The Empowering Function of Language in Women's Daily Lives (A Study on Power Strategies of Language in Middle Class Women Living in Tehran)

Abstract

AbstractPeople employ several linguistic strategies to make progress in their lives. In a society such as Iran where there is an imbalanced distribution of power, available means of power for people are limited to linguistic tools only, meanwhile due to their special social and cultural conditions as well as small amount of properties, specific social groups such as women resort to different linguistic mechanisms and strategies to change the power balance in their favor where their contribution to the authority is otherwise negligible.This is why the world of women is defined by language. This paper aims at examining the linguistic actions of women in the context of daily life to understand the spirit of their language as well as their verbal strategies. The study has used the qualitative method and a combination of focus group interviews, lived experiences, and texts like blogs and novels as supplementary reference to find out the strategies of women's language use to exercise power and resistance against inequalities in order to meet the most amounts of benefits in the social fields. As such, it has attempted to answer the main question of the article: What strategies do women of Tehran use in their daily lives to exercise power and protect women against inequality in order to achieve maximum benefits?.

Keywords

• keywords: women's language
• language strategies
• everyday life
• power and resistance
• gender linguistics