The Effects of Age, Gender and Region on Non-standard Linguistic Variation in Online Social Networks
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We present a corpus-based analysis of the effects of age, gender and region of origin on the production of both "netspeak" or "chatspeak" features and regional speech features in Flemish Dutch posts that were collected from a Belgian online social network platform. The present study shows that combining quantitative and qualitative approaches is essential for understanding non-standard linguistic variation in a CMC corpus. It also presents a methodology that enables the systematic study of this variation by including all non-standard words in the corpus. The analyses resulted in a convincing illustration of the Adolescent Peak Principle. In addition, our approach revealed an intriguing correlation between the use of regional speech features and chatspeak features.
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