Words That Matter: Gender Features In The Language Use Of Weblog

In modern society the use of Internet has been extremely highlighted in people's lives. Each time, the appearance of new technology in the field of computer science may touch off a storm of online revolution. In the 21^st century, no one can deny that weblog—the frequently modified web pages containing dated entries listed in reverse chronological sequence—should be viewed as one that attracts most of people's eyes. The characteristics of weblog aroused a heated discussion among western linguists of whether there're gender differences in weblog. However, few studies could be found in the Chinese academic field.Being interested in the blogging phenomenon and linguistic gender studies, the author carried out a research into gender-language relationship in the Chinese weblog context. Data included 288 relevant blogs selected from blog.sina.com.cn and blog.sohu.com during December 1st to 30th, 2006. The analysis was a combination of quantitative word frequency analysis and qualitative discourse analysis. First, two computer programs ICTCLAS and NoteTab Pro helped me elaborate lists of words based on the selected number of texts and group the words by frequency order. In this way, the most frequently used words in men's and women's blogs had been found out. Then the original texts in which the most frequently occurring words appeared were examined qualitatively. As a result, both gender similarities and differences were discovered. On the one hand, men and women were different in point of view and style. Men seemed to be more likely to look at a problem from the viewpoint of society, raise questions, offer suggestions and find solutions, while women tended to approach an event from the angle of human relationships, show understanding and sympathy by sharing personal experiences. Moreover, men used more coarse words whereas women used more intensifiers and personal pronouns. On the other hand, both men and women were found to be constrained by some cultural factors when writing blogs. These gender features in language use are very similar to the characteristics of men's and women's language use in off-line communications.The study reveals that although weblog is a theoretically free area, bloggers are still restricted by their language habits formed in the specific culture in which they grow up. Gender features in the language use of weblog are similar to gender features in language use in off-line circumstances.