| Summary: | Gender-based research on the language use in blogs has its roots in the long-standing notion
that men and women speak and write differently. This paper reports an empirical study on the
use of English in a blog context involving Malaysian blog authors. Specifically, the study
aimed to identify gender-specific English use among Malaysian blog authors and determine
the differences in the language use. Using an ensemble text analysis approach, Malaysian
female blog authors are more inclined towards using more verbs, adverbs and pronouns than
their male counterpart, with a significant difference, while the males are inclined towards
using more adjectives, nouns, determiners and prepositions/subordinating conjunctions than
the females, with a significant difference. There are also differences between females and
males in terms of the function words, neologisms/blog words as well as use of tag questions
and adverbs initiating sentences. However, there are minimal differences between the females
and males in terms of length of sentences and that the use of intensifiers, hedges, empty
adjectives and emotions, thus concluding that they are not necessarily gender-specific
differences. The findings can serve as useful language markers that can benefit the applied
linguistics and particularly gender-based and forensic linguistic research.
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