A study of women's language features used by Korean high school debaters

This present study investigates the women's language features by eight Korean high school debaters in the debate competition program "Intelligence High School Debate" by Arirang TV. This research aims to discover the women's language features used by the Korean high school debaters in the debate competition and how the features affect their debate speech. This study used descriptive qualitative methods. The data are in the form of words, phrases, and sentences transcribed from the utterances of the Korean high school debaters. The researcher collected the data by transcribing two videos of the first and second parts of the debate. After that, the researcher classified and identified the data to find the women's language features. The researcher continued by explaining and describing the use of these features according to the context and condition during the debate. From the findings, only six out of ten women's language features found uttered by all the Korean high school debaters in the program. Those are lexical hedges or fillers, emphatic stress, intensifiers, superpolite forms, rising intonation on declaratives, and hypercorrect grammar. Women’s language features can affect the way the debaters speak also the whole speech. There are 5 effect reflected on their speech from using the women's language features. Those are: Indicates Strong Commitment, Indicates Confidence, Indicates Politeness, Indicates Insecurity, and Expressing Uncertainty and Ambiguity.