Gender Based Linguistic Variations in Urdu Language and Their Role in Suppression of Females

Sociolinguistics deals with linguistic variations such as dialect, idiolect, genderlect, register etc. It deals with ways of using particular languages and the social roles of speakers of these languages.& It is the speaker-oriented approach. Genders have different characteristics in the use of language, which lead to the gender differences in language. The present study was conducted to analyze the gender-based linguistic variations (variations at discourse and communication level) in Urdu language. Deborah Tannen’s Genderlect theory is the theoretical Background of the study. She has presented six sets of language contrasts that are used as instrument to analyze male and female conversations. It is commonly believed that women language is more sophisticated, apologetic as compared to men. These differences are called gender preferential differences in a patriarchal society with their own fancies and whims. The hypothesis is that men and women have different ways of communicating, based on male and female perception of the world as they are made of different things and contrasting style. The qualitative paradigm used in this study. Direct observation, interview and tape recording are used as tools for the data collection. Recorded conversation has been transcribed and analyzed to provide data from which these issues have been discussed. The researcher has analyzed Urdu language conversation among Urdu speech community living specially in Sialkot, according to Tannen’s speech contrasts. The data was analyzed manually. The findings show that variations occur due to the use of various linguistic devices, style, topic of discussion, power etc. This study is limited to the Urdu speech community. The limitation of my research is that I observed the language of middle class Urdu speech community not the other classes. In this research, I only highlighted variations at communication level, and delimited all other variations such as morphological, syntactic, phonological variations. Future researchers can study these aspects. The study will benefit the whole society in creation of awareness about non-sexist language to give a psychological identity of females in Pakistan.