A2 English Language

Investigating Language on Twitter 

Introduction:

·        I have chosen to focus on language and power and how this has been affected by modern technology.

·        Hypothesis – People with political power use a higher level of formality when using Twitter

·        In order to conduct this investigation we will specifically look at the use of textisms, grammar, and punctuation.

Methodology:

·      We chose to compare the tweets of a person with political power and a person with influential power we therefore chose Ed Milliband and Fearne Cotton à they are both powerful people that are constantly in the public eye. They are also of similar age and are both British, this makes them comparable.

·        In order to avoid bias we chose a systematic way of sampling; we went to each person’s Twitter profile and picked every 5^th tweet.

·        Using the tweets that we picked we counted different formality features; use of non-standard English, multimodality, use of first person pronoun, emotive language.

Analysis:

Feature	Ed Milliband	Fearne Cotton
Non-standard English		IIIII IIIII II
Multimodality	I	II
1st Person	IIIII	IIIII IIII
Emotive Language	IIIII IIIII II	IIIII II

·        Fearne is more informal à uses 12 x more non standard English than Ed Milliband, this could be attributed to the fact that because she holds no political power she doesn’t feel like she has to be formal

·        Ed uses more emotive languageà almost twice as much more than Fearne, this could be because he is using emotive language as a way of persuading people

·        Fearne Cotton uses more multimodality with her tweets ( pictures, emojis, links etc.) this could be considered less formal as it is behaviour associated with those of the younger generation

·        Fearne uses more 1^st person pronoun, this is exclusive language.

Evaluation and Conclusion:

·        Data supported the hypothesis, therefore we can accept it. Those who have Political Power use a higher level of formality than those who have influential power.

·        The investigation was successful however very limited; in order to improve the investigation we could have increased the number of tweets analysed to make the data more reliable.

·        Although we tried to make the two people comparable other factors could have also influenced the formality of the language used. In order to make the data more reliable we needed to use more control variables; e.g. same sex, same age, same upbringing/ background etc. This is to make sure that the only thing that would affect their language is their position of power.