Addressing, Greeting and Related Gestures in the Opening Sequences of Finnish, French and Hungarian YouTube Videos

Abstract

Abstract This paper compares the opening sequences of Finnish, French and Hungarian YouTube videos. We concentrate on addressing, greeting and related gestures, important elements when YouTubers interact with their imagined viewers, using data consisting of 138 videos in the three languages. This study falls within the field of the pragmatics of social media and interpersonal pragmatics, and data were analysed using multimodal discourse analysis. Shared practices included the frequent use of greetings, a preference for general nominal address forms as well as for iconic and deictic gestures. Cross-cultural differences revealed that Finnish and Hungarian were closer to each other than to French. Shared practices may be connected to the genre of YouTube videos, whereas differences appear related to cross-cultural practices generally.