• What is Standard Male Conversational Style, and how did it become the standard for workplace communication?

• Are there any disadvantages to adopting Standard Male Conversational Style?

• What can gendered language teach us about the need to balance IDENTITY and AGENCY in the workplace?

• Can speech patterns gendered? If so, why and how?

• Are there statistically significant differences between the way that men and women speak? Or is it our own flawed perception that men and women talk differently?

• If these differences are “real”, how is being aware of gendered speech patterns beneficial to us as workers?

Collaboration and cooperation are linguistic tasks.

• How can we define collaborative conversation by their language patterns?

• How do teams fail to collaborate? How do they collaborate successfully?

• What are some strategies to ensure effective collaboration?

• What are some emerging linguistic trends in the workplace, and how do these trends vary by age or position in the company?

• Where does slang come from, how do we interpret different people’s uses of slang depending of age, gender, race, and sexuality?

• What is codeswitching, why do linguists study it, and why is it important to consider in business settings?

• Who codeswitches? Is race the only relevant demographic category for code-switching?

• What is the “freedom from codeswitching” movement, and is it realistic to eliminate codeswitching in business settings?

• What is swearing? Why do humans collectively decide that some words are “bad words”?

• How is swearing interpreted differently based on speaker and context? Where does the workplace fit into all of this?

• How do younger generations impact swearing norms in the workplace?

• What are “demographics”, what is the connection between language and demographics, and why is this important to consider in the workplace?

• What do linguists know about how individual interpretation of different speech patterns impacts our perception of demographic categories?