Self and Identity in Personal Blogs

Abstract

This chapter describes how American bloggers and Chinese bloggers from similar age and gender groups represent themselves and their identities linguistically in their blogs and explores whether and to what extent the differences in terms of the blogging language and culture affect these representations. The author adopts a corpus-based approach and focuses on the description and the comparison of the orthographic features and semantic domain preference as revealed in the blog entries. By conducting a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison between American bloggers and Chinese bloggers, the author finds that bloggers’ linguistic practice is closely related to their developmental stage of life, their gender, and the cultural environment they are immersed in. Meanwhile, bloggers’ linguistic practice is also constrained by the internal system of the language they use for blogging.