Is Japanese gendered language used on Twitter ? A large scale study
This addresses the problem of understanding how gendered language manifests in online social media for linguists and sociologists, providing large-scale empirical evidence but is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study analyzed 408 million Japanese tweets from 2015-2019 and 2355 manually classified accounts to investigate the use of gendered language on Twitter, finding it in about 6% of tweets and noting that traditional gender classifications often do not align with actual usage, with trends showing language evolution.
This study analyzes the usage of Japanese gendered language on Twitter. Starting from a collection of 408 million Japanese tweets from 2015 till 2019 and an additional sample of 2355 manually classified Twitter accounts timelines into gender and categories (politicians, musicians, etc). A large scale textual analysis is performed on this corpus to identify and examine sentence-final particles (SFPs) and first-person pronouns appearing in the texts. It turns out that gendered language is in fact used also on Twitter, in about 6% of the tweets, and that the prescriptive classification into "male" and "female" language does not always meet the expectations, with remarkable exceptions. Further, SFPs and pronouns show increasing or decreasing trends, indicating an evolution of the language used on Twitter.