Category Archives: Weekly Post

November 27, 2022 · 11:42 pm

Week 10: A Case Study of Internet Arabic

Much of the analysis of Arabic language usage on the internet has focused on Arabizi, the non-standardized system of writing Arabic with the Latin script (Davies 70). Although these papers largely focus on orthographic features of this system, they still can provide us with some insight as to how Arabic is being used in online contexts and what routes future researchers can take to dig into the questions surrounding these uses and Arabizi in general.  

 

Some Background on Arabic Dialect

Arabic is distinct from English in that it has a very standardized formal form, called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Fusha, but this form is not used by native speakers in daily speech. Every Arabic speaker speaks in dialectal Arabic. MSA is also the form of the language that has been most often used for formal writing. Writing dialectal Arabic is not new – it has historically appeared in some private contexts, like handwritten letters (71). But there are no standards for writing in dialect, and writing in dialect has been stigmatized for most of the Middle East’s modern history. Using the formal variety of Arabic indicated that someone was educated; conversely, writing in dialect because one was unable to write in formal Arabic marked that person as backwards or ignorant. As such, dialectal Arabic has remained a language largely only spoken, while formal Arabic has been a largely written language, spoken only in highly formal contexts. 

 

Rise of Arabizi

Writing Arabic with the Latin script is not a 21st century innovation. French colonialism in Morocco and other parts of northern Africa led to a bilingual administration system which used both the Arabic script and the Latin script (both for French and to transliterate Arabic) (71). But Arabizi as it exists today was shaped by technological advances and limitations. Case in point: early computers and phones couldn’t display or input the Arabic script. The only choice for people who wanted to use these devices to communicate in Arabic was to write in the Latin script (71). 

Arabizi has challenged the traditional views of writing in dialect. Today, people of all educational levels and classes are texting in Arabizi. Its use online makes it highly visible and public, as opposed to older forms of dialect writing, which were largely private (71). Not only is it being used on personal social media profiles, but also on official company webpages (74). Arabizi is also moving into offline contexts, being seen in graffiti, flyers, and print ads on billboards or in magazines (74). And although ads which use Arabizi are often advertising everyday products, some companies are now using Arabizi in advertisements for luxury products as well (75). It seems, then, that Arabizi may be allowing for writing in dialect to shed some of its long-held stigma. 

 

Features of Arabizi

This alternative system of writing has not been standardized and was not imposed by a government or organization, but has been created by individual users (Davies 71, Vavichkina 198, 207). The lack of official writing rules may make Arabizi feel more accessible to people who do not feel confident in their ability to write in MSA or formal English or French (Davies 73). The frequency of Arabizi use versus Arabic script use depends on several factors, including where the user is located (its popularity may differ between regions), the user’s personal preferences, and whether the user is frequently incorporating other languages into their messages (72). This is a fairly common occurrence, as in a survey of 248 Moroccan university students 97.1% mixed French and Moroccan Arabic, 77.7% mixed English and Moroccan Arabic, and 67.4% used all three languages (79). If a user is frequently including French or English words in their messages, then it may be easier to write everything with the Latin script rather than switch between keyboards and writing/reading directions. 

The orthographic choices users make tend to differ from the official transliteration standards of the French colonial era (71-72). However, individual users may be influenced by French or English spelling standards. For example, someone who speaks English may write the Arabic word for ‘thanks’ as ‘shukran’, while someone who speaks French might write it ‘chokran’ (Davies 72, Vavichkina 203).

The most prominent new orthographic feature in Arabizi may be the use of numbers to represent Arabic letters (72). Early phones combined the keyboard with the number pad. Using numbers to represent letters thus allowed users to type more quickly, since they had to push buttons fewer times (72). And it made sense to use numbers to stand in for some Arabic letters, because the numbers themselves had a visual resemblance to some letters. Numbers do not appear to be used for rebuses or other phonetic replacements, as sometimes occurs in English-speaking online contexts (‘gr8’ for ‘great’, or ‘4’ for ‘for’) (Vavichkina 202). However, use of numbers may be becoming less common with time; Vavichkina’s 2021 study of 372 Arabizi comments on news videos found that users tended to use consonant clusters to represent sounds rather than their associated numeral (201-202). This may be due to technological shifts; smartphones now host numerals on a different keyboard than letters, requiring users to shift between the two.  

