Kim Woo-Dal. 1998. A Review of Sociolinguistic Explanation about Sex Differences. Studies in Modern Grammar 13, 213-229. This paper briefly reviews what we calling `sociolinguistic explanation`, and proposes that the main explanations advanced that women tend to produce speech closer to the standard in pronunciation than that of men are in terms of sociological factors external to language such as status consciousness or solidarity. And this paper tried to show the explanations most commonly put forward to account for sex-difference findings are presumed to be inadequate, and sociolinguists have not considered the specific conditions of women`s lives. Too little attention has been paid to the places of women in economic and social organisation; too little is known about the nature and values of women`s subcultures, and often this lead to an assumption that `vernacular culture` is a uniform and exclusively masculine phenomenon. This study proposes that differences in women`s and men`s language are regularly associated with changes in language and the changes are toward on the bases of language and social environments which are opened to both sexes on various job opportunities in the advanced society of capitalistic economy.

• 김우달 | Woo Del Kim