WOMEN, LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL CHANGE

Abstract

The paper attempts to make a critical analysis on the language used by women. Many sociolinguists who observe the language of men and women found that there are the differences of the way men and women using language. Gender seems to affect the variation of lexical choices, the syntactic preferences, the way women and men perceive conversation, and the way women and men behave in conversation. A lot of studies have categorized the characteristics of women, such as: using polite language, indirect speech, personal pronoun, and hedging. Those characteristics pertain to women may give some negative image on women. The usage of hedging and indirect speech may be considered as incompetency by men, especially for women who become a leader in an organization. However, assertive women may also be seen as negative. Although nowadays women have a lot of opportunity to get a higher education and work in public sphere, the stereotype of women’s characteristic in using language has changed yet. I undertake the research based on two goals. First, it examines the social construction that affects women using language. Second, it tries to analyze the shift of the way of women use language in contemporary era. The changes make an incongruent situation between the persisted cultural values on women and the new value gained by women. The data will be taken from novels to describe clearly the situation of Indonesian women in facing their problems.