Women’s Speech Features used by the female characters in The Young Victoria movie

ABSTRACT

Language and gender are two dimensions that are correlated. Men and women can have different styles in speaking because of gender rules constructed in the society. This Sociolinguistic phenomenon can be found in a movie entitled the Young Victoria that describes the life of women from upper class. According to Lakoff, there are several linguistic features that signify the characteristics of women’s language such as being polite and less assertive. Those are lexical hedges, hedges, intensifiers, question intonations, super polite form, empty adjectives, hypercorrect grammar, precise color terms, absence of humor, and speaks in italics.

There are two problems of the study; those are what types of women’s speech features are used by the female characters in the Young Victoria movie and how those features are used by the female characters in the Young Victoria movie. Considering the significance of the study, there are two objectives of the study. The first objective is to identify the types of women’s speech features used by the characters in “The Young Victoria” movie. The second objective is to describe how the women’s speech features used by the characters in “The Young Victoria” movie. The approach is qualitative descriptive since the data analyzed and described are in the form of words and sentences. The data were taken by finding the transcript from internet. Then, the data were analyzed by identifying and classifying the types of women’s speech features based on Lakoff’s theory and supported by Holmes theory as the sociolinguistic approach.

The findings show that not all types of women’s speech features are used by the female characters in the Young Victoria movie. There are seven types of women’s speech features identified in the dialogue. Those are lexical hedges, intensifiers, question intonations, super polite form, empty adjectives, hypercorrect grammar, and speaks in italics. The women’s speech features not found in the dialogue are absence of humor and precise color terms. The female characters use such features as hedging devices to reflect feeling of uncertainty and lack of confidence; as boosting device in order to persuade their addressee to take their intention seriously; and also as politeness devices to show that they behave like a lady. In addition, the way the female characters use their speech features reflects the social relationship and background, the topic and the formality of the setting. The next researcher may conduct the similar research by taking one or two types of women’s speech features to analyze so that they can get a deeper investigation than the present research.