Quantitative Comparison of Writing Styles Among Indonesian Women Novelists: A Corpus Linguistics Approach

Using the KORTARA Korpus Nusantara application, this study employed a quantitative corpus linguistics approach to examine the lexical density and average sentence length in nine novels by Indonesian women authors. The results indicated that each work differed greatly with respect to average sentence length and lexical density. When lexical density was analyzed through TTR, the results displayed a sufficiently wide range, suggesting the absence of a uniform women’s writing style in terms of vocabulary. For example, Dee Lestari’s Supernova: Roots (2002) achieved the highest TTR of 23.59%, which indicates an extensive and diverse vocabulary. Alaska Bay (2019) by Eka Aryani, on the other hand, had the lowest TTR of 7.87%, indicating a repetitive lexical pattern in the text. The analysis of the average sentence length of the novels showed a wide range of sentence length, syntactic complexity, and stratum. The novel with the longest average sentence length was Amba (2012) by Laksmi Pamuntjak (17.42 words) and the shortest was Supernova: Roots (2012) (6.90 words). This study encourages further exploration into how women writers in various contexts write beyond socialized linguistic gender norms. By providing an evidence-based model for stylistic diversity, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between gender and creativity. It invites scholars in gender studies and sociolinguistics to move beyond binary linguistic frameworks toward a more individualized view of authorial voice. While the primary focus remains on the Indonesian literary landscape, the methodology offers a replicable framework for broader comparative linguistic analyses across diverse geographical and genre-specific contexts. Further investigation might develop the corpus by analyzing more authors and works and by incorporating qualitative analysis to deepen the exploration of these findings.