Abstract

Sociolinguistics can be defined as an evocative and descriptive study and analysis of the influence of any side of society. It studies and analyzes many aspects of society such as social standards and norms, beliefs, backgrounds, and how language is used among cultures and societies. This study focuses on examining the effect of gender on the sociolect of language use in text messages and posts on social media sites. Gender is an important parameter in the social variety of language use. Many studies have been done to understand how gender affects the linguistic choices of a speaker. In traditional societies, men and women belong to two different sub-cultures and hence they develop different linguistic systems. In turn, these differences in the language systems create a mismatch and misunderstanding between the two genders. However, with the advancement of education and modernization, the differential language characteristics tend to equalize in the case of certain social strata. This study analyses the language sociolect used in social media text messages of both genders to find out whether gender still affects the linguistic choices of a speaker or whether it has become equalized. A comparative analysis has been done on the text messages and social media posts of both genders to find out whether there are any differences in their linguistic choices.