2011

Adolescence – Name – Internet: How Do German-Speaking Girls Name Themselves on the Web?

The authors conducted the present study across onomastics and social-, gender-, Internet,- and psycho-linguistics. The paper analyzes virtual anthroponyms (so-called nicknames or usernames) that are result from self-nominations by German-speaking adolescent girls on the social Internet services Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr, Pinterest, and TikTok. The study material covers four years (2017–2020) and examines 2,363 nicknames, as well as the accompanying personal metadata of 11–17-year-old users along with the results of online and offline interviews with informants. The paper seeks the main goal and hypothesis of t finding a correlation between the gender-age characteristics of adolescent Internet users and their linguistic embodiment in virtual communication in the form of self-nominations. The authors study and describe nicknames based on the positions of their semantic motivation and meaning, nominative potential, structural and grammatical design, and graphic organization. The linguocultural component of virtual self-nominations receives special emphasis. In addition, the authors provide the results of an experiment to determine the stability of nicknames over time. A descriptive linguistic analysis of the data reveals clear trends in the creation of self-nominations by adolescent girls. The authors discovered different specific gender and age markers through the lens of virtual anthroponyms: formation of self-concept against the background of striving for an emphasized individualization and simultaneous need for social acceptance, distinctly feminine manifestations, a tendency to positive or overestimated self-esteem, and increased interest in the pubertal phase. The users are equally inclined to deanonymize and to anonymize their personalities in the web space. However, in both cases, it is particularly important for girls to transfer their original self-nominative intentions to nicknames. The development of cognitive abilities and critical thinking by adolescent girls is manifested in linguistic creativity and involvement in the problematic or cultural context of interest.

Keywords:

Adolescence, girls, Internet-communication nickname, self-nomination,

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