Linguistic and Stylistic Variety Across Genders in Suicidal Notes on Social Media

Abstract

This study compares the linguistic and stylistic traits of male and female authors of suicidal notes posted to Reddit directly to the first goal of a larger corpus study investigating gendered discourse features in digital crisis communication. The study is based on the purposively compiled corpus of 400 posts (200 for each gender) from r/SuicideWatch and r/Depression (2022-2024), and uses the stylistic model of Leech and Short (2007) and corpus stylistics methodology to find systematic variation at lexical, grammatical, figurative and discourse levels. Qualitative close reading was used in conjunction with computational tools such as AntConc and WordSmith to produce lists of frequency, KWIC concordance lines, cluster patterns, N-grams and collocational profiles. Results show that female notes contain more words that are relational and emotionally expressive (such as sorry, love, family), have a greater lexical diversity, and show a preference for interpersonal pronouns and pragmatic strategies of apologizing. Male-dominated notes tend to be shorter, with more existential and direct lexical selection and themes of personal failure and emotional restraint. Additionally, syntactic analysis reveals that female posts have longer and more complex sentences, while male posts tend to be shorter and more succinct. The patterns are consistent with existing sociolinguistic theories of gendered language, and indicate that culturally constructed scripts of masculinity and femininity also exist in anonymous digital contexts. The results have implications for suicide risk assessment, AI-based content moderation, and the creation of gender-neutral crisis intervention protocols.