Ambient affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter

Abstract

This article explores how language is used to build community with the microblogging service, Twitter (www.twitter.com). Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL), a theory of language use in its social context, is employed to analyse the structure and meaning of ‘tweets’ (posts to Twitter) in a corpus of 45,000 tweets collected in the 24 hours after the announcement of Barak Obama’s victory in the 2008 US presidential elections. This analysis examines the evaluative language used to affiliate in tweets. The article shows how a typographic convention, the hashtag, has extended its meaning potential to operate as a linguistic marker referencing the target of evaluation in a tweet (e.g. #Obama). This both renders the language searchable and is used to upscale the call to affiliate with values expressed in the tweet. We are currently witnessing a cultural shift in electronic discourse from online conversation to such ‘searchable talk’.