Arabizi is essentially a transliteration of dialectal speech (198). As such, it preserves many of the features of Arabic dialect that differ from MSA. The case markers of MSA are dropped in Arabizi, as they are in Arabic dialects (203). Morphological elements, like the b-/ba- prefix used in dialect for present tense verbs, are also used in Arabizi (205). 

Spelling is not standardized and largely phonetic (204). This can lead to a disconnect between related words, as MSA has highly formulaic ways of deriving words, meaning that readers can intuit a word’s meaning by knowing the formula being used and the meaning associated with the root letters. Latinized spellings, in all their variety, can easily obscure these formulaic structures, potentially making it harder for readers to make connections between related words (204). 

Standard Arabic writing conventions are also disrupted by how Arabizi users treat glottal stops. Traditionally, no word in Arabic can start with a vowel; rather, words that start with a vowel actually start with a glottal stop. This is marked in the Arabic script. In Arabizi, however, users drop the glottal stop altogether and just start words with vowels (204). This phonetic spelling also allows users to add letters to words – specifically, the short vowels that usually go unmarked in texts written with the Arabic script (202). 

 

Factors Determining Arabizi Use

Arabizi is considered to be an informal system of writing. The survey of Moroccan students found that it was most commonly used to communicate with friends or classmates, with texting and instant messaging being the most common contexts it was found in (Davies 75-76). Only 22% of the students used Arabizi in emails and, interestingly, only 31.5% used it for writing notes in class (76). Arabizi is therefore not simply for informal writing, but for informal writing in digital contexts. 

Additionally, Arabizi use can depend on age, familiarity, and nationality. The surveyed students largely did not use Arabizi when communicating with people of their parents’ generation or older (of the 36.4% who did, most used it to communicate with older family members) (76). This could be either due to gaps in comprehension – older people might not be as familiar with Arabizi – or because users see Arabizi as too informal (and therefore disrespectful) to use with older people. Considering that most of the students who did use Arabizi with older people were communicating with family members, whom they are more likely to be close with and therefore able to more easily flout expectations of respect with, I think this latter interpretation might make more sense. 

69% of students said they used Arabizi with peers whom they didn’t know personally, with some students saying that using Arabizi with strangers would be impolite or disrespectful (76). Again, this points to the idea that Arabizi is not only informal but also may carry a sense of intimacy or familiarity that would be impolite or uncomfortable to impose on strangers. 

Finally, 92.5% of the students reported using Arabizi only with other Moroccans, with the explanation that other Arabic speakers would not understand them (76). Considering that dialect can vary widely from country to country, and Moroccan Arabic is considered to be especially distinct, this explanation does make some sense. The use of Moroccan Arabic in general, whether written in the Arabic or Latin script, thus functions as a marker of identity. Just as with other dialectal writing online, using words specific to Moroccan dialect can also establish a sense of intimacy or familiarity with other users. 

Why do individuals choose to use Arabizi? When the Moroccan students were asked about their motivations for using Arabizi, they listed several reasons. 85% of the students thought it allowed them to write more quickly, and 84% thought it was easier to write (77). Some thought it was easier to express their feelings in Arabizi (77). This is seemingly backed up by data from Vivichkina’s study, which found that Arabizi comments tended “to express appreciation or emotion” (201). The Moroccan students also said using Arabizi made it easier to communicate – 79% of students thought Moroccan dialect was easier to read when it was written in the Latin script (Davies 78). It is easier to fully vocalize a text in the Latin script, after all (77-78). In fact, a fairly large percentage (61.3%) said they never wrote Moroccan Arabic with the Arabic script because “the result was incomprehensible”(79). 

Of the Moroccan students, only 36.5% thought it largely was cool or fashionable, and only 32.5% saw it as a marker of identity (78). I assume that by ‘marker of identity’ they mean a marker of youth culture or of some other subculture. As I said above, the use of Arabizi with Moroccan dialect does most definitely invoke a Moroccan identity, since it is almost entirely being used only with other Moroccans. On the other hand, a 2018 study of Saudi youth found that they viewed Arabizi as “cool and stylish” and thus “a strong marker of Arab youth identity and group solidarity” (Vavichkina 199). The same study found that youths thought using Arabizi made them stand out and allowed them to show off their knowledge of a foreign language like English (197). The ability to use non-standard orthography also shielded them from the embarrassment of making spelling mistakes (197). Clearly, motivations for using Arabizi differ depending on region.

