The contributors to this issue all present work that can be characterized as
research into the relationship between language and gender, and all of them work
with conversational data; however, the groups with which they work differ qualitatively. These qualitative differences will illuminate the contribution that a CofP
analysis can make to the study of language and society. The chief purposes of this
introductory article are to exemplify communities of practice, and to provide a
principled basis for distinguishing the CofP from similar concepts such as the
speech community, social networks, and social identity .