Linguistic Gender Differences. Examining Apologies of Social Media Figures (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, , language: English, abstract: This term paper looks at politeness behaviour from a gender perspective. The author focuses her investigation on apologies as speech acts. In order to analyse the differences between the two genders, she investigates several apology videos of YouTubers from the U.K and the U.S, who have reached a certain level of popularity among young viewers.

The author analyzes the strategies the YouTubers use to apologize to their viewers for various missteps they made earlier and in the process exposes some strategic mistakes in these apologies. Even though the differences between the genders when it comes to the wording of apologies are not clear cut, there a certain tendencies which are interesting to look at. These sociolinguistic differences mainly come from the high correlation between the use of language of a person and their social background, society norms, standards and expectations on gender behaviourism.

The question, if real language differences exist between the genders, needs further consideration, because it also depends on the individual and the context. In this essay, the author focuses on people who have a certain media presence (i.e. on YouTube) and reach a large young audience. They have to choose their words very carefully in order to retain and/or regain a positive image and to reduce the danger of losing their followers. Just by examining a certain (limited) number of different sources, it becomes clear that women and men not only regard and react to apologies differently but also use them in different proportions and for different purposes.