 

Arabizi versus Standard Arabic

Arabic language media and the general public tend to view Arabizi negatively (Davies 80). They fear that it represents a loss of proficiency in or a simplification of MSA. But the Moroccan students voiced support for MSA (79). And, despite the fact that dialect and MSA tend to mix in daily speech, only 26.9% of the students said they mixed Moroccan Arabic and MSA in online communications (79). There seems to be a cultural resistance to using the Latin script to write MSA. Davies argues that rather than blurring the distinction between dialect and MSA, thus threatening MSA, the use of Arabizi actually makes a clear distinction between the two varieties through the use of two different scripts (79). In doing so, it can shield MSA from becoming simplified or being further influenced by English (Vavichkina 208). Arabizi can also act as an important tool for those of Middle Eastern heritage who live outside the region. They may be familiar with an Arabic dialect due to hearing family members speak it, but may not have received a formal Arabic education (Davies 81). Arabizi allows them to communicate with other Arabic-speakers despite this fact.

 

Final Thoughts

Arabizi, as with other phenomena I’ve looked at, is an informal writing system being used for interpersonal communication. Said system is largely influenced by spoken language rather than formal written varieties of language. However, further analysis will need to be done to better determine whether there are features of spoken language missing from Arabizi and other forms of Arabic used online and whether there are features specific to Standard Arabic present within Arabizi. Regional analysis might also be interesting to see if Arabizi differs dramatically from region to region (beyond the dialectal differences we expect). In any case, it’s clear that analyzing Arabic as it exists in online contexts would make for some interesting results.

 

References

Davies, Eirlys. “Colloquial Moroccan Arabic: Shifts in Usage and Attitudes in the Era of Computer-Mediated Communication.” Language, Politics and Society in the Middle East: Essays in Honour of Yasir Suleiman, edited by Yonatan Mendel and Abeer AlNajjar, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2018, pp. 69–89. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1tqxb42.10.

Vavichkina, Tatiana, Yulia Vlasova, and Elena Paymakova. “Present and Future of the Arabic Language Transliteration on the Internet (linguistic features of Arabizi).” LINGUISTICA ANTVERPIENSIA, 2021, pp. 195-213.

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November 26, 2022 · 2:03 pm

Week 9: Non-English Internet Language

Up until now we’ve looked at a lot of English-related content. But this week we’re looking specifically at what ‘internet language’ looks like for speakers of other languages.

 

Malay Netspeak

Izazi’s article on Malay Twitter users describes several different features found in a sample of Malay tweets (17). To find these tweets they used makan, ‘to eat’, as a keyword. Makan is commonly used in Malay informal greetings, so researchers thought this word could help them find a variety of tweets specifically coming from a Malay context (21). Interestingly, in some of the tweets makan was the only Malay word the users wrote (30). Since users made the intentional choice to include a Malay word, makan functioned as a marker of Malay identity (31). English appeared frequently in the sample (22). Some slang found in the sample is derived or borrowed from English, including words like ‘yup’, ‘baby’, and ‘cool’ (20). Similarly, abbreviations like ‘omg’ ‘lol’ and ‘idk’ were the three most common abbreviations found in the sampled corpus (23). We could argue, considering the frequency of English, that the choice to use Malay words may be driven by similar motivations to those users from week 7, who chose to include specific features from their dialect in their tweets in order to invoke a specific regional or cultural identity. 

There are other ‘netspeak’ features which are not directly based on English words. One feature found in the dataset were shortened words, which often dropped vowels (22). Yang(a preposition) became yg, orang(‘man’)became org, and so on. Other words were shortened by dropping their first letter (rumah, ‘house’, becoming umah) or their first syllable (macam, ‘like, such as’, becoming cam) (22). 

Another feature related to spellings is onomatopoeic spellings. Examples from the sampled tweets include ‘haha’, representing laughter and ‘huhu’ to represent crying (23). These spellings allow users to bring sounds present in spoken speech into the written medium. As in English usage, laughter may be used to express genuine amusement or to express a more sarcastic or ironic attitude (24). 

