INTRODUCTION

Social network is a mechanism for mediating distal interaction among people which allows

people to follow the lives of friends, acquaintances and families and the number of people on

social networks. One of the examples of social networks is Twitter. Twitter is the first

microblogging systems that made its first appearance in 2006. Microblogging systems provide a

light-weight, easy form of communication that enables users to broadcast and share information

about their current activities, thought, opinions and status. Twitter users can stay in touch and

keep up with friends regardless of where they are and what they are doing. People update their

status or known as tweets, with a maximum of 140-characters, in the form of either spoken or

written.

Spoken form differs from written form in several ways. The first one would be, spoken

form is less formal than written form where language conventions are broken such as beginning

sentences with but. Spoken form is much more dynamic and immediate, therefore precision is

not given much attention. In addition, spoken form is more communicative where tone, intention

and meaning. On the other hand, written form gives extra attention on grammar and language

conventions. Furthermore, written form present ideas in a precise, well-ordered and presented in

a more sophisticated way. This shows that written form is more articulate and sophisticated than

spoken language.

The objectives of this study are to identify the differences between spoken and written

language by analyzing the corpus available and to study the factors that might lead to such use in

language. In other words, the corpus which is the compilations of the twitter will be analyzed in

terms of its use either in written form or in spoken form. Some of the factors that lead to the used

of those languages in the corpus will be discussed in details.

ANALYSIS

From the corpus that has been analyzed, it is found that there are some differences between the

spoken and written language used by the respondents. For example, in spoken language, most of

the respondents are among artist/public figure, women, and men. An example of spoken

language produced by an artist can be seen from the extracted line “I just saw the most beautiful

young girl. About 5 years old. Lovely hair, lovely smile, lovely face. A stunning girl. She has

albinism” and “With tears I drive home... Good to do a little or a whole lot of reflection. Will be

busy today... Take care everyone!” Artists tend to use spoken language in order for them to

attract attention from their audiences and also to share their opinions or tips. It is because, most

of these artists’ followers are their own fans, so it is very important for them to keep their tweets

interesting and entertaining to their audiences. Meanwhile, an example of spoken language by

women can be seen through this line “Soup too salty? Instead of adding more liquid, add raw cut

potatoes, It'll absorb the salt. Discard the potatoes...” and “Left leg needs a massage :( Aching :

( ”. Women in this case are more emotional, they prefer to use a lot of emoticons. Women tend

to share their true feelings on twitter. Another example of spoken language produced by men can

be seen through these two examples of sentences “I will be offline for the rest of the day doing

some hardcore packing. Take care y'all! May peace be upon you~” and “Been reading all

tweets...thank u thank u so much for all ur wonderful wishes!!! Sending our love to all out there..

:)”. As for men, they use spoken language to show their state of appreciation.

Other than the spoken language, status updates or tweets by the users can also be found in

the written form. This denotes that the tweets do not contain any spoken language criteria such as

emoticons or punctuation marks. Written-form tweets are usually produced to give advice or

motivation usually in the form of quotes. An example can be extracted from the corpus available

where person A tweets “Knocking other's success doesn't make you more successful. It just

makes you a hater” or Person B “It’s better if someone doesn't recognize your existence rather

than a person that knows you exist and yet gives you no worth.” The language used here can be

categorized as a written language as it is very much formal, usually exist in books or even if it is

used in a verbal-communication, people use it as or with reference. Especially users who tweet

quotes, these are established words where it is printed again and again in different sources thus it

has authority on its own. When one uses this in a communication, it is known that the words are

not a product of the speaker but a quote in itself. Therefore if twitter users update their status by

using quotes or words of wisdom, it is categorized as a written-form of tweet. It is not just formal

but more articulate and sophisticated.

