Filipino and American online communication and linguistic variation

This paper investigates cross-cultural and cross-register variation from four corpora of internet blogs and online opinion columns written in English by Filipino and American authors. A multi-dimensional analysis following established linguistic dimensions from Grieve, Biber, Friginal, and Nekrasova was used to compare the relative distribution of frequently co-occurring linguistic features, with the goal of describing the statistical relationships and variations among the two selected internet-based registers of these two varieties of English. Parallel corpora of Filipino and American blogs and opinion columns (N total texts = 5,320), with approximately 13 million words, and collected across a wide range of topics, were analyzed for this purpose. The texts were tagged for grammatical and semantic markers to match the resultant dimensions from Grieve et al. (as the main basis for comparison. Results show significant variations in the linguistic composition of Filipino and American texts along four functional dimensions: (1) informational vs. personal focus; (2) addressee focus; (3) thematic variation; and (4) narrative style.