Gender-Related Variatin in CMC Language. A Study of Three Linguistic Features on Twitter

Abstract

This study examines the usage of reduced forms, first person subject ellipsis, and alternative capitalization in tweets from a gender perspective, with the data provided by a 20,000 word selection of male and female tweets. The results of the present data analysis for these features are compared to previous findings on male and female language in both spoken as well as written form in some current studies on gender-bound variation in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), though there are cases when a direct comparison has been found unworkable. While the present statistical observations, in most cases, are fairly equal between the genders, the following gender-related tendencies have been found manifest: female users tend to use more reduced forms, and to avoid capitalization at the beginning of a sentence. Additionally, female tweets display a wider variety of unique reduced forms. The frequency of reduced forms may be related to gender-specific tone or auto-correction. Ultimately, findings of this study may indicate that CMC skews the traditional concept of male and female language use, based on the data examined.