Gossip can serve to:
* normalise and re-inforce moral boundaries in a speech-community
* foster and build a sense of community with shared interests and information
* entertain and divert participants in gossip-sessions
* retail and develop various types of story — anecdotes, narratives and even legends — see memetics
* build structures of social accountability
* further mutual social grooming (like many other uses of language, only more so)
* provide a mating tool that allows (for example) women to mutually identify socially desirable men and social pariahs to avoid
* reflect unvarnished and spontaneous public opinion - of interest to marketers, opinion pollers and secret-policemen
* undermine entrenched systems of power and domination as a form of political resistance (see this chargeable New York Times article by Patricia Cohen)
This Soviet war poster reads: "Don't chatter! Gossiping borders on treason" (1941).
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