Women's Language Used by Female and Male Acted Female Characters in the Movie White Chicks

Abstract

The study entitled “Women's Language Used by Female and Male Acted Female Characters in The Movie White Chicks” discusses the use of women’s language used not only by women but also by men disguised as women in this context. This study aims to identify the features of women’s language found in the movie and examine the contrasts of language in the use of women’s language between women and men and whether men’s language is detected in the characters during disguises. A qualitative method used with data obtained from the movie White Chicks which was released in 2004. In addition, the writer also uses the movie script as a reference for the accuracy of the conversations used to analyze the movie. The method and technique used to collect the data required include an observational method and a note-taking technique. The collecting data is selected through classification based on features of women's language and contrasting of language used between the female and male acted female characters in the movie. The results of the analysis then show that almost all features of women's language based on Lakoff's theory (1975) can be found where the features obtained consist of lexical hedges or fillers, tag questions, rising intonation on declarative, intensifiers, empty adjectives, super polite form, avoidance of strong swear words, and emphatic stress. Meanwhile, hypercorrect grammar and precise color terms are other features not found in the data source. Apart from that, the writer has also managed to find differences in the use of women’s language used by females and male acted female characters in this movie based on the difference theory by Tannen (1990).

Keywords: Language and Gender, Women’s Language Features, Men’s Language, Movie Characters