Articulating Difference

Sophie Salvo's 'Articulating Difference' investigates nineteenth-century German debates about language to show how ideas about sexual difference were central to the formation of language science and philosophy.

Drawing on philosophy, linguistics, ethnography, and literature, Salvo argues that male scholars repeatedly used gendered narratives—about origins, women's speech, and grammatical gender—to define and delimit linguistic knowledge.

The book also recovers understudied contributions by women writing about language, demonstrating how they negotiated masculine disciplinary boundaries.

Salvo connects these historical formations to present-day debates over language, arguing that gendered conceptions of language underpin exclusionary claims about who can speak or write authoritatively.

The work reframes the history of Sprachwissenschaft to make gender a primary analytic for understanding the discipline's epistemic and political commitments.