A Sociolinguistic Study of Graffiti in University Campus: The Case Study of Sistan and Baluchestan University

Graffiti, which is also called silent discourse, reflects different status of women and men in social structure. Hence, studying graffiti can provide us with salient information regarding their anonymous writers’ linguistic and social features. The present study aims at analyzing sociolinguistic features of “theme” and “style” in a corpus of female and male university students’ Persian graffiti in the university campus clarifies some basic sociolinguistic processes such as similarities and differences in communication patterns in female and male (silent) discourse. To this end, a corpus of 640 graffiti (320 written by female university students and 320 written by male ones) were collected from female and male dormitory areas as well as central library study halls at University of Sistan and Baluchestan in a one-month period. These graffiti were then analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results revealed that both groups had used “love, solicit help from God, depression, declare presence, wish, time and date, swear, poetry, kidding, and friendship” themes. However, “study lesson subjects” were used only in female students’ graffiti while “advice” and “financial anxiety” themes were used only by the male counterparts. Furthermore, content analysis of the graffiti showed that the male students predominantly sought to “confirm power” and “ higher status” while the female ones attempted to “express emotions” and “make solidarity”. In addition, the obtained results with respect to style showed that the male students tended to use more words than their female counterparts, but the latter were more apt to use linguistic elaborated code through prepositions, impersonal pronouns, and dependent clauses and hence had a linguistic superiority over the males.