Gendered Talk in World of Warcraft

Abstract: This essay is predominantly a qualitative piece of research by which I mean it is mainly based on my own observations and analysis of the material. To do this I will cover the theories of communities of practice together with gendered language and apply it to the community and language of the online game World of Warcraft. Through using collected chat logs, I will analyse conversations held in World of Warcraft with a specific focus on gender and identity, I will then compare these to examples of face-to-face conversations. My analysis will draw on the works of theorists such as Holmes (2006), Sunderland and Litosseliti (2002), Eckert and McConnel-Ginet (1992) amongst others. This study will show that although Netspeak within World of Warcraft is written and not spoken, the strategies for creating gendered identities are not very different from real life discourse. The essay will be a general study of gendered language in a virtual community and will discover that there is an extremely nuanced language within the limited communication medium of chat, and lays the ground for more extensive research on the subject.