Hannah Kentridge

MPhil candidate in Japanese Studies 2020-2022. 

My provisional title for my MPhil dissertation is ‘Language Used by LGBTQ+ Japanese Twitter Users.’ I hope to research the ways that LGBTQ+ Japanese Twitter users use language online to express their identity and form community. Having researched the use of oneekotoba (a style of Japanese used by some gay men) on the anonymous forum 5channel for my undergraduate dissertation, I now plan to examine the role that language plays in creating identity on a much less anonymous online platform, such as Twitter. I am interested in the way context that is particularly apparent in non-spoken language can affect our use of language. Communicating on a platform like Twitter removes some contextual factors (both context that relates directly to communication such as gesture, facial expression and tone), but also adds some new contextual factors (such as profile picture, hashtags, choices of spelling) that all affect the way in which people use language. This dissertation project will quantitatively analyse language data from Japanese users with certain identity keywords in their bio, (while keeping them entirely anonymous) and determine what language features are most common among which groups.

Supervisor: Professor Bjarke Frellesvig 

College: Pembroke College

Previous Degree Programme: BA in Japanese Studies 2015 - 2019