THE COMPARISON OF WOMEN’S LINGUISTIC FEATURES USED BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN ASK.FM USERS ON RESPONDING TO HATE MESSAGES

In this internet era, the communication mostly happens through social media, for the sake of speed and efficiency. However, there are times when someone misused these privileges. They send hate messages to other people because it is easier to do so. This study aims at discovering how men and women respond to hate messages using the theory of Women’s linguistic features by Lakoff (1975). There were sixty Ask.Fm users which consist of thirty men and thirty women as the source of the data. They were selected using the purposive random sampling which took 18-28-year-old range and in the years of bachelor degree. The method of this study is qualitative research which emphasizes the explanation of the phenomena. The result showed that men were likely to respond to hate messages with intensifier, emphatic stress, and tag question while women tend to use intensifier, emphatic stress and raising intonation. Moreover, the highest difference of women’s linguistic features used between men and women were found on tag question and super polite form. To fully understand the phenomena, there was also a calculation of the type of hate messages. It was found that women are more likely to answered denigration question which can be seen from the high difference of denigration between men and women. It reflects that women are more sociable and cautious of people around them