FEMINIST LANGUAGE AS A SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIABLE FOR ENACTING CHANGE: A STUDY OF ADICHIE, JUDD, OBAMA AND PEREZ’S SPEECHES

Abstract

This work is a qualitative study of the variation of language employed by feminists using Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ashley Judd, Michelle Obama and Caroline Criado Perez‟s speeches. In language, a lot of studies have been done in sociolinguistics on the language used by women and men but only little has been done on the language of feminists. The aim of this study therefore is to show that feminist language is a shift which varies from the stereotypical characteristics previous studies have identified as the language of women. This study identified the salient features of language used by these feminists in their speeches as well as the effects of these features. Purposive sampling procedure was used in the selection of the feminists whose speeches were analyzed. The population of study is six transcripts of speeches drawn from four notable women adjudged to be feminists. The theoretical foundation is anchored on the Social Constructionist Theory which states that realities are constructed through language and that gender is a social construction. The findings of this study revealed seven features of language in the speeches of feminists. They are: Rhetorical question, Mundane expressions, Inclusive pronouns, Direct Speech, Parallelism, Content adjectives and collocations. These linguistic features are characteristics of feminist language and are therefore different from what previous researchers have identified as features of women‟s speech. It is therefore recommended that men and women who aspire to be feminists should use more of this variation which the researchers termed “FemTalk” in other to enforce change. It is also hoped that “FemTalk” will be yet another addition to the growing studies on gender and language studies.