Linguistic Studies on Social Media: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

This study aimed to present the status quo of linguistic studies on social media in the past decade. In particular, it conducted a bibliometric analysis of articles from the field of linguistics of the database of Web of Science Core Collection with the aid of the tool CiteSpace to identify the general characteristics, major strands of linguistics, main research methods, and important research themes in the area of linguistic studies on social media. The main findings are summarized as follows. First, the study reported the publication trend, main publication venues, researched social media platforms, and languages used in researched social media. Second, sociolinguistics and pragmatics were found to be major strands of linguistics used in relevant studies. Third, the study identified seven main research methods: discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, multimodal analysis, narrative analysis, ethnographic analysis, and corpus analysis. Fourth, important research themes were extracted and classified based on four dimensions of the genre framework of social media studies. They were the participation nature and technology affordances of social media in the dimension of compositional level, the researched topics of education, (language) policy and politics in the dimension of thematic orientations, the researched discursive practices of (im)politeness, humor, indexicality and multilingualism in the dimension of stylistic traits, and the researched communicative functions of constructing identity, communicating (language) ideology, and expressing attitude in the pragmatic dimension. Moreover, linguistic studies on social media tended to be characterized by cross-disciplinary and mixed-method approaches.

The Speech of Social Media Influencers in Najd: Introducing a New Source of Sociolinguistic Data

“…LITERATURE REVIEW As stated earlier, linguistic studies on social media are attracting the attention of researchers in the field. According to Sun et al (2021), the majority of linguistic studies on social media are in the sub-fields of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and applied linguistics. It was also found that most studies are conducted on the social media platforms of Twitter and Facebook.…”

“…For instance, the Labovian framework of the interview which elicits casual/careful styles (Labov, 1972) does not work for other languages, e.g., Arabic because it will trigger the use of Standard Arabic rather than different styles (Al-Wer, 2013). As technology advances, it can be observed that sociolinguistic studies relying on social media data are gaining traction (Sun et al, 2021). In this study, the speech of social media influencers in Najd will be analyzed sociolinguistically to further explore the possibility of using it as a reliable data source for Najdi dialects.…”

A Bibliometric Analysis of Technology-Based Foreign Language Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Direction for Indonesia Language Learning

“…Also, all documents including the top 8 documents with the highest score citation were journal articles. It means that the journal article dominates the eight most influential documents [24], [35].…”

“…To date, many bibliometric analysis studies related to foreign language education have been carried out widely by a lot of researchers [20]- [30]. In addition, several bibliometric analysis types of research regarding technology-based English learning such as computer, website-based assessment, e-books, social media, and wearable devices also have been performed by some researchers [31]- [35]. In contrast, this study focuses on exploring and analyzing the large scientific data from the Scopus database regarding technology-based foreign language learning during the COVID-19 outbreak.…”

A bibliometric review study of Michael Burawoy

“…Owing to the proliferation of open access databases and availability of free software for analyses, it has become the central means for evaluating scholarly publications and their producers. Although bibliometric studies have been primarily used in natural sciences, recently it has also been used in the broad category of social sciences, especially in disciplines like linguistics ( Sun et al, 2021 ), economics ( Samudra, 2023 ), psychology ( Dong et al, 2022 ), and publication media ( Petrovich, 2022 ). This paper aims to extend this method to the discipline of sociology further by putting the work of American social theorist and ethnographer Michael Burawoy to bibliometric analyses.…”