Addressing, Greeting and Related Gestures in the Opening Sequences of Finnish, French and Hungarian YouTube Videos

What is it about?

YouTube is the second most popular social media platform with 1.9 billion users, and it can be navigated in 80 different languages. Thus, surprisingly, analyses of social media practices have focused primarily on English, whereas contrastive studies remain rare._x000D_ _x000D_ Our study concentrated on the opening sequences of YouTube videos comparing three languages: Finnish, French and Hungarian. The opening sequences have received little attention, despite presenting an interesting dataset via which to study how YouTubers interact with imagined audience. _x000D_ _x000D_ Our study sheds light on interactional practices which were shaped by the features of the genre (computer-assisted communication) as well as influenced by specific lingua cultures. _x000D_ _x000D_ Finnish, French and Hungarian YouTubers frequently greeted their viewers, and they mostly used general address forms. Gestures accompanied frequently greeting and addressing. _x000D_ _x000D_ Cross-cultural differences appeared. Finnish and Hungarian were closer to each other than to French. Finnish and Hungarian videos included less explicit address forms, more informal T forms and fewer nominal address forms. French was the only language in which other reference frequently included health-specific well wishes for viewers. In Finnish and Hungarian, gestures more often related to greeting than addressing, but in French, they were equally related to both.

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