Phonetic replacements of words are also fairly common (24). Interestingly, Malay users also incorporate English pronunciations of numbers into these phonetic constructions, like in the example 21ku, which represents the word tuanku (24). Users must use the English pronunciations of ‘two’ and ‘one’ in order to decipher the construction. 

Users also, at least in one instance, use a non-phonetic symbol to represent a word – that of x to mean tidak, or ‘no’ (24). X, in this case, does not represent any of the sounds in the word, but could be interpreted as a visual representation of the word’s meaning. X can also be combined with other words to create phrases. Xkisah, for example, is equivalent to tidak kisah, ‘I don’t mind’ (24). 

One feature that English and Malay users of Twitter seem to share is that of the keysmash: a nonsensical string of letters that carries no informational meaning, but does convey a sense of emotion (25). The idea here, of course, is that the user is so overcome with emotion that they aren’t able to focus enough to type actual words to describe how they’re feeling. Another feature shared across both these communities of users is that of letter repetition (25). Users can repeat letters within the word – in this example, the final letters of words – to emphasize the message and the emotion behind the message (25, 27).  Finally, capitalization and superfluous punctuation (!!!) are used similarly across the two groups to add emphasis to words or phrases (28)

Malay users also play with creative spellings of words. English words might be subjected to Malay grammatical conventions (‘I’ becomes iolls, ‘we’ becomes weolls) (25). Users might change the spelling of words slightly to allow for wordplay (26). Since Malay spelling is phonetic, users can also misspell words in order to intentionally invoke a humorous sounding pronunciation (26). Changes in spelling also occur with foreign loanwords or names (McDonald’s, Starbucks), which users can choose to spell phonetically according to local pronunciation (Mekdonel, Setabak) (27). In this case, the spelling change seems to be used less for humorous effect and more to localize the word. 

Finally, Izazi touches on the use of emoji in the dataset (29). However, this analysis is fairly limited to one function of emoji: that of illustrative emoji that support and re-inforce the literal meaning of the text and the emotion behind it. For example, one of the tweets for this section has text that says the user can’t stop eating cookies, paired with the cookie emoji. Further research or analysis would need to be done to see if Malay users use emoji for other functions, like to clarify intent or to collaboratively make meaning with the literal text. 

As we can see, Malay users take advantage of a variety of features in their tweets. Some allow for dropped letters, enabling brevity, while others add characters to a message (30). Some borrow from English vocabulary, while others focus on native Malay words. Some of these features allow users to invoke spoken speech, while others are not connected to spoken speech (30). As with English features, these features allow Malay users to write informally and indicate emotion or enthusiasm.  

 

Japanese Honorifics

Japanese honorifics are a grammatical feature that doesn’t really have an English equivalent. They allow for speakers to clarify their relationship to the addressee or a third party (2). But this gets a bit tricky when users are communicating online. Users may not have information on who others are or what respect they are demanded (Liu 2). Online communication also tends towards the informal anyway. What results are some interesting and creative uses of honorifics in regards to honorifics that refer to third parties. 

Japanese honorifics used for third parties (‘referents’) can be roughly categorized into two types: respect form and humble forms (2). Respect forms allow users to express their deference by elevating the prestige of the referent. Humble forms allow users to downgrade themselves, thus showing respect to the referent (2). These honorifics are expressed through different verbs forms and affixes that can be attached to nouns, adjectives, or adverbs (3). 

So if these honorifics are used to indicate politeness, how do we indicate impoliteness? There are two ways impoliteness can occur in online communication: when a speaker intentionally communicates impoliteness, and when the audience perceives or constructs the speaker’s behavior as impolite (6). So a speaker could indicate impoliteness through the insincere use of honorifics (5). Using extremely polite honorifics or using honorifics where they aren’t required may read as sarcastic or ironic (5). Although previous studies looking at the insincere use of honorifics focused on spoken speech, there is no reason why this cannot also be used in online contexts. 

In online contexts, impoliteness can be constructed in several ways. It could be directly marked on a word (or be implied by not marking polite forms) (6). It could also be marked through mismatches of the content of a message and its grammatical forms (ie, speaking negatively about a person but referring to them with polite forms) (6).

