Learning the Lingo? Gender, Prestige and Linguistic Adaptation in Review Communities Hemphill, Libby Otterbacher, Jahna gender online community social voting linguistic convergence Women and men communicate differently in both face-to- face and computer-mediated environments. We study linguistic patterns considered gendered in reviews contributed to the Internet Movie Database. IMDb has been described as a male-majority community, in which females contribute fewer reviews and enjoy less prestige than males. Analyzing reviews posted by prolific males and females, we hypothesize that females adjust their communication styles to be in sync with their male counterparts. We find evidence that while certain characteristics of “female language” persevere over time (e.g., frequent use of pronouns) others (e.g., hedging) decrease with time. Surprisingly, we also find that males often increase their use of “female” features. Our results indicate, that even when they resemble men’s reviews linguistically, women’s reviews still enjoy less prestige and smaller audiences. ACM Press 2011-11-19 2012-02 Article Manuscript application/pdf islandora:10198 http://hdl.handle.net/10560/islandora:10198 HUM / Humanities Illinois Institute of Technology en In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Open Access