Gender Differences in Suicide Notes: A Forensic Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

This research finds out language used by men and women in their suicide notes. It is aimed at: (i) find out and identify the language features used by men and women in their suicide notes, (ii) find out the gender differences featured by men and women in their suicide notes, and (iii) find out linguistic similarities and differences found in the suicide notes. This research used a qualitative method. The data of this research was sentence that containing language feature representation. The sources of the data were suicides notes which written by female namely Caroline Angelica, Nancy Motes and Virginia Woolf, then the male namely George Eastman, Paul Bern and Sid Vicious. The data collected from online media internet. The collected data was analyzed qualitatively and descriptively. The analysis based on Deborah Tannen's (1990) theory. The study found that male and female written language share six features; status vs. support, independency vs. intimacy, advice vs. understanding, information vs. feeling, orders vs. proposal, conflict vs. compromise.