‘Fuck’ and emoticons
A quantitative study of the use of two ‘gendered’ linguistic variables by transgender and nonbinary Redditors
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.25734Keywords:
corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, computer-mediated communication, Reddit, emoticon, swearingAbstract
This quantitative study investigates gender variation online by focusing on two ‘gendered’ linguistic variables: the swear word fuck, which has often been associated with men, and emoticons, which have been shown to be used more frequently by women than men. It is based on a nineteen-million-word gender-diverse corpus, which includes comments posted in English on the community website Reddit by 372 cisgender women, 372 cisgender men, 100 transgender women, 100 transgender men and 100 nonbinary individuals (all according to self-identification). The statistical analyses take both the gender and age of the Redditors into account. Results show that in most cases transgender men do not align with cisgender men; that transgender women mostly align with cisgender women in their use of fuck, but the former produce more emoticons than the latter, and that the use of the variables did not differ between nonbinary individuals assigned male versus female at birth.
References
Argamon, Shlomo, Koppel, Moshe, Pennebaker, James W. and Schler, Jonathan (2007) Mining the blogosphere: age, gender and the varieties of self-expression. First Monday 12(9). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v12i9.2003
Bailey, Lee Ann and Timm, Lenora A. (1976) More on women’s – and men’s – expletives. Anthropological Linguistics 18(9): 438–449.
Bamman, David, Eisenstein, Jacob and Schnoebelen, Tyler (2014) Gender identity and lexical variation in social media. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18(2): 135–160. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12080
Baron, Naomi S. (2004) See you online: gender issues in college student use of Instant Messaging. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 23(4): 397–423. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X04269585
Baroni, Marco (2009) Distributions in text. In Anke Lüdeling and Merja Kytö (eds) Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook, Vol. 2 803–822. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110213881.2.803
Barthel, Michael, Stocking, Galen, Holcomb, Jesse and Mitchell, Amy (25 February 2016) Reddit news users more likely to be male, young and digital in their news preferences. Pew Research Center Report. Retrieved May 2024 from http://www.journalism.org/2016/02/25/reddit-news-users-more-likely-to-be-male-young-and-digital-in-their-news-preferences
Becker, Kara, Khan, Sameer ud Dowla and Zimman, Lal (2022) Beyond binary gender: creaky voice, gender, and the variationist enterprise. Language Variation and Change 34(2): 215–238. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394522000138
Coats, Steven (2017) Gender and lexical type frequencies in Finland Twitter English. In Turo Hiltunen, Joe McVeigh and Tanja Säiley (eds) Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, Vol. 19: Big and Rich Data in English Corpus Linguistics: Methods and Explorations. Retrieved May 2024 from https://varieng.helsinki.fi/series/volumes/19/coats
Coats, Steven (2021) ‘Bad language’ in the Nordics: profanity and gender in a social media corpus. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 53(1): 22–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/03740463.2021.1871218
Cunha, Evandro, Magno, Gabriel, Gonçalves, Marcos André, Cambraia, César and Almeida, Virgilio (2014) He votes or she votes? Female and male discursive strategies in Twitter political hashtags. PLoS ONE 9(1): e87041. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087041
Del-Teso-Craviotto, Marisol (2008) Gender and sexual identity authentication in language use: the case of chat rooms. Discourse Studies 10(2): 251–270. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445607087011
Dewaele, Jean-Marc (2004) The emotional force of swearwords and taboo words in the speech of multilinguals. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 25(2–3): 204–222. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434630408666529
Flesch, Marie (2020) lol thats how reddit talks ;): le site américain Reddit comme espace de variation de l’anglais: etude de corpus intersectionnelle et quantitative d’usages non standard, au prisme du genre, de l’âge et de l’ethnicité [lol thats how reddit talks ;): variation in English on the American community website Reddit: a quantitative and intersectional study of eleven non-standard variables through the lens of gender, age, and ethnicity]. Doctoral thesis, Université de Lorraine. https://www.theses.fr/2020LORR0192
Foote, Russell and Woodward, Jack (1973) A preliminary investigation of obscene language. The Journal of Psychology 83(2): 263–275. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1973.9915614
Francis, W. Nelson and Kucera, Henry (1964) A Standard Corpus of Present-Day Edited American English, for Use with Digital Computers [The Brown Corpus]. Department of Linguistics, Brown University.
Fullwood, Chris, Orchard, Lisa J. and Floyd, Sarah A (2013) Emoticon convergence in Internet chat rooms. Social Semiotics 23(5): 648–662. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2012.739000
Fullwood, Chris, Quinn, Sally, Chen-Wilson, Josephine, Chadwick, Darren and Reynolds, Katie (2015) Put on a smiley face: textspeak and personality perceptions. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 18(3): 147–151. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2014.0463
Gauthier, Michaël (2017) Age, gender, fuck, and Twitter: a sociolinguistic analysis of swearing in a corpus of British tweets. Doctoral thesis, Université de Lumière Lyon 2.
