Gender-Linked Language Differences in Social Network Communication: Algerian Facebook Users.

Abstract

Owing to the development of sophisticated online social networking communication technologies, it became compulsory for researchers to have a handle on the way social meanings and/or identities are constructed; especially when text-based virtual communication is concerned. In such interactive contexts, written language is the only medium of interaction that interlocutors can embark upon to express their thoughts and interests in a more innovative way. In view of this, the current thesis is intended to spot gender-linked language differences in using particular non-standard linguistic features that typify the casual written discourse of Algerian Facebook users, as it also aims at measuring the magnitude of language use and/or choice in constructing gendered identities vis-à-vis the co-existing language varieties in Algeria. The research findings have shown first that text-based casual discourse of our target participants on Facebook contained innovative occurrences of non-standard morpho-syntactic, scriptural, orthographic, phonetic, paralinguistic, multimodal and language alternation practices that were at play by both male and female Facebook users. Secondly, gender has had a little influence on language use and/or choice due to the nature of the virtual casual written context; whilst grammatical gender bias was relatively apparent. Thirdly, the results have also revealed that females are fairly liable to exploit informal text-based linguistic features on Facebook; confronting therefore the essentialist outlook of gender given that most of the results have corresponded to gender-preferential communicative features instead of exclusive ones.