A socio-linguistic study on the relevance of convergence and divergence to in-group identity on twitter

Abstract EN

SNSs provide a medium for millions of users and inhabitants of the virtual world to communicate, play different roles and negotiate identities.

Inhabitants of the virtual world tend to gather around common goal or interest, by doing so they are forming online communities that are boundless by time and space.

To join these communities, members need to establish an identity in accordance with the requirements of the target community.

Manchester United Football club fans community is an example of a community of practice that is formed on Twitter where fans from all over the globe cheer for and support one club.

Within this community, there are certain linguistic norms and behaviours that are followed in order for a user on Twitter to be recognized, and acknowledged as a fan of Manchester United Football club.

The first step is identification through self-presentation (Schwämmlein and Wodzicki, 2013).

A user is required to reflect their interest in belonging to the group by tweeting about it or choosing a group-related username.

The group the fan belongs to is the in-group and the fan categorizes themself as part of the “us” (Tajfel and Turner, 1979).

After being accepted in the group, the fan starts acting in a way similar to how other real fans act.

This can be reflected clearly in the way the fans converge towards the “us” and diverge away from the “them”.

A corpus of (648125) words, representing (25757) tweets of Manchester United Football Club fans, was built and analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Lancsbox (Brezina and McEnery, 2018) was used to examine the frequencies, concordances and collocations of the selected lexical items, logically guiding the researcher to a qualitative discussion of examples.

It is through following these linguistic norms of indexing self and other, and linguistically accommodating, that a fan identity is constructed and reflected at the same time.