Friday, 10 January 2014

Do female Lady Gaga fans make more nonstandard spellings than male Lady Gaga fans when tweeting at #LadyGaga?

The data below is two sets of 15 tweets. The first set are all posted by twitter accounts that appear to be owned by men, and the second 15 appear to be owned by women. I will be examining each tweet and counting the number of non-standard spellings within the tweet, then afterwards looking at certain aspects such as whether or not the non-standard spelling was intentional, and how the two different groups compare to each other. These tweets were all posted within the last fortnight, at the time I am writing this. The number of nonstandard spellings is bracketed in bold after the Twitter handle of each user.

MALES: (2)

15) by  (0)
Take me to your planet (to the planet) Take me to your Venus (to the planet) Your Venus, your Venus

14) by  (0)
What to wear? 2 days left to work lol love you

13) by  (0)
": So cute "

 12) by  (0)
Mary Jane Holland at Venus style. .

11) by  (1)
Lady Gaga apologizes for 'Do What U Want' video delay

10) by  (0)
my could mean anything

9) by  (0)
I follow back everyone.

8) by  (0)
RT THE LINK TO WIN THE TEE! COMPETITION ENDS TODAY!

7) by  (0)
Lady Gaga says: I know I'm prettier and richer than simple princess 1

6) by  (1)
OMG Happy New Year to us!! & ! Do What U Want (feat. Christina Aguilera) - Single by Lady Gaga

5) by  (0)
In one year, only the legend, .

4) by  (0)
SHARE this photo in every social network! Its an MTV Voting for the Best Fandom of 2013! 1 share= 1 VOTE !

3) by  (0)
Interested to give this sequence a go

2) by  (0)
are you an Ariana Grande or Lady Gaga fan? go check out my items @ .

1) by  (0)
What Happens when your awake forever lol Lady Gaga Artpop Ball Tour Stage IDEA …



FEMALES: (3)

15) by  (0)


14) by  (1)
"Why are you asking me thes....."

13) by  (0)
My love))

12) by  (0)
Do you like ?? If you're a little monster please watch Oh La La by Guido Moran…

11) by  (0)
How Beautiful She Is😍 👽❤

10) by  (not the 'real' Katy Perry) (0)
Let Stop Fighting Fans! Both Are Awesome! Retweet if you agree!

9) by  (0)
She's the best idol ❤️

8) by  (1)
OMG it's 11:11pm here I wish for to win <3 were in it to win it ❤️ let's take it home

7) by  (0)
I am beyond in love with this !!!!! My two favorite parts is it has a bit of which I…

6) by  (0)
.Are you a fan of ? Appreciate unusual love stories? ~ ~ “Mirror Face” ~ “It’s awesome.”

 5) by
I'll do anything for you. That's why not being able to do anything is the toughest thing for me.

4) by Alissia Monster (0)
MONSTERS C'MON WE NEED TO DO THIS FOR Gaga RT Little Monsters 1RT=1VOTE!!!

3) by  (0)
my diva perfect i love so much

2) by  (0)
My new artwork :3

1) by  (1)
": My Suicide letter I wrote earlier good BYE Monster's I LOVE You all "


Interestingly my results are far different than I initially expected. There are far fewer spelling mistakes in total than I foresaw. Traditionally, the internet has been something of a petri dish for non-standard grammar to develop and thrive, and I expected that the 140 character limit that defines Twitter would push users to use more nonstandard spellings as a way of remaining within the limit. What I found was that the majority of twitter messages are largely made up of copy-pasted links. The handful of typed out words in the tweets did not usually contain any nonstandard spellings. There were many cases of nonstandard lexis, but these cannot be examined for nonstandard spelling as there is no 'standard' in the case of these words.

Two of the examples were males quoting a song title, which means it was intentional. One of them was a female who used "were" in a context where "we're" was the standard spelling. One of them was a female who referred to more than one monster as "Monster's". And finally, one of them was simply an extract that cuts off the letter 'e' from 'these'.

All in all it seem that males and females use a very similar amount of nonstandard spelling when communicating in the context of Lady Gaga, with the vast majority of everyone not using them at all, though nonstandard lexis were common.
Posted by at

1 comment:

  1. Unknown31 January 2014 at 13:52

    Interesting. Worth looking at what was non-standard lexis and how it was spelt?

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)