The Characteristics of Linguistic Features Enfolded in Suicide Notes

Suicide notes are messages left by individuals who commit suicide or who intend to commit suicide. These written messages express the victims' feelings that were not expressed when they were alive. And thus, this qualitative study intends to investigate the characteristics of linguistic features of suicide notes written by eleven male well-known individuals. The approach to this study is qualitative content analysis. Data were obtained from suicide notes written by eleven male well-known individuals. These notes were retrievable online. The researchers read, classified, and described the data based on the five characteristics of linguistic features of suicide notes, they are clear reasoning, expressing emotion, structure text, grammar, punctuation. The results showed that all of the characteristics of linguistic features were found in the well-known individuals' suicide notes. The characteristics of clear reasoning took place as the most frequent one to occur since it tells the readers of the victims' point of view about the problems that they were facing that led them to suicide. While the absence of doubt and form of address took place as rare. In the end, the result of this research can provide more information in research regarding the study of suicide notes in forensic linguistics, an application of linguistic on analyzing data or legal issues.