This idea however, does not apply to all the quote-tweets of the users because there are

some users who produce their own sayings. With the intention of giving advice, motivation or

words of wisdom, it is not possible that users can produce their own. An example of this is when

Person C tweets, “Twitter is a river that we share. It flows us forward together. Don't pollute it

with hatred, disrespect and rudeness.” This is a piece of advice given by a user who wishes that

all Twitter users would not abuse the real usage and intention of Twitter. This advice can be

categorized as a written-formed tweet as it is formal and very much sophisticated in its words

and structure.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Huberman, Romero and Wu through their article “Social Networks That Matter: Twitter under

the Microscope” discuss the issue of how relevant is a list of “friends” is to members of the

network. It is mentioned in the study that scholars, advertisers and political activist see massive

online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the

propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing. The dataset used in this study

contains 309,740 users with average posts of 255, 85 followers and 80 followees. Out of the

number of users, 211,024 posted at least twice and they are under the category of active users.

Twitter post or known can be categorized into direct and indirect posts. The findings show that

25.4% of the posts are direct which means they are directed to friends, mostly. The findings also

show that users who received attention from many people and users who have more followers

tend to be more active in posting their tweets. This shows that the number of friends is the driver

of Twitter user’s activity.

The article “Why We Twitter: An Analysis of A Microblogging Community” by Java,

Song, Finin and Tseng focused their study on microblogging phenomena, particularly Twitter.

As a start, they define microblogging as a new form of commucation where users describe their

current status in short posts. Microblogging mainly acts as a medium to talk about daily activities

and to seek or share information. Furthermore, microblogging systems provide a light-weight,

easy form of communication that enables users to broadcast and share information about their

current activities, thoughts, opinions and status. Microblogging intentions varied from daily

chatter, conversations, sharing information to reporting news. The authors monitor the public

timeline of their samples for two months which result in 1,348,543 posts from 76,117 users.

These users shared intentions of information sharing, information seeking and friendship-wise

relationship.

In the article “Twitter: Expressions of the Whole Self - An Investigation into User

Appropriation of a Web-based Communications Platform” written by Edward Mischaud

discusses the use of Twitter, its features and the people who uses it. As defined by Mischaud,

Twitter is a web-based communications platform combining Instant Messaging and SMS that

enables subscribers to its service to send short ‘status updates’ to other people. In this article,

Mischaud seeks to investigate the extent to which users of Twitter responds to the ‘guiding’

question ‘What are you doing?’. From this question it is possible to find out whether users of

Twitter goes beyond this particular question, by deviating to other ‘updates’ or vice versa. By

analysing the results obtained, Mischaund concluded that the majority of Twitter users observed

are appropriating the platform beyond “What are you doing?”. This article also discusses about

the society’s role in shaping technology and the influence a technology’s design may have on

how it is used. This research of Mischaud contributes in the understanding of the spoken and

written language of the Twitter users. A line can be drawn between the two by applying

Mischaud’s method of study.

CONCLUSION

Through the analysis, it can be seen that spoken form of tweets are mainly determined through

the use of emoticons and punctuation marks. This is due to the fact that emoticons and

punctuation marks replace tone, body language and intention in spoken language. The purpose

for the use of spoken form in tweets are mainly to share feelings, thoughts and information, to

show emotions as well as to share tips. The tendency to use spoken form could be because the

Twitter user wants to address people from different background and the tweets carries less-

serious tone. On the other hand, written form of tweets are seen to be influenced by the intention

of the Twitter user and the intended meaning. As written form carries a more serious tone, tweets

of written form are largely dedicated to the purpose of giving advice, words of wisdoms and to

motivate.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Huberman B. A., Romero D. M., Wu F. (2004). Social Networks That Matter: Twitter Under The Microscope. Retrieved on 11 February 2011 from http://www.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0812/0812.1045v1.pdf

Mischaud. M. Twitter: Expressions of the Whole Self – An Investigation into User Appropriation in a web-based communications platform. Retrieved on 12 February 2011 from http://www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/mediaWorkingPapers/MScDissertationSeries/Mishaud_Final.pdf.

Java A., Song X., Finin, T., Tseng B. (2007). Why We Twitter: An Analysis of a Microblogging Community. Advances in Web Mining and Web Usage Analysis. Retrieved on 4 February 2011 from http://books.google.com.my/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8me70KLsvw4C&oi=fnd&pg=PA118&dq=twitter&ots=x4uBcpsg-m&sig=R2kSPvMFkjRdpcVvDMm0GHBRrE8#v=onepage&q=twitter&f=false