Gratton, Chantal (2016) Resisting the gender binary: the use of (ING) in the construction of non-binary transgender identities. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 22(2): 51–60. https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol22/iss2/7
Hazenberg, Evan (2016) Walking the straight and narrow: linguistic choice and gendered presentation. Gender and Language 10(2): 270–294. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v10i2.19812
Heiden, Serge, Magué, Jean-Philippe and Pincemin, Bénédicte (2010) TXM: une plateforme logicielle open-source pour la textométrie – conception et développement [TXM: an open-source software platform for textometry – design and development]. In Sergio Bolasco, Isabella Chiari and Luca Giuliano (eds) JADT 10: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Statistical Analysis of Textual Data 1021–1032. Milan: LED Edizioni Universitarie.
Hilbe, Joseph M. (2014) Modeling Count Data. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holtgraves, Thomas (2011) Text messaging, personality, and the social context. Journal of Research in Personality 45(1): 92–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2010.11.015
Huffaker, David A. and Calvert, Sandra L. (2005) Gender, identity, and language use in teenage blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10(2). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2005.tb00238.x
Koch, Timo K., Romero, Peter and Stachl, Clemens (2022) Age and gender in language, emoji, and emoticon usage in instant messages. Computers in Human Behavior 126: 106990. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.106990
Lakoff, Robin (1973) Language and woman’s place. Language in Society 2(1): 45–79. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500000051
Larson, Brian (2017) Gender as a variable in natural-language processing: ethical considerations. In Dirk Hovy, Shannon Spruit, Margaret Mitchell, Emily M. Bender, Michael Strube and Hanna Wallach (eds) Proceedings of the First ACL Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing 1–11. Valencia, Spain: Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W17-1601
Leech, Geoffrey N. (1992) 100 million words of English: the British National Corpus (BNC). Language Research 28(1): 1–13.
Love, Robbie (2021) Swearing in informal spoken English: 1990s–2010s. Text & Talk 41(5–6): 739–762. https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0051
Magué, Jean-Philippe, Rossi-Gensane, Nathalie and Halté, Pierre (2020) De la segmentation dans les tweets: signes de ponctuation, connecteurs, émoticônes et émojis [Segmentation in tweets: punctuation marks, connectors, emoticons and emojis]. Corpus 20. https://doi.org/10.4000/corpus.4619
Maltz, Daniel N. and Borker, Ruth A. (1982) A cultural approach to male-female miscommunication. In John J. Gumperz (ed) Language and Social Identity 196–216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Massanari, Adrienne (2017) #Gamergate and The Fappening: how Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. New Media & Society 19(3): 329–346. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815608807
McEnery, Anthony and Xiao, Zhonghua (2004) Swearing in modern British English: the case of fuck in the BNC. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 13(3): 235–268. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947004044873
Mislove, Alan, Lehmann, Sune, Ahn, Yong-Yeol, Onnela, Jukka-Pekka and Rosenquist, J. Niels (2011) Understanding the demographics of Twitter users. Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v5i1.14168
Newman, Matthew L., Groom, Carla J., Handelman, Lori D. and Pennebaker, James W. (2008) Gender differences in language use: an analysis of 14,000 text samples. Discourse Processes 45(3): 211–236. https://doi.org/10.1080/01638530802073712
Nguyen, Dong, Dogruöz, A. Seza, Rosé, Carolyn P. and de Jong, Franciska (2016) Computational sociolinguistics: a survey. Computational Linguistics 42(3): 537–593. https://doi.org/10.1162/COLI_a_00258
Oleszkiewicz, Anna, Karwowski, Maciej, Pisanski, Katarzyna, Sorokowski, Piotr, Sobrado, Boaz and Sorokowska, Agnieszka (2017) Who uses emoticons? Data from 86,702 Facebook users. Personality and Individual Differences 119: 289–295. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.07.034
Pérez-Sabater, Carmen (2012) The linguistics of social networking: a study of writing conventions on Facebook. Linguistik Online 56(6): 81–93. https://doi.org/10.13092/lo.56.257
Podesva, Robert J. and Van Hofwegen, Janneke (2014) How conservatism and normative gender constrain variation in inland California: the case of /s/. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 20(2): 129–137. https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/45003
Provine, Robert R., Spencer, Robert J. and Mandell, Darcy L. (2007) Emotional expression online: emoticons punctuate website text messages. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 26(3): 299–307. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X06303481
R Core Team (2021) R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org
