Gender Differences in Expressing Emotions

ABSTRACT Huwaida, Alma. 2017. Gender Differences in Expressing Emotions. Thesis, Department of English, Faculty of Letters, Universitas Negeri Malang. Advisors: (I)Dr.MirjamAnugerahwati, M.A. (II) Drs. M. Misbahul Amri, M.A. Keywords: gender differences, gender stereotype, emotions, swear words. A lot of studies have been conducted related to gender especially gender and language. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to analyze the language used by men and women to express six emotions which are sadness, joy, fear, anger, disgust and surprise. The main framework used in this study is different, deficit, dominance theories (e.g. Lakoff, 1973, 1975;Tannen, 1990, 1994; Freed, 2003; Uchida, 1992) and gender stereotype (Lakoff, 1975; Kelly &Hutson, 1999; Romaine 2001). The research design of the study is descriptive qualitative which aims to analyze the language differences used by male and female to express their emotions. The data of this study was taken from English students of UniversitasNegeri Malang. 25 males and 25 femalesstudents of 2014 and 2015 years were chosen to be the participants of this study. The process of analyzing the data was started from collected the data followed by classifying the data, analyzing, discussing the findings, to the conclusion of the study. Through the analysis, this work came to the conclusion that men and women spoke differently. Men were found to use expletives a lot to express their emotions while women’s language were found more expressive. Beside the findings of language differences, this work also came to the conclusion that male and female students spoke stereotype. Even though 40 percent female students were found using swear words – which are stereotypically considered as men’s language, the found of stereotype utterances still dominated the findings. However, the development from linguistics students is needed. Hopefully, this research can be a trigger and also reference for another linguistics students who want to conduct a deeper and better research in order to contribute comprehensive description on gender and language issues.