Cross-Gender Differences on Netspeak

Abstract

As everyone knows, language are invented by human beings and used by human beings. It is proved that human is the main part of language in the language creation and the language using history. Human being can be divided into two parts, male and female, and it is inevitable that language has the gender characteristic. Nowadays, information technology developed rapidly, because of its economical, efficient, user-friendly and convenient hallmarks, the Internet has irresistibly entered into almost every corner of people’s life. The result in linguistics is that a new language variety——netspeak, which was designed to meet the requirement of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) was created. Recent years, linguists and sociolinguists have paid increasing number of attention to netspeak. A large number of studies have been conducted on netspeak, but gender differences in netspeak have been hardly get concern because of the anonymity of CMC. In this article, I want to verify whether the previous studies findings on gender differences in face-to-face communication can be applied to describe and to explain the gender-related differences in netspeak or not, and I hope this article can be beneficial to the understanding of language and gender in CMC context.