So, having considered all of this, how are Japanese speakers using referent honorifics online? Liu collected and analyzed 13,855 comments from four Yahoo Japan News articles, all published in the first week of July, 2018 (7-8). Referent honorifics were actually fairly rare, appearing in 2.5% of all comments (for the individual articles, referent honorifics appeared in 1-5% of the comments) (8). The article with the highest percentage (5%) of comments with referent honorifics was about then Japanese prime minister Abe (8). The social expectation of referring to Abe with honorifics was carried over to this online context (8). The other articles were not centered around high-ranking politicians or other celebrity figures, which may account for the low frequency of referent honorifics in the comments on those articles (7). 

Most of the referent honorifics were respect forms, rather than humble forms (9). Referent forms also had higher rates of non-normative usage (9). In general humble forms are rarer than respect forms in face to face communication, which may explain the gap in use between respect and humble forms (9). However, we may also be able to attribute this fact to the idea that commenters tend to be anonymous. As such, a reader has no way of knowing what the commenter’s relationship to a referent actually looks like in terms of social standing. They have no reference point against which to compare the humble form of an honorific. On the other hand, when speaking about a referent the audience has an idea of what that referent’s social standing is, either because they are a public figure (like Abe) or because the article provides readers with information about the referents (such as their occupation, their behavior, or their character). A reader then has a reference point to compare a respect form honorific to. 

Honorifics had several different functions within the data. They could be used to show respect or admiration, as in comments praising students at the University of Tokyo, the country’s most prestigious school (10). Sometimes they were used to conform to professional standards, as when a commenter who worked at a senior boarding house referred to clients (10). Commenters also used honorifics when they were expressing agreement with other users in the comment section, although these honorifics were generally limited to one or two verbs and were not used throughout the message (10). Other usages were less sincere. As mentioned above, users can mismatch honorifics with message content to create a sense of sarcasm. One user criticized the work of journalists, and referred to commenters who supported the work of journalists as having ‘valuable opinions’, with this phrase being preceded by a polite honorific (10-11). Mock politeness is created by the contrast between the user’s negative opinion of these journalists and their supporters and the respectful form attached to ‘valuable opinions’. Mismatches can also occur when referents are referred to both with insults and with overly respectful honorifics (12-13). In these non-standard uses “there are always co-occurring linguistic features in the text signposting the poster’s negative attitude and hence their intended message”, thus preventing other readers from misinterpreting their use of honorifics as sincere (13).

In short, the move to online contexts has not displaced referent honorifics entirely. However, they are used at much lower rates than in spoken language. Honorific usage is driven both by politeness and by genuine respect. Those commenters who criticize other commenters for not using referent honorifics when discussing respected public figures see honorific usage as a polite thing to do. But the data also shows that sincere honorific usage generally only appears when the commenter has a favorable view of the referent, suggesting that honorific usage is also dependent on the user having genuine respect for the referent (14). The findings also show that honorifics can be used to construct impoliteness and sarcasm by mismatching these polite forms with impolite adjectives, descriptions, or criticisms (14).

 

Russian Netspeak

Expressive features used by Russian users on Instagram, Twitter, and LiveJournal have many things in common with English and Malay features, at least if we can take the 145 respondents in Olga Novikova’s 2021 study as representative of the general Russian-speaking internet user population (69). 

Users use graphical features like bolding or capitalization to emphasize words (71). Unlike users in previously referenced studies, however, the surveyed users here also used underscores around words as a way to emphasize. Russian users also used strikethrough text in interesting and innovative ways. The studied users used strikethrough text to express their opinions while also acknowledging said opinions might be viewed negatively by society in general or other users (71). This strikethrough text would then be followed by a milder form of the opinion. For example, one user asked (translated) “did the police readers recognize you…?”; here, the user expresses self awareness of how their opinion (‘police’) might be reframed by outsiders (‘readers’) (71). 

As with some other linguistic communities, the surveyed users used letter repetition to evoke sounds of emotion (‘Mmmm’, ‘Aaaaah’) or to emphasize words (Даааа, ‘yessss’) (71). Users may violate spelling or punctuation rules, although it is unclear whether there are any patterns to these violations and whether they are meant to elicit any specific effect on the reader (72, 77). Ellipses, as in some English examples, can be used to indicate pauses in the text (79). In the provided example, the ellipses follow a question the author rhetorically asks of the readers; Novikova suggests that these pauses can be used to create a sense of back-and-forth with the reader, giving them a chance to stop and consider the author’s words.

