Gendered language on internet chat

rooms

Chat Rooms

• Chat rooms are essentially a virtual conference room where online users can write comments at the same time

• Messages appear in a feed that everyone in the chat room can read and respond to

• Gives you the ability to communicate with multiple  people, which differentiates from instant messaging, mainly aimed at ono-on-one communication

Identifying Gender

• Social networking sites have altered our lives in many ways, including our manner of communication and self-expression

• Impact of gender on linguistic choices of people while chatting• Lakoff (1975) claimed that women use more colour words,

submissive language and tag questions as a result of their insecurity in society which is reflected in social mediums of communication

• Men, according to Fishman (1983), respond minimally as they are socialised that male speech is more dominant where they should wait for women to prompt them

But is this the case?

Would you expect this comment to have been written by a man or a woman?

Why?

• As Lakoff suggests in her Deficit Model, women are more submissive to norms and avoid coarse language

• Here the repeated use of swear words suggests that this is therefore likely to be a man typing as he is not afraid to risk his reputation in society

Would you expect this reply to have been written by a man or a woman?

Why?

• As Lakoff states, women tend to be more apologetic so ‘sorry’ makes us think that this is a woman

• The repeated use of kisses suggest approachability and demonstrate the loving, perhaps more gentle personality associated with women

• Jane Pilkington (1992) believes that women in same sex conversations use positive politeness strategies

Would you expect this comment to have been written by a man or a woman?

Why?

• Men tend to adhere to ‘lad’ culture and through the use of the term of endearment ‘bud’ usually associated with male speech, it stereotypically suggests that this is a man

• Similarly, ‘beer’ is stereotypically a man’s drink and ‘one too many’ suggests getting drunk which a woman perhaps wouldn’t be so flippant about sharing if it was to be viewed publically

As text speak is used alongside technology as it is quicker and easier, both men and women, from what I have found, seem to express opinions and ask questions very similarly in short-hand, brief ways, therefore making it difficult to differentiate between a man and a woman’s comment

However, as seen on the previous slides, habits associated with the different genders can’t help but emerge online thus making it easy to tell the gender of a writer through their vocabulary, sentence length and use of punctuation