Sociolinguistics and Women’s Language

ABSTRACT:By analyzing the previous literature, this paper looks into the salient features of women’slanguage from the perspective of sociolinguistics. It is find that women are not necessarily using more lexiconof colors, particles, intensifiers, hedges, or more tag questions, polite forms, phatic stress, etc. What theyactually do has to be analyzed with a mixed factors like social position, topic, relationship with the interlocutor,her personality, the particular occasion, etc; Women are not necessarily less dominant or with less power in theinteraction with men. Social position and the specific context are two other major elements impacting on theirlinguistic performance; Both theoretical and empirical methods are applicable to studying women’s language,and research design should be attached great importance to, involving the two groups of moderators,methodological moderators and contextual moderators. Based on the findings, future study on women’slanguage can be further contextualized and further categorized. For instance, when looking into women’s talk incourt, we should specify her position. We may further compare women’s different uses of language betweenjudge, prosecution attorney, defence attorney, jury, or defendant in different cases such as finance, divorce,criminal offence, or others.

KEYWORDS: sociolinguistics, conventional, theoretical, empirical, women’s language