Speech Style Used by the Dolan Twins towards Family and Friends in Their YouTube Videos

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the use of speech style by the Dolan Twins towards their family and friends as well as the underlying social factors that influencing them. Focusing on their videos, Ethan and Grayson have different styles of delivering something that they wanted to talk with. Interestingly, their speech style differs when their guest is a family member or a friend. The study uses the descriptive qualitative research method because it involves collecting and analyzing non-numerical data in the form of utterances taken from conversation. The theoretical framework used as the foundation for this study is Joos’ (1976) and Chaika’s (1982) theories of speech style. The data of this study are five chosen of the Dolan Twins YouTube videos namely Our Family Reacts to Our Videos, Our Mom Controls Our YouTube Channel for a Day, Identical Twins Meet Their Mini Identical Twins, Road Trip to Vegas. The result found 18 utterances of the Dolan Twins toward their family and friends that consist of speech style, with 9 casual styles as the most dominant, followed with 4 intimate styles, 4 consultative styles, and 1 formal styles. However, frozen style was absent. It was concluded that casual style is the most dominant style used as the context of communication relies around family, friends, acquaintance and mostly in daily conversation or informal atmosphere. In addition, there is no frozen style found in this study as it has the highest rank of formality beyond four styles, and with that, there are no scenes showing a conversation at a formal place where the use of high standard pattern of language is required.