Expressiveness in Flemish Online Teenage Talk: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Social and Medium-Related Linguistic Variation

We analyze linguistic expressiveness in an extensive corpus (2 million tokens) of Flemish online teenage talk, focusing on the use of typographic chatspeak features, an onomatopoeic and a lexical variable and its correlation with the chatters’ profile and the online medium. General quantitative findings are that girls outperform boys in the expression of emotional involvement, and younger adolescents outperform the older group. However, medium has the largest impact: much more expressive markers are used in asynchronous social media posts than in synchronous instant messaging. On a qualitative level, utterances written by girls, by younger teenagers and on the asynchronous platform contain more expressive markers related to love or friendship. Apart from the medium’s (a)synchronicity and its public or private character, the nature of the interaction appears to be a determining factor too. The asynchronous social media posts involve a lot of flirting or pleasing, which drastically increases linguistic expressiveness.