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.

Language and Gender

The most obvious function of language is probably to communicate information. However, language also can contribute to at least two other equally important. As stated by Sims (2004), language also can function to establish and maintain social relationships, and to express and create the social identity of the speaker. Sociolinguists, as it is said by Speer (2005:5), view that variations in patterns of language use are not random but are conditioned by social identity variables such as a person’s gender or class, and the situation or context in which they find themselves.

Among those social variables, gender is a term that refers to the way man and woman interact in their daily life. This behavior is constructed by the social values they have. The general usage of the term gender began in the late 1960s and 1970s, This term is used to help the sociolinguists in distinguishing the aspects of life that were more easily attributed or understood to be of social rather than biological origin (Unger and Crawford, as cited in Speer, 2005).