Assignment 2 - Research Report

Assignment 2 (Research Report)

Language, Gender and Identity of Male and Female Bloggers in Malaysia

INTRODUCTION   

            Computer mediated communication (CMC) used to be defined as a medium of communication that occurs between people using the computer. But, it was defined further from time to time as CMC also been applied to other forms of communication like instant messaging, text messaging and email that can be done only by using smart phones. Apart from that, the use of blog among people in Malaysia today is seen as one of the important medium of communication since it can compress all sorts of ideas and knowledge about everything under one roof. There are many well-known bloggers among male and female despite their age and educational background. Therefore, this research is intended to see the language differences between male and female bloggers in terms of the use of hedges, intensifier, tag question and some other language items in their writing.

LITERATURE REVIEW

According to Lakoff (1975), men and women speak in different ways. Society has different perception for both men and women and how they speak to others. Women are expected to be more polite. Lakoff found that in speaking, women frequently used empty adjectives, intensifiers and qualifiers, tag question, lexical hedges, and polite forms. In the local context, Akmaliah (2009) who has done a research that is focusing on the female bloggers managed to identify the four features which are lexical hedges, tag question, intensifiers, and avoidance of the taboo language. The previous researches have been focussing on women and the use of language. However, there is no exposure to the comparison of male and female blogger‘s language differences. Hence, this research intended to answer these questions: 1) Which gender disclose more information about themselves? 2) What are the linguistics features that differentiate male and female in their blog?

METHODOLOGY

Participants

Participants were two randomly selected bloggers. The chosen 2 blogs consist of 1 male and 1 female was taken from Blogspot.com and Web Blog. Those 2 bloggers used mostly English in all of the posts with a little use of Malay. The male blogger has just graduated from University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada majoring in Biology and Psychology and working as a consultant under Langit Ilahi Consultancy in organising various talks and seminars. While the female blogger graduated from Universiti Teknologi Petronas majoring in civil engineering, and owns a master from Universiti Putra Malaysia. However, recently she chose to quit from her current job and starting up her own online shop named La Kayena as she wanted to spend more time with her family and  her newborn daughter. Both of the male and female bloggers are in their twenties and frequently rant about topics that matter to them. Participants are labelled as Male (M) and Female (F).

Instrument

The data were collected by browsing the blog postings of the two bloggers which rant mostly of their daily routines, current issues and interests. The blog posts were then narrowed down to which it shares the same topic between the two bloggers. Comparison on similarities and differences of the two blog posts were then analysed and recorded for further reviews. Those data were then analyzed based on two measures which are 1) the amount of personal information revealed in the text such as first name, contact information, current job, age, location, and 2) linguistics features which consist of 5, namely, intensifiers, hedging, adjectives, tags questions and adverbs. Gender differences were then examined based on the 2 measures mentioned above.

FINDINGS

Disclosure of personal information

From Table 1, both of the bloggers disclose their personal information like their first name and their current job. Both of them also provide links to their personal Facebook, Twitter, email address and links to their YouTube page. However, the male blogger does not share his Instagram page while female blogger does. Apart from that, the male blogger shows his location while the woman blogger does not disclose her location. This result shows that male participants provide more personal information since current location is considered as private and one of the personal information as compared to links to other social networks. The female blogger gives the opportunity to the blog readers to know her better via online, from her blog and other social media. On the other hand, the male blogger allows both online communications and real life communication when he provides links to his location and social events organised by him in order to have face to face communication.

Linguistics Features

There are five types of linguistics features used in this study. First is intensifiers which are normally used as boosting devices in language such as ‘very’, ‘so’, ‘really’, ‘just’ and ‘totally’. The results in table 2 show that female blogger uses more intensifiers in their blog posts compared to the male blogger. For instances:

M – Having said that, I still believe wholeheartedly that it is an obligation for a Muslim woman to cover herself properly, as it is also an obligation for a Muslim man to cover himself properly.

 F - Some comments hurt me to the core and made me depressed too for a while.

Second linguistics feature is tag questions. Tag questions are commonly used in posts written by the female blogger as shown in Table 2 as compared to the male blogger that uses less tag questions. For Examples:

M - If I am a Muslim, then what distinguishes me from someone who is not a Muslim?

F - How la like that?

Hedges is used as a way to express uncertainty and also to soften the utterance of the speaker, for instance, ‘i think’, ‘you know’, ‘kind of’, ‘well’ and ‘in my opinion’. The results illustrate that female blogger uses lexical hedges more frequently compared to the male blogger. The examples are:

M - I am not saying that I accept the act of not wearing the hijab. What I am saying is that I accept the person who is not wearing the hijab, as my sister in Islam and a part of the Muslim Ummah.

F -Fashion is fun to follow too, i get it, but it's making us lose focus.

Apart from that, another linguistics feature is adverbs which indicates manner, time, place, cause, or degree and also answers questions such as ‘how’, ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘how much’.

Table 2 above shows female uses more adverbs than male in their blog posts as illustrated below:

M - Every time she goes outside, she will cover herself up properly even if she’s just going out to water the garden in front of her house.

F - I myself am a woman, so i know and completely understand the need to look good as a hijaber (especially) because dressing up and being covered from head to toe is not as easy as those who choose not to be covered.

