Women’s Language Features and Functions in “Barbie: The Movie” (2023) Film: A Sociolinguistic Study

Abstract

This research objectives were to find and analyse the women’s language features (WLF) from Robin Lakoff’s women’s language theory and the functions from Roman Jakobson’s language functions theory (JLF) on the female characters’ dialogues from “Barbie: The Movie” film. Through the application of qualitative method, the analysis provided description and explanation for the displayed data. The data source, “Barbie: The Movie” film provided 341 female characters’ dialogues containing 440 WLF. From 10 WLF, one feature was not recorded, which was Precise Colour Terms (PCT) and there were 9 recorded features: 42 Lexical Hedges or Fillers (LHF), 5 Tag Questions (TQ), 124 Rising or Question Intonations on Declarative Sentences (RQIDS), 21 “Empty” Adjectives (EA), 27 Intensifiers (INT), 6 Hypercorrect Grammars (HG), 14 Super Polite Forms (SPF), 14 Avoiding Strong Expletives (ASE), and 187 Emphatic Stresses (ES). Emphatic Stress (ES) and Rising or Question Intonations on Declarative Sentence (RQIDS), as the features that contained the most amount of data, were used to highlight certain parts of the dialogues and to show prominent emotions in the tone of speech. Precise Colour Terms (PCT) was not found due to the lack of colour discourse that required precise colour naming system. The 6 Jakobson’s language functions were found with the majority of the dialogues containing two functions, instead of singular function. There were 136 referential functions, 96 emotive functions, 49 phatic functions, 35 conative functions, 16 metalingual functions, and 9 poetic functions.