An esports and sports casting corpus

• Main Author: Wee, Wan Xuan
• Other Authors: Francis Bond
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2022
• Subjects: Humanities::Linguistics
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/155787
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Esports is a growing industry of competitive video gaming, boasting millions of viewers in many popular leagues and competitions. Yet, esports broadcast viewership still pales in comparison to traditional sports broadcasts despite the emergence of esports into mainstream recognition and monetary value. This paper compares the linguistic differences between esports and traditional sports casting commentary through the creation of the Esports and Sports Casting Corpus. The matches used were sourced from the League of Legends esport, the Overwatch League, the FIFA World Cup for association football, and the National Football League for American football. The corpus is tagged manually using self-picked tagging categories to identify the differences in selected speech topics between esports and sports casters. Particularly, speech speed, focus on analysis and gameplay description, and preference for related facts and trivia were found to have the most impactful differences between the two types of casting. The paper also provides suggestions for how esports casters could tweak their speech style and possibly make esports broadcasts more accessible to new viewers and boost its popularity further into the mainstream.