Coquetry In South Asia

The present study explores South Asian women’s acquaintances with coquetry on the streets of South Asian cities, as well as their revelations and elucidations of this socially and culturally rooted communicative act. The study investigates the custom of coquetry, accolades, compliments, commendation, tributes and praise comments in South Asian street communication. Coquetry can be explained and demarcated as advances made by male strangers toward women in the public domain, and they typically include: strengthening, gazing, staring, ogling, and unsolicited sexual and romantic comments. It is often considered as a practice of heterosexual, suggestive, erotic, sensual linguistic interplay. It is perceived as a pleasant way to approach a woman

Language used in coquetry reflects and transmits the culture of the society on the one hand and serves as a powerful weapon with which the dominant group maintains their value system and hierarchy on the

She noted that women are oppressed by sexist language at two levels: the process of learning language and the negative influence of acquired language imposed on them. By analyzing the vocabulary, sentence patterns and tones regularly used by women, Lakoff (1975) pointed out that the language used by women puts them at a disadvantaged position, which will gradually result in their lower social position and weakened discourse power. Lakoff's (1975) pioneering work suggested that women's speech typically displayed a range of features, such as tag questions, which marked it as inferior and weak. Thus, she argued that the type of subordinate speech learned by a young girl "will later be an excuse others use to keep her in a demeaning position, to refuse to treat her seriously as a human being" (1975, p.5). While there are clearly some problems with Lakoff's work - her analysis was not based on empirical research, for example, and the automatic equation of subordinate with `weak' is problematic - the emphasis on dominance has understandably remained at the Centre of much of this work. Research has shown how men nominated topics more, interrupted more often, held the floor for longer, and