The Language of Flirting

We're all familiar with the art of flirtation. Throughout the mass media we are inundated with guidelines on how to flirt; told that everything from the shoes we wear to the way we sit to the amount we blink to the way we hold our hands, all influence our likelihood of successful flirting. But what about the language of flirtation? Surely the way we speak influences how we come across to other people. Isn't flirting essentially just elaborate presentation of our good points?

Surprisingly, very little academic research has been conducted on the language of flirting. It is far more likely to be dealt with in magazines and pop-psychology books than anywhere else. The majority of these focus on prosodic and paralinguistic features of flirting; "when a woman is attracted to a man, she lowers her voice, making it huskier and breathier" claims an article online from US women's magazine "Cosmopolitan", whilst "The Telegraph" advised readers online in an article in 2010 to "remember the "big three": look directly at the person you're flirting with; smile; and turn your body towards them."

A slightly more linguistically focused idea of how to flirt can be gained from popular-psychology and self-help texts, such as John Gray's "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus". Texts like this one don't specifically focus on flirting, but instead upon linguistic differences between men and women, and how best to overcome these for functional and cohesive conversation. Consequently, these texts frequently accentuate the differences between male and female speech, seeking to offer help with common miscommunications. Many of these dissimilarities are similar to those seen in Deborah Tannen's 1990 Difference Model, for example men will give advice when women wish for understanding. The assumptions made by these texts, however, are frequently criticised for furthering gender divides by giving men and women and excuse to not communicate, as seen in Professor Deborah Cameron's 2007 book "The Myth of Venus and Mars". After all, if men and women truly did speak different languages than how would the complexities of flirting function?

One very interesting piece of research into the mechanics of flirting was done at Stanford University by Ranganath, Jurafsky and Macfarland (2012). They endeavoured to see if flirtatious language on speed-dates could be detected automatically by a machine and whether this detection proved more or less accurate than that of human beings. 946 speed-dates were recorded and processed, the participants were also asked to rate the use of flirtatious, friendly, awkward and assertive language. Analysing features of flirtation defined by Jurafsky et al (2009) such as use of words from lexical fields that were sexual, food-based, taboo and insightful, as well as prosodic speech features the software was able to analyse the use of flirtatious language more accurately than the human observers. This surprising result could suggest that flirtation is far more common than it is thought to be.

The language of flirtation remains a multifaceted and intriguing area, often covered in the media. It could be suggested that society is fascinated with the concept in the hope that someone will eventually crack the code for perfect flirtation, thus forming a kind of modern linguistic love potion. But is such a thing even possible? If flirting is merely the positive presentation of the self to others, then surely it is a highly individual art form, context bound by the speaker, receiver and social factors? The area is certainly interesting, and I look forward to studying it further.

By Polly Davis