how our use of language constructs are gendered self. Gendered self means we construct ourselves as men and women. At this point, our course gets connected with sociolinguistics. So this is how language and gender is related with sociolinguistics. And other view of word building is that we use words to say something, to do something or be being something. Okay. If a Nikah Khan, for example, says in Nikah ceremony that Mrs. A and Mr. B are husband and wife. So these are not just words. Saying these words creates marriage. This is how words build word. Here is a task you will attempt it to understand the ideas we have discussed. Read a news report in which the board sinking incident in Greece is reported. During this reading of the report, try to recall, try to capture what was going on in your mind. Write it down on the paper. After that, question yourself what might have been and then write an other version in answer to this question of the same incident. And then see how far the ideas of possible word we have discussed in this module are applied here.