Female Disney Characters' Linguistic Features in the 1990's

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate female Disney characters’ linguistic features in the 1990’s. It studies sexist ideologies manifested through these characters’ language. The sample consists of three Disney animated movies from the 1990’s: Mulan, Beauty and the Beast and Pocahontas. The frameworks adopted to study female Disney characters’ language are Lakoff’s (2004b) forms of women’s language and Fairclough’s (1995) three-dimensional approach to CDA. The findings revealed that the linguistic features that mostly characterized female Disney characters’ language were hypercorrect grammar, super polite forms and hedges. They reflect the sexist stereotypicality of women’s language being slang-free and polite. They also used large stock of words related to their specific interests, empty adjectives and intensive ‘so’, which imply having stereotypical lexicon. The least linguistic feature used was tag questions. However, when used, they implied anticipation of being corrected by others.