A corpus-based study of sex differences in Baboli dialect

Corpus linguistics is one of the new methods in linguistics that studies language in language corpora. Sociolinguistics study the differences and similarities between (or in) different language varieties and reveals the impact of social variables on language productions. The present research discusses the role of sex in speech based on Baker’s (2010) corpus-based sociolinguistics approach. To this end, first a Baboli dialect corpus was developed and then the data was transcribed alphabetically. Then the text was translated into standard Persian. In order to investigate the role of sex, by controlling the age variable and also the topic variable of the corpus which was exclusively on life difficulties, the keywords of each sex group were identified by LancsBox concordancer program. Then, the keywords were categorized based on their semantic domains. The results revealed that sex differences played an important role in the representation of the life difficulties in the dialect.