Rankin, Sue and Beemyn, Genny (2012) Beyond a binary: the lives of gender-nonconforming youth. About Campus 17(4): 2–10. https://doi.org/10.1002/abc.21086
Reddit (n.d.) User flair. Reddit Mods. Retrieved 9 January 2023 from https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010541651-User-Flair
Reddit – Press (2021) Reddit by the numbers. Retrieved 9 January 2023 from https://www.redditinc.com/press#numbers
Rezabeck, Landra L. and Cochenour, John J. (1995) Emoticons: visual cues for computer-mediated communication. In Darrell G. Beauchamp, Roberts A. Braden and Robert E. Griffin (eds) Imagery and Visual Literacy: Selected Readings from the Annual Conference of the International Visual Literacy Association (26th, Tempe, Arizona, October 12–16, 1994) 371–383. The International Visual Literacy Association. Retrieved 20 February 2023 from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED380056.pdf
r/ftm (n.d.) Related subreddits. Retrieved 20 February 2023 from https://www.reddit.com/r/ftm/wiki/index/related_subreddits/
Schilt, Kristen (2010) Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schwartz, H. Andrew, Eichstaedt, Johannes C., Kern, Margaret L., Dziurzynski, Lukasz, Ramones, Stephanie M., Agrawal, Megha, Shah, Achal, Kosinski, Michal, Stillwell, David, Seligman, Martin E. P. and Ungar, Lyle H. (2013) Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: the open-vocabulary approach. PLoS ONE 8(9): e73791. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0073791
Scott, Kate (2022) Pragmatics Online. London: Routledge.
Selnow, Gary W. (1985) Sex differences in uses and perceptions of profanity. Sex Roles 12: 303–312. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00287597
Settanni, Michele and Marengo, Davide (2015) Sharing feelings online: studying emotional well-being via automated text analysis of Facebook posts. Frontiers in Psychology 6: 1045. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01045
Spina, Stefania (2019) Role of emoticons as structural markers in Twitter interactions. Discourse Processes 56(4): 345–362. https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2018.1510654
Spina, Stefania and Cancila, Jessica (2013) Gender issues in the interactions of Italian politicians on Twitter: identity, representation and flows of conversation. International Journal of Cross-Cultural Studies and Environmental Communication 2(2): 147–157.
Staley, Constance M. (1978) Male-female use of expletives: a heck of a difference in expectations. Anthropological Linguistics 20(8): 367–380.
Tagg, Caroline (2012) Discourse of Text Messaging: Analysis of SMS Communication. London: Continuum.
Thelwall, Mike (2008) Fk yea I swear: cursing and gender in MySpace. Corpora 3(1): 83–107. https://doi.org/10.3366/E1749503208000087
Thelwall, Mike and Stuart, Emma (2018) She’s Reddit: a source of statistically significant gendered interest information? Information Processing & Management 56(4): 1543–1558. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2018.10.007
Thompson, Dominic and Filik, Ruth (2016) Sarcasm in written communication: emoticons are efficient markers of intention. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 21(2): 105–120. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12156
Vandergriff, Ilona (2013) Emotive communication online: a contextual analysis of computer-mediated communication (CMC) cues. Journal of Pragmatics 51: 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.02.008
Venables, W. N. and Ripley, B. D. (2002) Modern Applied Statistics with S (4th ed.). New York: Springer.
Wang, Wenbo, Chen, Lu, Thirunarayan, Krishnaprasad and Sheth, Amit P. (2014) Cursing in English on Twitter. Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ’14): 415–425. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531734
Wikipedia (2020) List of emoticons. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11 December 2020 from https://web.archive.org/web/20201205052138/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons
Witmer, Diane F. and Katzman, Sandra Lee (1997) On-line smiles: does gender make a difference in the use of graphic accents? Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2(4). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997.tb00192.x
Wolf, Alecia (2000) Emotional expression online: gender differences in emoticon use. CyberPsychology & Behavior 3(5): 827–833. https://doi.org/10.1089/10949310050191809
Zimman, Lal (2013) Hegemonic masculinity and the variability of gay-sounding speech: the perceived sexuality of transgender men. Journal of Language and Sexuality 2(1): 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.2.1.01zim
Zimman, Lal and Hayworth, Will (2019) Lexical change as sociopolitical change in talk about trans and cis identity labels: New methods for the corpus analysis of internet data. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 25(2): 143–152.
Zuur, Alain F., Ieno, Elena N., Walker, Neil J., Saveliev, Anatoly A. and Smith, Graham M. (2009) Mixed Effects Models and Extensions in Ecology with R. New York: Springer.
