A Content Analysis of the Features of Online Discourse on Japanese Twitter

Sammanfattning: This research was conducted in order to study and analyze the online discourse in Japanese. It is a Twitter-specific study on the Japanese linguistic features of computer-mediated communication. A total of 887 tweets from 30 Japanese celebrities between ages 19-31 were divided by age, gender, degree of formality and genre, and a content analysis was conducted on them to compare the use of orthographic and lexical features by using previous studies by Nishimura (2003) and Miyake (2007) as a framework. The results show that Twitter was most commonly used for replies to other Twitter users, to maintain social media presence and for self-promotion. Tweets were most commonly sent via iPhone, written in informal style. The findings also offer further proof on how strongly the graphic signs are part of online communication, and confirm that many technology-inspired slang words and abbreviations are created for different media platforms.