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

Tiziana Carpi 1, Stefano Maria Iacus 2 *
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1 Department of Studies in Language Mediation and Intercultural Communication, University of Milan, ITALY
2 Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods, University of Milan, ITALY
* Corresponding Author
Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies, Volume 10, Issue 4, Article No: e202024. https://doi.org/10.30935/ojcmt/9141
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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

CITATION

Carpi, T., & Iacus, S. M. (2020). Is Japanese Gendered Language used on Twitter? A Large Scale Study. Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies, 10(4), e202024. https://doi.org/10.30935/ojcmt/9141

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