In my observations, I expect to find that males on Habbo will talk more than females because, generally, in mixed sex conversations males speak more than females. A contributing factor to this is the frequent implementation of interruptions and overlaps by men when women are speaking, which more often than not results in women ceasing to speak, allow the interrupter to speak instead (Broadbridge). A key difference is with computer mediated communication is that interruptions and overlaps can not occur simultaneously to the actual conversation and can not occur in the traditional sense. I do suspect that despite this there will be conversational dominance exerted by males manifesting in more lines of text submitted to the conversation. It may follow that women submit fewer lines on average, because of the tendency for females to employ more active listening skills than men, meaning they are more likely to encourage others to speak than they are to speak themselves in some cases (Broadbridge). A final reason to expect men to speak more is the difference in perceptions each gender has about the amount they speak. Despite that fact that men tend to speak more in conversations, they usually hold the perception that they are speaking the least, and while women speak less, men and other women tend to perceive them as being more talkative than their male counterparts (Broadbridge). These altered perceptions of speaking time likely will result in males having a greater verbosity and a reluctance for females to contribute.

I expect that females will use more emojis than males because of the stereotype that females are more emotive than males, however, this prediction could prove problematic because studies have found that in mixed-sex conversations males and females use approximately the same amount of emojis (Fullwood). However, in same-sex conversations males use fewer emojis than females do, so potentially, the use of emojis could depend on the ratio of males to females in the conversation. The reason that males and females use similar amounts and types of emojis is a phenomenon referred to as communication accommodation theory or CAT, in which people will change the way they communicate to emphasize their sameness in a group of people. In the case of emojis, it is speculated that men will use them as a means of downplaying things that could be negatively perceived as aggressiveness or threatening behavior and emphasize empathy and lightheartedness. This is sometimes referred to as “linguistic androgyny” when people will adapt linguistically to appear more gender neutral and appeal to a wider array of users (Fullwood).

I predict that women will use more laughter representatives because humor is regularly used in conversation as a way of establishing dominance in power between individuals. Women’s humor is regularly marginalized in everyday conversation, and I think that it is less likely that I will observe men laughing as much as women (Kotthoff). Similarly, men often obtain most of the power in conversations and using humor functions in many ways as a power grab in discourse. Males will make jokes or attempt to, and I predict that females will laugh more frequently to conform to the power dynamic being established in the conversation.

Although I believe that both males and females in Habbo Hotel will be profane to some degree, I expect that men will use more profanity than women. Swearing is frequently considered to be a forceful or aggressive linguistic trait, which are characteristics that are most frequently ascribed to men, so when women do swear it is often recognized as a marked behavior and is more conspicuous than when a man does it. Women tend to swear less than men for a variety of reasons; they do not want to appear offensive, they fear it will give people a negative impression of them, it feels uncomfortable to them, and they believe it shows a limited vocabulary or ability to express oneself (Stapleton). This focus women have on appearing educated and likable shows a movement towards the prestige variant of not swearing and leads me to believe that in Habbo Hotel males will swear more than females.

Using all capital letters has evolved to become netspeak for yelling (Robb). Because yelling is something considered to be assertive, aggressive, or hostile, I predict that mostly males will be doing it as these are traits stereotypically applied to the male gender, especially in conversation. Capital letters allow words to consume the maximum amount of space and draw attention to them, which given the tendency of males to dominate conversations is likely something that would attract them to using all capital letters. I am not, however, certain about this prediction because capital letters are also likely to be used as an intensifier, which is something that female speakers do more frequently than males.