Language choice and gender in a Nordic social media corpus

Abstract

This study analyzes language choice, bi- and multilingualism, and gender in a corpus of over 22 million Twitter messages by almost 36,000 authors from the Nordic countries and territories. Author location, gender, and tweet language are identified using a novel method. Three principal findings are discussed: First, gendered preference for particular languages in the Nordics can be explained in part by patterns of gendered migration. Second, a distinct geographical pattern of female/male preference for the national languages of the region and for English is evident for users who are likely native users of a Nordic language: Females are more likely to use English, while males are more likely to use a Nordic language. Third, while high rates of bi- and multilingualism are found across the whole sample, males are more likely to use more than one language in all the Nordic countries/territories. The latter two findings are interpreted in light of sociolinguistic considerations as evidence for incipient language shift towards English for Nordic users on the Twitter platform.

Construction and Application of Media Corpus Based on Big Data

“…e personal data banking model is a new model that can effectively sort and integrate personal data, improve the quality and value of personal data, enhance the controllability and availability of personal data, and effectively protect personal data privacy [2]. In the process of data aggregation, due to the high dispersion of personal data at the same time, personal data are typical dynamic data, and various data reflecting personal attributes and status are constantly changing.…”

Millennials’ Use of Terms of Endearment in Casual Conversation in Digital Communication

“…Tagliamonte [1] argues that the internet is not the sole factor leading to language change and shift since language itself is dynamic and keeps changing over time. However, one of the main findings of Coats' [12] study is that language shift towards English currently occurs amongst young people in the Nordic countries especially on the social media platform, namely Twitter. The use of languages other than mother tongue is not uncommon during online interaction compared to faceto-face communication [12].…”

“…However, one of the main findings of Coats' [12] study is that language shift towards English currently occurs amongst young people in the Nordic countries especially on the social media platform, namely Twitter. The use of languages other than mother tongue is not uncommon during online interaction compared to faceto-face communication [12]. However, according to Musgrave [13], also supported by Abtahian and Cohn's findings [10], the shifts occurring in many places including in Indonesia should be seen as 'changing patterns of multilingualism' instead of viewing as 'shifts of large populations from one language to another'.…”

‘Bad language’ in the Nordics: profanity and gender in a social media corpus

“…In the Nordic countries, societies in which knowledge of English is widespread, many speakers make use of profanities borrowed from English as well as native-language profanities: For example, fuck is widely used in Swedish, Finnish, and Danish (Beers Fägersten 2017; Hjort 2017; Rathje 2014). By looking at profanities, a class of lexical items that are widely used in informal communication, we can gain insight into the contours of the online language situation in the Nordic societies as it continues to develop (Coats 2019a(Coats , 2019b, and this is what the present study sets out to do. The study explores the following questions: (1) To what extent do Nordic male and female Twitter users use profanities, both Nordic-language and Englishlanguage?…”