A LINGUISTIC STUDY OF LANGUAGE VARIETY USED ON TWITCH.TV: DESRIPTIVE AND CORPUS-BASED APPROACHES

This paper examines the variety of language used by the community of Twitch.tv with the application of descriptive and corpus-based methods. Twitch.tv is one of the world’s most visited websites for live broadcasting of video games; the unusual conditions under which the website’s users engage in discussions and express themselves gave birth to a language variety which only very remotely resembles any other internet-specific way of communicating. Twitch.tv is a website accessible from all the European, South/North American and East-Asian countries and the main language used by the majority of the site’s users is English. The most fascinating aspect of the site from the linguistic point of view is the possibility for all its users to write on the chat. Approximately 400 000 users are logged in at any given time and during major broadcasts more than 100 000 users are often talking simultaneously on the same chat. These factors had an immense impact on the nature and structure of the messages. The huge interlingual gaming community (aged 16-26 on average) developed a very peculiar way to comment on the broadcasts and discuss the games being played. The language used on Twitch.tv chats is abundant in neologisms and meaningful site-specific emoticons. The corpus-based study I conducted indicates that the messages are extremely context-dependent and follow certain syntactic patterns.