Shigeko Okamoto is a Professor in the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. Her areas of research include sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics and functional grammar. She has published numerous articles on Japanese language and gender, honorifics, regional dialects, grammaticization and grammatical constructions. She is a co-editor of the volume Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology (with Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith, 2004). Her latest interest is in semiotic diversity and multiplicity and its relationship to language ideologies. Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is a specialist in Japanese language, society and culture, with an emphasis on the interaction between ideology and practice. Publications include Japanese Women's Language (1985) and the edited volume Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology (with Shigeko Okamoto, 2004). Her latest long-time interest in language and gender has merged with studies of contemporary cultural models of femininity/masculinity and romantic love through textual analyses of popular print and televisual materials.