Gender and Language on Habbo Hotel

Analysis

The most interesting results about linguistic features that I found regarded the use of capital letters. I predicted that males would use more capital letters to show aggression and conversational dominance, but what I found was that more females also used capital letters than males by 4.46%. This suggests that rather than using capital letters to represent yelling,  they were used to function as an intensifier- like the words “so” or “very” are used more frequently in Habbo Hotel. I don’t think this is the case simply because more females used capital letters than males, but rather because of the context they were used in. When females used capital letters in Habbo Hotel, the most frequently capitalized a single word or a small cluster of words. Examples of this would me “i LOVE you” or “ur hair is SO pretty.” In these instances, the capital letters function similarly to the way italics script does, by adding emphasis and intensity to the chosen word. Males on the other hand more frequently capitalized entire sentences when they spoke, but it wasn’t always in an angry context. For example some would just type lyrics to songs in all caps and submit them in the conversation. I interpreted this more as a means of taking up conversational space, drawing attention to oneself, and attempting to exert conversational dominance.

All of my other predictions regarding linguistic features were correct however. I predicts that females would use more emojis and laughter representatives than males would and I predicted that males would use more profanity. Both of these were correct. I found that 14.46% more females used emojis than males, 11.90% more females used laughter representatives than males, and 11.03% more males used profanity than females. These finding suggest that many of the gendered linguistic stereotypes that function in real life and in adult conversations are persistent not only into computer mediated communication, but also into the conversations of adolescents and young adults.

In looking at conversational dominance in mixed sex conversations, I was a little surprised by my findings. I expected that males would dominate females in the conversations, and that's what my findings suggest as well, but not to the extent that I expected. According to my data, on average males dominated mixed sex conversation by 2.80%. I expected this margin to be much higher based on the degree that males tend to exert dominance in real life conversation. Of course, males did dominate to a high margin in several instances, by as much as 21.43% in some cases, but females also did it in some instances (by as much as 15.10% in the most extreme cases) which averaged it out to the non remarkable average of 2.80% male dominance.

It’s worth noting that the male to female ratios in each mixed sex conversation varied regularly which certainly impacted conversational dominance to some degree, even when you look at it proportionally as I have done. For example some conversations had 1:1 ratios like the fifth conversation which was dominated by males by 21.43% and other conversation like the fifteenth one have 3 females and 1 male and was dominated by females by 15.10%. An example of a mostly male conversation is the eleventh one, which have 5 males and 4 females and resulted in a slight female dominance of 0.33%. Because of the significant number of variables that go into conversational dominance, I think that it would be worth gathering more samples before making any drastic conclusions regarding conversational dominance on Habbo Hotel.

 
 

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