the language spoken by the isolated Pirahã people indigenous to Amazonas in Brazil, which involves differences between men’s speech and women’s speech, helps to illustrate this. First, Pirahã women use a more impressionistically ‘guttural’ speech than men. This is produced by two culturally motivated uses of the Pirahãs’ vocal apparatus. One is that most Pirahã women’s sounds are articulated further back in the mouth, relative to men’s speech. Where a man might produce an /n/ by placing the tongue just behind the upper teeth, in women’s pronunciation, an /n/ places the tongue further back, to
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