The Effects of Age, Gender and Region on Non-standard Linguistic Variation in Online Social Networks

TL;DR

This study analyzes how age, gender, and region influence non-standard language features in Flemish Dutch social media posts, highlighting the importance of combined methods and revealing correlations between regional and chatspeak features.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic corpus-based methodology for studying non-standard linguistic variation in online social networks, incorporating all non-standard words for comprehensive analysis.

Findings

Confirmation of the Adolescent Peak Principle

Correlation between regional speech features and chatspeak features

Demonstration of the importance of combined quantitative and qualitative approaches

Abstract

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.