A Study of the Influence of Gender on the Language of Contemporary Female Poets

Most of the researchers in the fields of social linguistics, and sociology of language along with the feminist critics believe that there are phonetic, lexical and syntactic differences between the language of men and women. Some believe that these differences rise from men and women physiological differences and also their different social status along with cultural factors dominating the society. And some believe that these differences are because of men's interference in language which consequently leads to the appearance of a kind of masculine language. This paper tries to study the role of gender on the language of ten contemporary Iranian female poets. Firstly, one or two collections of poems of these poets are randomly chosen and then their poems are studied phonetically, lexically and syntactically. The result shows that because of the social and biological differences between men and women, female poets significantly employ gendered words to express the emotional concepts and to protest against the social status of women. In the phonetic level, some specific vowels and consonants seem feminine because of the female poet's employment of gendered words and the employment of romantic concepts. In the syntactic level, based on the interpersonal role which is investigated in the light of Halliday's theory of functions of language, female poets mostly employ interrogative, emphatic and grammatical sentences. Though it cannot be clearly determined for conveying what ideas and concepts they use these sentences, the female poets employ grammatical sentences when they are more concerned about the content.