English does make an appearance in the data. Some English words are directly borrowed, Latin script and all (76). Others are borrowed from English or other languages like German, Japanese, or Korean, with their spellings adjusted for the Cyrillic script and Russian pronunciation (76). Other new words are created from native Russian words by merging words together, although whether these new words are limited to online contexts or not is unclear (77).

 

Final Thoughts

Although these three papers do not represent all linguistic communities, or even all speakers of a certain language, we can see some common threads throughout all three. Malay and Russian both make use of English loanwords as well as features shared with English, such as letter repetition or intentional use of nonstandard spellings. Now, whether these features arose through contact with English-speaking users or whether they developed on their own is unclear. But these features must have some sort of crosslinguistic usefulness if speakers of other languages are continuing to use them, even in contexts which are not necessarily aimed toward English-speaking audiences or native English speakers. 

The Japanese paper focuses on honorifics, which do not have an equivalent in English or the Malay and  Russian papers. But it does show us that linguistic communities besides English-speaking ones (or, at least, Japanese-speaking users) are using and adjusting native linguistic elements to communicate their ideas online. That is, using language online which does not directly reflect formal writing standards is not something that is unique to English-based contexts. 

Finally, these three papers show that investigating other linguistic communities and seeing how they use language in online contexts is a viable exercise and, more than that, a necessary exercise if we wish to see which elements of ‘netspeak’ are useful crosslinguistically, which elements are unique to English, which elements are unique to other languages, and which elements may have influenced or been imported to other linguistic online communities. 

 

References

Izazi, Zulkifli Zulfati, and Tengku Mahadi Tengku-Sepora. “Slangs on Social Media: Variations among Malay Language Users on Twitter.” Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities, vol. 28, no. 1, 2020.

Liu, Xiangdong. “Japanese referent honorifics in computer-mediated communication.” Language@Internet, vol 19, 2021. https://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2021/liu.

Novikova, Olga, et al. “Linguistic Analysis of Insta, Twit Posts and LJ Blogs in the Context of Their Functions (Based on the Russian Language).” International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies, vol. 15, no. 5, May 2021, pp. 66–86.

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November 25, 2022 · 5:13 pm

Week 8: Multilingualism and the Influence of English

One inescapable fact is that English is used a lot on the internet. As of 2010 it was the most used language online (Crystal 79). As such, many platforms, websites, and programs are more accessible to English-speaking users. Although people would often prefer to use their first language online, the unfortunate reality is that many websites and software simply are not set up to support all languages (81-82). Technology is now able to support more scripts and more platforms have made an effort to create interfaces in languages other than English. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are simply fewer resources in languages other than English when it comes to information hubs like Wikipedia, sites on specific and niche topics, and availability of academic articles and papers (85). With all this in mind, it’s fairly inevitable that English would have an influence on how other languages are used. Additionally, these imbalances of resources can play into already existing relationships between dominant and minority languages. As you might guess from all of this, how frequently a language is used offline does not always directly correlate to how often that language is used online (87).

So, with that context out of the way, let’s take a look at how power imbalances between languages might influence user’s linguistic choices online. 

 

Linguistic Choices of Bilingual Welsh/English Teenagers

Daniel Cunliffe and his colleagues set out to examine how bilingual Welsh/English students used language online, and how those linguistic choices compared to their usage of the languages in daily life. They surveyed 200 students total, ages 13-18, and also had 64 of the students participate in more intensive focus groups (Cunliffe 342). They ensured that half of the participants spoke Welsh as their first language, and the other half spoke English as their first language (343). However, the students still viewed English as the dominant language, and many of the students struggled with their Welsh reading comprehension skills (343-344). As per the nature of the study, all of the participating students had access to broadband internet, and the majority of the students used at least one social networking site (343-344).

Audience, although not the sole factor which goes into language choice, did seem to have an effect on the students’ linguistic choices.  In general, they were more likely to use Welsh if their in-person support system frequently spoke it in person, especially if they were communicating with those in-person friends online (345). But students who spoke both Welsh and English with their friends were more likely to use English online. If students are mainly communicating with friends from their in-person network, it makes sense that their linguistic habits from in-person conversations would carry over. 

