Paper Title
Language Structure and Contents in Online Dating of Thai Women
Abstract
The globalization era makes everything faster and easier as well as finding the lover in dating websites. In the present, there are increasing popular websites for Thai women to search for foreigners. This article aims to find out the discourse structure and contents posted by Thai women in top 2 popular dating websites that isThaiCupid.com and Thai Friendly.com The personal information texts were collected from Thai women profile of which had set as a public that they are 25-35 years old. The discourse structure will be analyzed by the most data repetition in profiles. In part of contents will be analyzed by content analysis approach in terms of linguistic perspective.
The research finding was shown that discourse structure was divided into 5 parts; heading, greeting, personal information, objective, and goodbye. The ‘greeting’ is a short message in the first part of the discourse. The ‘personal information' part is given a woman detail, especially their places of living and work. The ‘objective’ part is able to be appeared at the profile’s heading or in the texts. This category is an important one that shows who the women are looking for. In the ‘goodbye’ part is an only short word at the end of the texts. All 100 data profiles there are 31 profiles that have 5 parts completely. The ‘personal information’ part and ‘objective’ part have appeared in most profiles. The 'personal information' part they gave private information in 14 issues that are remarked in websites; greeting, introduce themselves, name, family, work and place, children, behavior and activities, a man's qualification, objective, contact, relationship, like and dislike, and goodbye. This information, however, might are not the truth. The 'objective' part is explained the man’s qualification who she was searching. The discourse contents in profiles also implied what has attracted to foreigner men reach her profile that is good caring, house works and cooking Thai foods through what the contents the women posted. The language and contents of Thai women texts might differ from women in other countries; therefore, it should have been studied in the next research to compare with this finding.
Keywords - Dating website, Online Dating, Language Style, Dating Discourse