Linguistic Accommodation in Teenagers’ Social Media Writing: Convergence Patterns in Mixed-gender Conversations

Abstract

The present study analyzes the phenomenon of linguistic accommodation, i.e. the adaptation of one’s language use to that of one’s conversation partner. In a large corpus of private social media messages, we compare Flemish teenagers’ writing in two conversational settings: same-gender (including only boys or only girls) and mixed-gender conversations (including at least one girl and one boy). We examine whether boys adopt a more ‘female’ and girls a more ‘male’ writing style in mixed-gender talks, i.e. whether teenagers converge towards their conversation partner with respect to gendered writing. The analyses focus on two sets of prototypical markers of informal online writing, for which a clear gender divide has been attested in previous research: expressive typographic markers (e.g., emoticons), which can be considered more ‘female’ features, and ‘oral’, speech-like markers (e.g., regional language features), which are generally more popular among boys. Using generalized linear-mixed models, we examine the frequency of these features in boys’ and girls’ writing in same- versus mixed-gender conversations. Patterns of convergence emerge from the data: they reveal that girls and boys adopt a more similar style in mixed-gender talks. Strikingly, the convergence is asymmetrical and only significant for a particular group of online language features.