Gender variations in language use by male and female bloggers: A corpus-based comparative analysis

Abstract

The present study endeavours to investigate the influence of gender on language use among male and female bloggers by identifying Lakoff's "features of women's language," as listed in her seminal work Language and Woman Place that is widely credited as the pioneering and most influential feminist study on the relationship between language and gender. She discovered some variations on how women and men used language and proposed a Deficit model which described how women's lower status and inferior role in society are exacerbated by this language use. In the present study, Lakoff's deficit theory was chosen as a model for analysing gender's influence on linguistic use among male and female bloggers through a modest-sized quantitative comparative analysis. To identify the "features of women's language" as listed by Lakoff and analyse the gendered linguistic variations, the researcher used stratified random sampling and generated two gendered corpora from the Blog Authorship Corpus, one for male bloggers and the other for female bloggers. The researcher then used the KWIC and WORDS functions in the Lancsbox (v4.5) to calculate the frequency of each language attribute in the blogs. The results revealed that linguistic features found by Lakoff differed substantially between male and female languages (1975). Furthermore, the existence of some common language use differences and similarities showed that Lakoff's arguments regarding gender effects on language use are still valid and should be studied using broader corpora of written and spoken language grounded in various cultural settings since different uses of language often result in multiple variations in communication. This research may help writers, readers, and teachers better comprehend gender differences, especially in terms of linguistic characteristics as identified by Lakoff.