Lecture | Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
A cross-cultural comparison between Chinese and Russian self-praise on social media
- Date
- Monday 12 May 2025
- Time
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.06
Abstract
With the rise of the Internet, using social media has become pervasive in users’ daily lives. Social media are thriving on sharing (Scott, 2021). Due to the potential distinctive results found in online communication and the rich size of authentic data, such context has attracted much attention in previous literature (Ren, 2018; Tagg et al., 2017). A positive self-presentation category frequently used by netizens to construct a favourable self-image is self-praise. Drawing on Ren and Guo (2020: 180), self-praise is defined as “a speech act through which interlocutors positively display themselves regarding their appearance, possessions, skills, and so on”. Previous research on the speech act of self-praise has focused on different cultural contexts, including English face-to-face and online communication (Dayter, 2014; Underwood, 2011); Spanish face-to-face interactions (Maíz-Arévalo, 2021); French and US professionals’ LinkedIn profiles (Tobback, 2019); Japanese recorded conversation (Itakura, 2022); Chinese daily and social media communication (Ren & Guo, 2020; Wu, 2011); Russian literary plays (Makarova, 2021, 2022) and so on. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to self-praise in Russian digital communication. One of the aims of this study is to explore self-praising practices in the Russian context, and thus shed more light on Russian self-presentation in social media.
To explore potential cultural influences on the act of self-praising and taking inspiration from Wu et al. (2023) and Li and Wu (2022), which compared Chinese and American self-praising acts, we explore Russian self-praising practices from a cross-cultural perspective. Chinese culture is typically collectivistic (Kornilova & Zhou, 2021), emphasizing social responsibility, intragroup goals, social harmony, and connections among community members. By contrast, the position of modern Russia on the continuum of collectivism-individualism is still unclear, as the demise of the Soviet Union can be expected to have a certain influence on individuals’ traditional individualism-collectivism scale. Besides, few studies have compared language use between Chinese and Russian in social media communication concerning different ratings of individualism (Hofstede, 2020), which may influence individuals’ self-praising acts.
To address the aforementioned gaps, this study compares Chinese and Russian self-praise practices on social media. The data consisted of 200 self-praises on Weibo produced by Chinese netizens and 200 VK self-praises posted by Russians. With respect to the cultural influence on self-praise strategies, the differences between Chinese and Russian netizens in modified explicit self-praise and implicit self-praise strategies were significant. Concerning the effect of culture on self-praise topics, the differences between Chinese and Russian netizens in competence and appearance were statistically significant. This study also discusses the impact of culture and politeness behind the similarities and differences in the Chinese and Russian speech act of self-praise.
References
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