Variations in Intensifier Usage based on Gender in Kurdish EFL Learners' Spoken Language

Abstract

The ways men and women utilize language have historically attracted much attention. To date, a lot of research has been done on the existence of contrasts between males and females. Hence, this study explores the intersection of gender and intensifier, examining the differential usage of intensifiers in the speech of Kurdish male and female university students at Koya University through using record interview “one-on-one interviews.” The method of this research is quantitative, for analyzing the collected data from the students’ recordings, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences SPSS was used based on “The Shapiro-Wilk test.” To achieve the objectives of the study, interviewing forty-four 2nd grade students (males and females), two groups of students in the same proportion were interviewed: female university students between the ages of 19 and 21 years and male university students at an identical age between 19 and 21 years. Then 1020 sentences with amplifiers were retrieved and used as data. Results show that males and females use the booster amplifier “very” more than the other sorts but generally, women tend to use more intensifiers than males. There is a significant difference between males and females, because males and females have significantly different levels of use Too, Utterly, extremely as the findings showed that intensifiers like “too" and "extremely" were utilized by females more in their spoken language. In contrast males use "utterly" more statistically. These results offer insight into the intersection of language, gender, and power in modern society.