Global features of online communication in local Flemish: Social and medium-related determinants

The present case study tests the frequency of four clusters of features of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in a written chat corpus of more than two million words, produced by Flemish adolescents living in northern Belgium. The main focus is on the correlation between the occurrence of these features and the social variables gender and age, on the one hand, and the impact of the CMC-medium, on the other. For the latter parameter, a distinction is made between asynchronous and synchronous real time conversation. While gender has received ample attention in recent research on chat and texting practices, the findings qualify the impact of this social variable, and point to age and medium as two significant determinants of the use of typical CMC-features. Finally, the results call for a systematic distinction between expressive and playful vs. more strictly functional or economical features, since precisely that distinction enhances our understanding of the attested gender and age patterns.