The Register of Facebook: Linguistic Features of A Prominent Social Networking Site (2008)

Undergraduate: Brice Russ

Faculty Advisor: Paul Roberge
Department: Linguistics

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This paper provides an overview of studies in computer-mediated communication (CMC) from the perspective of register theory and attempts to demonstrate that certain forms of communication on the social-networking site Facebook merit consideration as a specific register. A corpus of messages from mostly college-age Facebook users is constructed and analyzed with various quantitative and qualitative methods, with phenomena such as word frequency, emoticon usage and message structures examined. Facebook ‘wall’ communications are found to have several dialogic purposes and linguistic features, suggesting that they may indeed be part of a unique register. These findings are compared to previous studies of instant messaging and e-mail to discern possible relations in style and formality levels; although there is some evidence that Facebook wall communications are more formal than IM and less formal than e-mail, the results are inconclusive enough to merit further attention.