How Men and Women are Violating the Rules of Standard English on the Internet (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Paderborn (Kulturwissenschaft), language: English, abstract: This study was set out to investigate if gender influences the usage of Standard English on the internet.

"What r u doing 2day? :)" "I do not know. Do you want to watch a movie with me?" It is not difficult to identify both sentences as examples of the English language; nevertheless, upon taking a closer look a few differences are still noticeable. English is ranking the second place of the most spoken languages in the world and is known to be widely spread due several reasons, like globalisation and thereby spreading communication around the world. However, there are many different situations in which English can be used for and different degrees to how well it might be spoken. For instance, the English variety used on the internet in blogs or on other websites, might vary from the English that is used in the news and official documents and might as well contain slang words or grammatical mistakes. Therefore, it is divided into a form of Standard English and Non-Standard English.

One of these factors that may influence the correctness of the English language is the aforementioned internet. The internet usage has increased in the last two decades and leads to people communicating with each other from different places, most of the times with English as the main language. In order to communicate as quickly as possible, as well as accurate as possible, certain patterns have been established throughout the years, such as abbreviations or emoticons, like they were used in the first example.

Since previous research has shown that women tend to pay more attention to the correctness of their language than men do, this term paper is set out to investigate if there are indeed distinctions between men and women concerning Standard and Non-Standard English, based on communications on the internet. Does gender play a decisive role in influencing the use of grammatical correctness on the internet? In order to gather information and data, this research project has asked a number of native English speaking people to respond to short instant messages. This procedure and its results however, will be further explained in the following chapters.