This study analyzes gendered linguistic representations in two contemporary Iraqi novels: Hilda’s Rock by Hadia Hussein and The Blasphemer by Ali Badr, employing the theoretical framework established by Robin Lakoff in her seminal work Language and Woman’s Place (1975). The research conceptualizes language as a social practice that produces power relations and reveals mechanisms of domination and marginalization. The study addresses a central problematic concerning the applicability of Lakoff’s theory of “women’s language” and “men’s language” to the contemporary Iraqi narrative context, examining whether linguistic patterns in these novels reproduce or resist gendered power structures. The study adopts a descriptive-analytical comparative methodology, drawing on sociolinguistic and discourse analysis tools to trace gendered markers across two analytical levels: the lexical level, encompassing semantic fields of colors (55 instances in Hilda’s Rock vs. 46 in The Blasphemer), oaths, insults (52 vs. 269), terms of respect (33 vs. 68), emphasis, hedging, exclamation, and women-specific vocabulary; and the syntactic-functional level, analyzing proverbs, colloquial expressions, short sentences, ellipsis, interrogatives, imperatives, and repetition as pragmatic devices reflecting the speaker’s position within gendered power systems. Findings reveal that the discourse in Hilda’s Rock tends toward constructing psychological interiority and repairing the self in exile, through dense employment of hedging, interrogation, and ellipsis as techniques reflecting semantic fragility and identity anxiety. The female narrative voice exhibits hesitation, self-protection, psychological fracture, and emotional introspection, with frequent vocabulary related to emotion, memory, embodiment, and waiting—characteristics aligned with Lakoff’s description of women’s language as reflective of socially subordinated groups producing less assertive, more tentative discourse. Conversely, The Blasphemer demonstrates heightened presence of confrontational language, stigmatization, and symbolic violence, with striking density of insults, interrogative questioning, and acute repetition functioning as mechanisms that expose and reproduce religious/social authority within the narrative. This pattern corresponds to what Lakoff termed “language of dominance,” characterized by directness, assertiveness, commands, and declarative statements, where lexical structures (profanity, objectification, oaths) and syntactic constructions (imperatives, interrogative questioning) serve as instruments for subjugating and symbolically excluding the female Other. The study concludes that Lakoff’s categories remain interpretively useful for analyzing Iraqi narrative, though their effectiveness is contingent upon cultural context and narrative structure itself, necessitating their treatment as pragmatic analytical tools amenable to reinterpretation rather than absolute gendered rules. Furthermore, the research emphasizes that female discourse represents not weakness but a linguistic survival strategy confronting patriarchal violence, while male discourse reproduces structures of domination within narrative text.