Women and Crime: A Sociolinguistic Study of the Use of Language in the Netflix Series’ Unbelievable

Abstract

Profession, status, philosophy, economy and gender play a vital role in the use of language. Role and gender is reflected through language and the analyses of such relationship are the domain of sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics tries to reveal the relationship and effects of these variable over language and vice versa. The current research tries to explore the relationship of gender and language by adopting Lakoff’s (1973) model as theoretical framework. Lakoff’s (1973) model is known as ‘Women Language Features’ which is further divided in 10 sections. For the current research, descriptive qualitative research methodology is used to achieve the objectives related to language and gender; to know the features of women language and to evaluate the change in language style of women when they discuss or talk about crime in Unbelievable. All the features of women’ language suggested by Lakoff (1973) were found except the feature of hyper correct grammar,  super-polite forms are use, but in the conversation of female police officers impolite and harsh vocabulary was used, which suggests that women in the profession, which generally associated with men as police, judge, chairman, batsman also effect language to great extent.