Tooru Hayasi
Modern Standard Turkish exhibits only afew, peripheral gender distinctions in its structure. Given thispaucity of categorical differentiation, andnoting that relations between men and women in Turkey are more complex than some stereotypes would allow, it is suggested that the influence of gender upon Turkish language use might be a matter 0/degrees ofdifference. For this study, the author examined a transcription of the performance of one episode of a somewhat improvisational Turkish television family drama series. A qualitative analysis of the utterances of the middle-aged husband and wife characters revealed the following differences: the female Speaker used terms of address and interjections more frequently than the male Speaker, while the male Speaker used the emphatic first person Singular pronoun andreligious expressions more frequently than the female Speaker.
The sentence-final particle yahu was used only by the male Speaker. These initial findings offer a starting point for examining gender differences in real-life Turkish discourse.