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Linguistic Variation in Iranian University Student Graffiti: Examining the Role of Gender

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Abstract

Research on the discursive features of graffiti in institutional settings is in its infancy and few studies have investigated the phenomenon and its implications in educational contexts. In this paper, we report on a study in which we employed systemic functional linguistics (Halliday in Learning how to mean, Edward Arnold, 1975). to probe communicative functions and gender differences in Iranian university student graffiti that appeared in all-male and all-female locations. The data comprised authentic instances of graffiti generated by students, analysis of which suggests that male and female university students each have their own distinctive motives for using graffiti, as realised in significant differences observed in the context-specific functions they perform. Graffiti pieces represented a distinctive and meaningful way of communicating, and its most salient features were creativity, simplicity and variation. Indications are that university students’ graffiti reflects psychological and social challenges, and the thoughts, attitudes and feelings expressed through it serve students’ personal and interactional purposes.

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Data Availability Statement

The dataset generated during the current study is not publicly available due to legal restrictions made by the participating institutes of this study but is available from the corresponding author upon a reasonable request.

Notes

  1. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) has been used to transcribe the data. IPA is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Persian

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, Shahrood University of Technology, Shahrood, Iran

    Mostafa Morady Moghaddam

  2. Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Neil Murray

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  1. Mostafa Morady Moghaddam
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Correspondence to Mostafa Morady Moghaddam.

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Morady Moghaddam, M., Murray, N. Linguistic Variation in Iranian University Student Graffiti: Examining the Role of Gender. J Psycholinguist Res 52, 721–742 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09919-y

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