AN ANALYSIS OF COMMUNICATION TRENDS ON TWITCH.TV

Alexandru-Bogdan Pârlițeanu

1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia, Romania

As with any other community that appeared at the climax of the internet, the streaming world is booming with every passing year, generating and reaching new revenue levels and being seen now as one of the most important and valuable forms of entertainment. This study will discuss the language used by certain streamers and their community. The main objective of this paper is to understand phenomena such as speech, dialogue, and overall interactions between the streamers, their community, and their viewers. This paper will also discuss the power behind the words used by streamers, which can very well determine how someone will be viewed on streaming platforms. This study will offer information about banned comments and provide semantic and pragmatic analyses of some of the most popular terms used on Twitch.tv.

To make this research possible, chats and live broadcasts from various popular streamers were monitored, trying to see specific patterns to understand how their language works and concluding if there is an already new language or system of speech that goes around in the streaming community. Discourse analysis was the primary theory for this study, understanding and interpreting what the streamers and the viewers say during the live streams. The semantic analysis of some of the words helped obtain a good understanding of the terms and their meaning, making it easier to interpret the language constructs coined by the streamers and their communities; with this, two different types of meanings were analysed to follow the line of meaning, both from a contextual and conceptual point of view. I also conducted a pragmatic analysis to see the correlation between words and contexts, determining if there is any importance in the context of the language of streaming.

At the endpoint of this study, I was able to offer a clear understanding of the language used on Twitch.tv, draw a clear picture of what certain expressions and combinations of words mean in this environment, and, if possible, see if these expressions or words can reach more than the online world of live broadcasting.

Keywords: Communication; Slang; Political correctness; Live streaming; F, L, W.

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How to cite this article: Pârlițeanu, A.-B. (2024). An analysis of communication trends on Twitch.tv. Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education – JoLIE, 17(3), 123–138. https://doi.org/10.29302/jolie.2024.17.3.7

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