The Study of Certainty in Kurdish Women and Men’s Speech in Eslam Abad-E Gharb Based on Lakoff’s Dominance Approach

The present study is an investigation in sociolinguistics, aimed to study linguistic differences in certainty in the speech of Kalhori Kurdish (one of the basic west-south speeches, common in west of Iran) speakers. One of the related outstanding approaches in gender linguistics, is Lakoff’s Dominance Approach (1975, 2004), in which 9 linguistic features are introduced to entitle women’s speech as “powerless speech”. Lakoff believes that it occurs because of some social inequalities. According to her, the speech and writing of women and men seem to be different in using rising intonation in declarative sentences, exact color terms, empty adjectives, hyperpolite forms, weak qualifiers, fillers, indirect requests, tag questions and emphatic stress. The present study tries to show if the mentioned approach can be confirmed in Kurdish community or not. For this purpose, based on field research and using questionnaire, 8 different social groups, including thirty two women and thirty two men were interviewed in two different age and educational groups. The findings of this investigation shows that women are more likely than men to use the linguistic variables of powerless speech. Therefore, the Dominance Approach was confirmed in this study.