Gender Language Differences In A Computer-mediated Forum

Gender language differences reflect not only the social and historic development but also denote the differences in the oldest human language types. As an important research area in sociolinguistics, gender language differences have been studied from a variety of perspectives.With the rapid development of science and technology, computer has acted as one of the most important media in communicating; a new style of communication mediated by computer or computer-mediated communication (CMC) comes into being. In some specific CMC setting, people may communicate without meeting face-to-face except for video communication. This means that their sexes can be hidden. They can communicate with each other without being confined to conventional limitations. They can express their thoughts freely and unfettered. American scholar Susan Herring is one of the prominent characters in the study of gender language differences in the CMC. She stated that people transfer the features of gender language in the face-to-face communication into the CMC. This is different from the ideas that CMC can make language neutral. If so, in such a mediated communication process men and women perform their language behaviors really the same as they do in real life?To answer this question, this study analyzed the data of the participants'postings based on language use (euphemism, taboo, and neutrality), response (direct response and hedge), and topic turn via a self-established computer-mediated forum. Thirty-six second-year English major students (18 males and 18 females) from a university located in eastern Shandong Province participated in the study. Their ages range from 19 to 21. They attended the forum one time a week and communicated with each other on one topic for an hour. This forum took about 3 months. Content analysis method was used to analyze the data collected from the forum and qualitative method was used to describe the results. According to the results, female students use a little more euphemism, but more than 60% of the participants like to use neutral language regardless of gender; females use more hedges and males use more topic turns.This study is an attempt to study the gender language differences in the CMC setting or the computer-mediated forum. Its aims are to explore whether any changes between the CMC and the natural language may be identified and whether CMC is of help to eliminate the gender language differences. Finally, limitations of the study are summarized and suggestions for conducting further research on this topic are made.