Women's Language

The distinctive language style that appears in male and female speech mostly covers three basic points. They are the use of vocabularies, the most common topics, and the linguistic style of language itself. In language, women are said to have their own vocabulary for emphasizing certain effects on them, words and expressions such as so good, such fun, exquisite, lovely, divine, precious, adorable, darling, and fantastic (Wardaugh: 2006).

According to Tannen (1990), women and men have some particular different habits in conversation. Women like to talk about connection and intimacy while men speak more about status and independence. Through her approach, she encourages the idea of equality in which the differences that happen between men and women are just simply because of their different culture that is introduced to their social life. Her study resulted that men tend to use a report style which refers to communicate factual information, while women tend to use a rapport style which concerns more about how to build and maintain the relationships.

The study about women’slanguage has basically been developed by Lakoff through her book entitled Language and Women’s Place in 1975. As it is said by Holmes (1992: 315), Lakoff has put a fundamental theoretical framework that has identified several linguistic features that have been unified by their function in expressing lack of confidence. Without this theoretical framework, it is difficult to know how to interpret the difference found in women’s language.

In her approach, Lakoff divides men and women into two discrete groups and measures the degree of linguistic differences that are found in their speech features. As a result, she found that there are several characteristics that are likely to be used by women more than men do in their social daily interaction. In language, women's language shows up in all levels of the grammar of English. The differences in the choice and frequency of lexical items; in the situations in which certain syntactic rules are performed; in intonation and other super-segmental patterns (Lakoff: 1973). Women tend to use more intensifiers (so, very, quiet), more tag question (I think, you know, well), more empty adjectives, and so on.