Gender Difference In Netspeak

The 21^st century is an information age. The fantastic spurt in information technology has given birth to a new language form that originally appears on Internet. The Internet as a world-wide literacy practice environment has created a new situation in communication, that is CMC (Computer-mediated Communication) and it is having incredible influences on every respect of our life. The Internet brings us not only a technological revolution, but also a cultural and linguistic revolution. Internet language, as a newly born language, has its own characteristics, and, the language used on QQ is special.In the field of sociolinguistics, many studies have been conducted to investigate the differences between women and men's conversational styles. However, little effort has been made to look at the gender difference of the talk taking place on QQ, which has become a craze among young people in China. This study aims to understand whether there is any difference between women and men's talk on QQ and, if there is, to explain how and why they are different. Therefore, this study will help researchers understand women and men's speech differences in China, with the setting being cyberspace and the language Chinese. Moreover, the findings of this study may shed light on the researchers on the largely unexplored field of computer-mediated communication.Seventeen mixed-sex QQ conversation records were obtained by the courtesy of 17 QQ users. These conversation records were coded through six variables: amount of speech, minimal response, final particle, laugh, emoticon, and creative language use. The reason why the writer chose these six variables is that to the writer, from these six aspects, we can see the characteristics of Internet language. The major findings are encapsulated in the following.1. Men talk more than women. On average, men were found to contribute more amount of characters, turns, and mean length of a turn (MLT).2. Women gave an average of 2.7 minimal responses throughout the conversation while men on average gave 3.1 minimal responses, which amounted to a 13.8% difference.3. Women produced an average of 7.5 final particles while men used an average of 3.7 final particles only.4. On average, men laughed 2 times during the conversation while their counterparts laughed only 1.7 times, which was a 16.2% difference.5. Men were found to use 40% more emoticons to express their feelings than were women.6. Female showed a 13.3% higher tendency to be creative in their language.