GCC VERIEFIED AND UNVERIFED TWITTER USERS: AN INVISTIGATION OF VARIANCE BY GENDER, LANGUAGE AND CONTENT

Abstract

Motivated by the immense popularity and social influence of Twitter in the Gulf region, this study aims to investigate the impact of the verification status of users on their language style, and to determine the extent to which verified and unverified accounts vary in relation to gender, language, and content. This research is exploratory and relies on a corpus-study approach. The four corpora compiled for the experiment include 588,000 tweets extracted from 84 verified and 84 unverified accounts of the male and female users living in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The obtained data have been examined with the help of the AntConc tool, which generated the lists of trademark words and high-frequency words. The results analysis suggests that verified and unverified users have different language styles in terms of formal and informal expressions, choice of topics and language expressivity. Furthermore, although the study confirms expected gender differences in language style, our examination refines and adds to the previous research by demonstrating that these differences are less pronounced in verified accounts. Both male and female users with verified status adopt a stance of objectivity and professionalism, making gender variable less noticeable. The thesis therefore argues that gender is not the only factor influencing one’s linguistic choices: language variations in style and dialect diminish once a person becomes a brand and a voice of a larger community.

Date of Award	2019
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Humanities and Social Science