ISSN 2657-1617 | 42 JELTIM Journal of English Language Teaching Innovations and Materials Volume 1 (1), April 2019 Discourse Features of Women’s Language In The Social Media as Influenced by Formal Education Maria Harumi Indrayani; Risa Rumentha Simanjuntak Department of Humanities, Bina Nusantara University – INDONESIA mariaharumi12@gmail.com Abstract This research has a purpose to find the ways women express themselves through written form in social media, relationship between educational backgrounds of women and their language choice, and the markers of the women’s discourse. This research uses qualitative method by doing stratified random sampling and giving questionnaires. The data is analyzed by analyzing participants’ language choice in social media post and formal education status, then finding the similarities and differences, analyzing the relation between participants’ formal education status and their language choice in social media post, and analyzing the markers of women’s discourse in social media. The results of this study found that some women uses coherence and cohesive consistently, while some women choose to have very casual writing style. This study confirms that women tendency to use more standard forms is more likely to be driven by their awareness of using proper language, rather than as a way of claiming such status (Holmes, 2008). Lastly, this study figured that women usually use intra-sentential code-switch more often and women’s tendency to be more sensitive is the caused why women used a lot of adjective words related to feelings. Keywords Women, social media, educational background, Holmes, discourse 1. INTRODUCTION Language variation happens because people express their ideas depending on their situations. Akmajian, Demers, Farmer and Harnish (1995) said that “no human language is fixed, uniform, or unvarying; all languages show internal variation” (p. 259). The amount of languages in the world are enormous but neither of it is altered instead it has its internal variety. One of the situations which affect language variation is social status. In order to determine one’s social status, many aspects have to be considered such as family background, formal academic achievement or current occupation. Socio-economic status is one of the achieved status examples which measuring one’s position in social economic scale based on their education, income, type of occupation, place of residence, and in some populations, heritage and religion. Experts’ research shows that social status and gender does have connection. Women are more self- conscious about their social status in the society rather than men do. This statement was made based on the research with linguistic approach which result shows women uses more standard forms in speaking more than men. Women believes that the way they speak indeed determine their social status. 2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND The writer chooses four main theories for this research. First theory is discourse analysis. According to Thornbury (2005), “discourse analysis is the study of such language, and the analysis of the features and uses of texts – or text analysis – is an integral component of discourse analysis” (p. 7). Discourse analysis is basically part of language studies which involve deeper analysis of texts’ attributes and functions. The distinction between discourse and text is to think of discourse as the process and text as the product. Furthermore, from discourse analysis, the writer chooses two sub- theories which are coherence and cohesion. Article received : September 3 rd , 2018 Article accepted : March 30 th , 2019