The fifth linguistics feature is adjective which the speaker or writer uses to express his or her emotional reaction. However, overall data shows that the amount of adjectives used by both male and female bloggers are in the same amount. For instances:

M - She was a bright student and got herself a scholarship to further her studies in one of the universities in the United States.

F - For example, we go online and we look at lookbook to know what's the latest trends.

DISCUSSION

According to Holmes (2008), men and women do not use completely different forms but rather they use the same forms but in different quantities and frequencies (p. 160). This theory was proven as referring at the first linguistics feature which is the usage of hedges. From this research, the result indicates that female blogger used more lexical hedges which is 10 while male blogger used only 5 hedges. This is because female blogger tries to put sentence in the best way that will not offend the readers but at the same time can deliver the real message. The male blogger somehow uses more straight forward linguistics form whenever he wants to express his ideas. This is why the amount of hedging devises less than the female blogger. Looking back at the function of lexical hedges, the result is consistent with the idea that woman is more sensitive towards their addressees which are the blog readers (Holmes, 2008).

As for the second linguistics feature which is the intensifiers, female blogger used more which is 5 and male blogger used 3. This result would probably happen because the female blogger tends to put a lot of emotions in their writing, hence explains the main function of intensifier which is to enhance the emotional context of the words. Male tends to hide their emotions in order to stay masculine. Male use this form because they try to carry macho connotations of masculinity and toughness (Holmes, 2008).

Tag question is another form of linguistic features that being analyzed in this research. Tag question shows that the speaker is not confident in making statements. Apart from that, the usage of tag questions can narrow down the gap between the bloggers and the readers. However, men usually use tag questions to show their perception on some topics. From this research, the female blogger use more tag question which is 3 times whereas for the male blogger, tag question happens twice in his post. However, when looking at the context, the usage of tag questions from both male and female blogger brings different qualities as the male blogger is more strict in asking questions to voice out his mindset, or rather his idea, compared to the female blogger who use tag questions to narrow the gap between her and the readers.

Subsequently, adverbs are used by both male and female bloggers to make sure readers can understand and feel what they are trying to convey. From the result shown, female blogger use more adverbs, which is 13 times but the male blogger only use 7 times. This shows that female blogger is rather polite and the male blogger is somehow more straight forward in conveying their ideas. From what the earlier scholar has mentioned, women are the subordinate group. Therefore what they say must not offend men so they must speak carefully and politely (Holmes, 2008).

Next linguistics features is adjectives. Like adverbs, adjectives is added to gives extra information about the words. However, adjectives give information about the conditions and the where about of something. Adjectives also answer the questions that are related to something. In this research, the adjectives used for both male and female blogger are the same amount which is 9. This shows both male and female blogger are aware of the context of some words that need to be emphasized more.

When people talk about CMC, the most important thing to bear in mind is that the communication happens through computer. The way both male and female blogger communicate might differ when they are talking live to their audience. The linguistics features will change as the medium are totally different. For instance, female blogger tends to be more emotional in conveying her idea. However, the language use is more polite and most of the time she considers about the reader’s feeling. On the other hand, the male blogger is straight forward in voicing out his ideas and thoughts. Therefore, spoken and written discourses are different and men and women have different personality for both.

According to Holmes (2008), one of the most obvious differences in speech between male and female is the pitch of their voice (p. 173). A man is more masculine when they speak using a lower pitch with a deeper voice. Being masculine is being brave and able to face critics. When they communicate live with the audience, the feedback is at instance and people can tell them straight about what they feel. Based on this idea, it is not possible for the male blogger to constantly using the language in a straight forward way to convey his idea. This is because they can be confident even in front of the audience since they can control the situation better than women, due to the emotional attachments. This is why the male blogger is able to provide his location to the audience in his personal information. On the other hand, women talk by using a high-pitch voice with less-deep sound. This means they sound weaker and the volume is lower than men. Therefore, it is believed that if the female blogger communicates live with her audience, the way might slightly change because she will not be as emotional as in the blog post. 

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, the data shows that the linguistics features such as intensifiers, tags questions, adverbs and adjectives are very closely related to gender in most of the cases. Male and female have high tendency of using all the language features in their writing. The only difference is the frequency of the language features used by them. This research shows that there are differences in the way of writing between both genders of Malaysian bloggers but still; they have the probability of showing the opposite masculine and feminine speech characteristics of communication regardless of their gender. However due to the limitation of time and corpus, further research on this topic might have different findings and conclusion

REFERENCES

Aiman Azlan (2013, July 5). A Hijab Story. Retrieved March 31, 2014,from http://www.aimanazlan.com/2013/07/a-hijab-story.html

Akhmaliah Abd. Rahim (2009). An analysis of language features in blogs of female undergraduates. Unpublished B.A. project paper. Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

Holmes, J (2008). Introduction to Sociolinguistics. England: British Library.

Lakoff, T. R. (1975). Languages and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper & Row.
Maria Elena Zarul. (2011, August 20). Tentang Hijab. Retrieved March 30, 2014, from Blogspot.com: http://peliks.blogspot.com/2011/08/tentang-hijab.html