An Investigation of Gender Differences Between Women’s and Men’s Informal Discussion in Iranian EFL Context

The language used by women and men differ in all speech communities. In order to examine some of these variations, the present study aimed to investigate the differences in an informal written discourse. For this purpose, a comparison between men’s and women’s informal language was made regarding length of utterances, questions, intensifiers, and hedges. Results revealed that men employed higher length of utterance and slightly more hedges than women. On the other hand, women tended to ask more questions and used more intensifiers than men. The findings may pave the way to better understand the world of communication.

Keywords:

Gender , utterance , Questions , Intensifiers , Hedge