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We can summarize our main findings as follows: 1. There was a dramatic decline in the rate of androcentric generics from 1971 through 1979 in the American publications surveyed. 2. The publications which displayed the sharpest declines were those addressed to women and to the well-educated, from whom the leaders of the feminist movement emerged. 3. Of the androcentric forms, the form least resistant to change was man and the form most resistant to change was man in compounds. 4. Based on the data from our newspapers, there was no evidence that the change was adopted first by more metropolitan areas. Our sample of news- papers was small enough, however, to make a replication with a larger, representative sample worthwhile. 5. Congresswomen avoided androcentric generics in their extemporaneous remarks from the floor of the House of Representatives more often than did congressmen, whose acceptance of the innovation appeared to lag behind that of the professional writers represented in our sample. 6. With respect to the avoidance of androcentric generics, newswriters appeared not to be in advance of the readers who wrote letters to the editor. 7. We found no consistent increase in the use of nonandrocentric generics as substitutes for mixed-sex he or man in compounds. Rates for the non- androcentric generics which we studied were very low, much lower than the rates for androcentric generics. 8. No decline in the use of androcentric generics was found in the one British publication surveyed, The Times Literary Supplement. However, several instances of singular they were found there. It is remarkable that the feminist movement - loosely organized, unofficial, and with relatively unimpressive financial resources - should have succeeded in effecting, in such a short time, the dramatic change in written usage documented here. Language planning need not be the product of formal institutions such as language academies in order to be successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section comments on the article, Levels of Analysis in Sociolinguistic Explanation: Bilingual Code Switching, Social Relations, and Domain Therapy, by L. B. Breitborde. Sociolinguistics lacks coherence. It is characterized more in terms of a congeries of loosely related topics than in terms of a universally agreed-upon central problem. This can be seen by juxtaposing the work of two of the most eminent sociolinguistic theorists, John Gumperz and Joshua Fishman. Breitborde's effort to reconcile the two approaches reminds us how far apart they are. Breitborde suggests that the problem of reconciling Gumperz's and Fishman's work lies in the problem of integrating microsociolinguistic and macrosociolinguistic levels of analysis. However, both men collect the data of observable speech in social interaction, and both men analyze observations in terms of abstract social constructs and higher-order regularities. Breitborde recognizes that Gumperz and Fishman do not share the same intellectual tradition. Indeed it is their socialization and development within differing research traditions which explains the gulf between them. Their membership in different traditions has led them to consider different questions as important and different data as valid.