A Study On Features Of US Women's Speech

Thirty years ago the linguist and feminist Robin Lakoff published her groundbreaking book,"Language and Woman's Place". (Lakoff 1975), which marked the beginning of a subfield of sociolinguistics: Language and gender studies. The book has sparked a considerable amount of thought and discussion in the past three decades, and many issues concerning linguistic gender differentiation, especially the reasons for the differences between men's and women's speech still remain to be conclusively resolved. This thesis aims to assess some of Lakoff's claims about features of women's speech. Additionally, it seeks to answer the question of what factors cause the linguistic gender differences.The thesis begins with a list of seven research questions and an account of considerations involved in the choice of the research topic. Following the chapter"Literature Review"is a chapter discussing methods in sociolinguistic research with emphasis on the two instruments used in this research: questionnaire and discourse analysis. Then, in the next chapter, responses from 78 US and 22 British and Australian citizens participating in this research and linguistic data generated by discourse analysis are presented and analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Finally, in the last chapter, the research findings are discussed and conclusions drawn from them.As an additional part to this thesis,"Postscript"carries a few points made by Lakoff in her annotations included in the revised and expanded edition of"Language and Woman's Place", published in 2004, and the researcher's view on what causes the differences between men's and women's speech is restated here.