The Effects of Age, Gender and Region on Non-standard Linguistic Variation in Online Social Networks
This research addresses linguistic variation in online communication for sociolinguists, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new dataset.
The study analyzed how age, gender, and region influence non-standard linguistic features like netspeak and regional speech in Flemish Dutch online posts, finding evidence for the Adolescent Peak Principle and a correlation between regional and chatspeak features.
We present a corpus-based analysis of the effects of age, gender and region of origin on the production of both "netspeak" or "chatspeak" features and regional speech features in Flemish Dutch posts that were collected from a Belgian online social network platform. The present study shows that combining quantitative and qualitative approaches is essential for understanding non-standard linguistic variation in a CMC corpus. It also presents a methodology that enables the systematic study of this variation by including all non-standard words in the corpus. The analyses resulted in a convincing illustration of the Adolescent Peak Principle. In addition, our approach revealed an intriguing correlation between the use of regional speech features and chatspeak features.