Gender Differences in the Use of Intensifiers

Abstract

The ways men and women use language have always attracted a great deal of attention. In spite of several theories, a consistent image of gender variations in language has not been projected by the empirical enquiries yet. This study intends to examine the use of intensifiers in the speech of Iranian male and female high school and university students. To conduct the study, Lakoff’s (1975) ideas about linguistic differences between males and females were taken into account. To this end, four groups of students were interviewed: female university students, female high school students, male university students and male high school students. Then 1224 sentences containing intensifiers were extracted to work on as data. For ease of analysis the intensifiers were classified into six categories which comprise five major intensifiers, i.e., xeili, aslan, vagean, hatman, faghat, and a miscellaneous group entitled “othersâ€. The results indicated that females used more intensifiers compared to males. This fact is even more significant in the speech of high school female students.  The findings of the study confirmed Lakoff’s opinion concerning gender-bound language.