Archive / Volume 10, Issue 4, October 2020

Is Japanese Gendered Language used on Twitter? A Large Scale Study

Tiziana Carpi 1, Stefano Maria Iacus 2 *

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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.

Keywords

Japanese women language joseigo danseigo gendered language Twitter

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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Article Type: Research Article

https://doi.org/10.30935/ojcmt/9141

Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies, Volume 10, Issue 4, October 2020, Article No: e202024

Published Online: 04 Nov 2020

Article Views: 596

Article Downloads: 147

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