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.
Highlights
YouTube is the second most popular social media platform with more than 2.3 billion monthly users,1 it remains an unexplored field in linguistic studies, despite its suitability “from the perspective of visual and verbal expression” (Johansson 2017: 191)
Our research questions focusing on Finnish, French and Hungarian opening sequences are as follows: 1) How do YouTubers address and greet their imagined audiences?; 2) What kinds of gestures are related to addressing and greeting?; and 3) What cross-cultural similarities and differences appear in addressing, greeting and related gestures? We hypothesise that, Finnish and Hungarian belong to the same language group (Finno-Ugric languages) and French does not, Hungarian lies closer to the French than the Finnish lingua culture
Comparing Finnish, French and Hungarian opening sequences of YouTube videos revealed both similarities related to the genre (CMC, YouTube) and cross-cultural differences
Summary
YouTube is the second most popular social media platform with more than 2.3 billion monthly users, it remains an unexplored field in linguistic studies, despite its suitability “from the perspective of visual and verbal expression” (Johansson 2017: 191). Ren and Fukushima (2021) studied requests in Chinese and Japanese on social media, Vecsernyés (2021) examined Finnish and Hungarian address practices in Facebook comments and Argüelles Alvarez and Muñoz Muñoz (2012) compared the use of Spanish and English on Twitter. Our study concentrates on the opening sequences of YouTube videos comparing three languages: Finnish, French and Hungarian. The opening sequences in YouTube videos have received little attention (English: Frobenius, 2011; French: Combe Celik, 2014), despite presenting an interesting dataset to study, namely, YouTubers’ interactions with imagined viewers. Our research questions focusing on Finnish, French and Hungarian opening sequences are as follows: 1) How do YouTubers address and greet their imagined audiences?; 2) What kinds of gestures are related to addressing and greeting?; and 3) What cross-cultural similarities and differences appear in addressing, greeting and related gestures?
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