Is Japanese gendered language used on Twitter ? A large scale study

TL;DR

This large-scale study investigates the use of Japanese gendered language on Twitter, revealing its presence in 6% of tweets and highlighting evolving trends and complexities in gendered linguistic expressions.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of gendered language on Japanese Twitter, combining large-scale data with manual classification to uncover usage patterns and trends.

Findings

Gendered language appears in about 6% of tweets.

Pronouns and sentence-final particles show evolving usage trends.

Prescriptive gender classifications do not always align with actual usage.

Abstract

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.