In many senses families are the cradle of language - the origin of everyday talk, and a touchstone for the talk in other contexts. The daily management of the household, the creation of intimate relationships, the negotiation of values and beliefs, are all sustained through conversation. Families have nonetheless been less a focus for discourse analysis than the workplace and other formal institutions.

Emerging from a three-year Georgetown project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, this contributed volume will be one of the first to fill this gap and look in-depth at the face-to-face interactions of four American families. All working with the same data - audio tape recordings made in four family homes over the course of several years - the contributors focus on extending our knowledge of family discourse and identifying new ways in which family members create and enact their identities within the family. Several broad themes emerge: the underlying dynamics of power and solidarity in the family and how they are reinforced through talk; the negotiation of gendered identities in conjunction with family identities, especially in dual-income families; and the ways in which families actively confirm their beliefs and values when children are present.

The volume makes an important and groundbreaking contribution to the fields of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and communication, as welll as to language and gender studies.