Taalaccommodatie in online datingprofielen: Effecten van opleidingsniveau en type datingsite op taalgebruik

This study investigates whether online dating profile owners accommodate their language use based on the type of dating site used. Following Communication Accommodation Theory, we expect that highly educated online daters’ language use on a dating site designed explicitly for the highly educated is different from language use of highly educated people on a general dating site with users of both low and high education levels. Specifically, highly educated dating site users will accommodate their language use depending on the dating site they use. Based on an analysis of 1570 profile texts from two Dutch dating sites, we found that profiles of highly educated users on a general dating site differed from those written by highly educated daters on the high-education dating site on some but not all measures of lexical complexity and on the amount of language errors made. On the high-education dating site, the highly educated daters used some more linguistic elements that are associated with a high education level than those on the general site. This suggests that minor contextual differences in expected audience can already induce linguistic accommodation.