Gender Differences Of Text Messages Between College Students

Gender language has been a hot issue being studied in the sociolinguistic field. Many scholars in western countries and China have concluded that males and females differentiate from each other in communicative style through daily observation and language material analysis. Short messaging service (SMS) has popularized in China since it was introduced into China in the 1990s. As a special genre, SMS has attracted many scholars to study its stylistic features, but few of them have ever touched upon the gender language research into SMS.Based on the framework of gender language differences of previous researches, this thesis investigates gender language differences in SMS among college students. The author tries to demonstrate gender differences of SMS language from aspects of the amount of speech, minimal responses, final particles, laughs, emoticons and swearing, etc. It has been found that male students and female students differentiate from each other to a large extent in single-sex SMS communication. In cross sex messages, female students use more minimal responses and swearing while male students tend to use the same communicative styles with female students in the other aspects.