No abstract

The present study analyzes the phenomenon of linguistic accommodation, i.e. the adaptation of one's language use to that of one's conversation partner. In a large corpus of private social media messages, we compare Flemish teenagers' writing in two conversational settings: same-gender (including only boys or only girls) and mixed-gender conversations (including at least one girl and one boy). We examine whether boys adopt a more 'female' and girls a more 'male' writing style in mixed-gender talks, i.e. whether teenagers converge towards their conversation partner with respect to gendered writing. The analyses focus on two sets of prototypical markers of informal online writing, for which a clear gender divide has been attested in previous research: expressive typographic markers (e.g., emoticons), which can be considered more 'female' features, and 'oral', speech-like markers (e.g., regional language features), which are generally more popular among boys. Using generalized linearmixed models, we examine the frequency of these features in boys' and girls' writing in same-versus mixed-gender conversations. Patterns of convergence emerge from the data: they reveal that girls and boys adopt a more similar style in mixed-gender talks. Strikingly, the convergence is asymmetrical and only significant for a particular group of online language features.

The present study examines adolescents’ attitudes and perceptions with respect to writing practices on social media. It reports the findings of a survey conducted among 168 Flemish high school students with various socio-demographic profiles. The survey examines linguistic attitudes and awareness of sociolinguistic patterns in computer-mediated communication, as well as relevant language skills. Moreover, the present paper uniquely combines the study of both adolescents’ perceptions and their production of informal online writing, as the participants’ responses to the survey are compared to their peers’ actual online writing practices.The respondents appear to have a fairly accurate intuition with respect to age and gender patterns in social media writing, but much less so with respect to education-related patterns. Furthermore, while typical chatspeak phenomena are easily identified as such, ordinary spelling mistakes often are not. Strikingly, the teenagers do not claim a high standard language proficiency, although they do state to care about standard language use in formal contexts. Finally, some significant differences were found between participants with distinct socio-demographic profiles, e. g. girls and highly educated teenagers appear to be more sensitive to the potential negative connotations of linguistic features and that sensitivity seems to increase with age.

This paper discusses the expression of emotional involvement in informal computer-mediated communication (CMC). While related research is quite fragmentary through its exclusive focus on a limited number of expressive markers or the inclusion of just one independent variable, the present study includes a wide range of expressive markers and three independent vari­ables. The data reveal strikingly consistent age and gender correlates across all expressive markers and a strong correlation between the preferences of younger adolescents and girls. Furthermore, the study highlights a major impact of medium type. It calls for a refinement of the operationalization of the variable medium, as apart from its inherent characteristics (private/public, synchronous/asynchronous), the nature and goal of the interaction (which is also partly related to the type of social media that people use) trigger specific linguistic practices.

The present study examines how teenagers adapt their language use to that of their conversation partner (i.e., the linguistic phenomenon of accommodation) in interactions with peers (intragenerational communication) and with older interlocutors (intergenerational communication). We analyze a large corpus of Flemish teenagers’ conversations on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, which appear to be highly peer-oriented. With Poisson models, we examine whether the teenage participants adjust their writing style to older interlocutors. The same trend emerges for three sets of prototypical markers of the informal online genre: teenagers insert significantly fewer of these markers when interacting with older interlocutors, thus matching their interlocutors’ style and increasing linguistic similarity. Finally, the analyses reveal subtle differences in accommodation patterns for the distinct linguistic variables with respect to the impact of the teenagers’ sociodemographic profiles and their interlocutors’ age.