- 632 - dr Marta Dąbrowska Assistant Professor Institute of English Studies Jagiellonian University Cracow, Poland The Fourth International Conference of the Faculty of Al-Alsun, Minia University: "Preserving Linguistic and Cultural Identity in the Age of Globalization" 23 rd – 25 th April, 2007 Female Acts of Identity The topic of the paper focuses on an important area of current socio- pragmatic study – the question of genderlects. Initiated by R. Lakoff in the 1970s, the issue of women’s language has inspired a number of experiments attempting to prove or disprove Lakoff’s theoretical observations. It has also caused some controversies as regards the source of the different male and female speaking styles, resulting in a split within the group of linguists dealing with the issue into those supporting the difference approach and those in favour of the dominance approach. However, the study presented in this paper is not to deal with linguistic differences between men and women and the possible reasons for the existence of those, but it focuses specifically on the language of women alone, with the aim to establish whether the linguistic behaviour of women may be described in similar terms across cultures (illustrated here by the British and the Polish ones). The topic stems from one of the sub-tendencies developed in the recent decades on the basis of studies analysing the behaviour of English-speaking women, which claims that women’s language is not, contrary to Lakoff’s view, deficient, but cooperative, especially when in all-female interaction, and consequently, what tends to be interpreted as a lack of power on the part of women may in fact be recognised as a positive facet of their identity (cf. Coates 1993, Holmes 1992). Following from this, I would like to examine whether the above assumption that women are highly cooperative and manifest positive politeness when in interaction with other women would hold true also in the