On the other hand, students were more likely to use English in more public online settings, like Facebook updates. Most Welsh speakers can speak English, but not all English speakers can speak Welsh, so it seems that users tended toward the language that was most likely to be understood. Some users used both Welsh and English in their posts, especially if they had separate friend groups that used Welsh or English predominantly. In these cases, the language of choice depended on which of their Facebook Friends they were writing for: their Welsh-speaking friends or their English-speaking friends (355). On the other hand, the researchers found that Welsh was rarely the only language students used on Facebook (352). This is likely due to the dominance of English; it’s unlikely that all of a student’s friends could speak Welsh. 

Larger community factors also seem to play a role. The dominant language spoken in the user’s community tended to correlate with the language they most frequently used on Facebook (348). But, then again, the researchers suggested that positive attitudes around learning and speaking Welsh might push some users to try to use Welsh more (350-351).

Students’ individual confidence with writing Welsh did not appear to have a direct effect on how often they used it (351). Similarly, researchers found no direct correlation between confidence in writing English and English usage (352). 

One factor that surprisingly did not appear to influence language choice was the language of the social media interface (in this case, Facebook). Although the site does support a Welsh interface, users express discomfort with it due to its use of unfamiliar words or clunky language (356). The interface did not appear to positively influence Welsh use, but the English interface did not appear to consciously discourage Welsh use (356). As such, the researchers concluded that Welsh currently has a limited use in digital contexts, but also that Facebook is still a viable context in which to use Welsh, even if English is still the more dominant language (358). The surveyed students seem open to increasing Welsh use online, saying they would use Welsh language resources if they were available (344). Continuing to build spaces where Welsh can be read and used and refining those current spaces where Welsh interfaces are still clunky may result in such interfaces having a direct correlation with Welsh language use. 

 

Linguistic choices of Bilingual Frisian/Dutch Teenagers

Looking a bit farther afield, we see that bilingual or multilingual speakers in the Netherlands also tend to use the regional dominant language – Dutch – when communicating online. The author of a study looking at the linguistic choices of teenagers who speak both Frisian and Dutch says this isn’t surprising; linguistic power imbalances in the real world tend to carry over into digital contexts (Jongbloed-Faber 29). 

Frisian is a language from the Fryslân region of the Netherlands; both it and Dutch are official languages, but Dutch tends to be more dominant (30). Frisian is also largely a spoken language, rather than a written one (30). When analyzing 6,000 tweets from 50 Frisian teens, researchers found “frequent phonetic writing as well as the incorporation of lexical and syntactic Dutchisms…in Frisian tweets” (30). Although there is Dutch influence, the researchers suggest that because writing on social media tends to be informal, teenagers feel more comfortable with using the language because they are not being held to formal written standards (30). Jongbloed-Faber and her colleagues decided to expand this research by collecting linguistic data from 2,367 multilingual students, aged 14-18 years old, about their in-person and online language use (32).  

Generally speaking, the students were more proficient at understanding and speaking Frisian than they were at reading and writing in it (33). Dutch was the most common language the students used on social media, with Frisian or English being used less frequently (34). However, Frisian and English were used at different rates depending on the platform. Frisian was used more often on WhatsApp and in private Facebook messages, while English was more used on Twitter and in Facebook updates (35). This seems to indicate that Frisian tends to be used more in more private, one-on-one settings, while English is used more frequently in public settings (and, again, Dutch is used far more frequently than either Frisian or English). 

The language students spoke offline did appear to impact what language they chose to use online. 87% of students who spoke Frisian as their first language used it online to some extent, although even these first language speakers used Dutch as their primary language online (35). In general, the results found that the more Dutch students used in daily life, the less Frisian they used online (35).

When they did use Frisian online, most of the participants (55%) reported using phonetic spellings; 52% of participants thought writing diacritics was too much work, and 47% didn’t know where to put diacritics (37). Although social media may not be helping these students develop the writing skills to write formal Frisian, the informal standards of social media are giving these students a place to use the language, at least to an extent. The researchers found that online Frisian use was strongly influenced by the language students used with their friends, as well as their attitude toward Frisian (37). Perhaps students who use the language informally online will gain confidence in their language, develop more positive attitudes towards it, and eventually develop stronger writing skills (or motivation to develop these skills) to be able to use Frisian in more formal or academic contexts. On the other hand, the desire to communicate with a wider audience beyond their in-person friend groups may cause students to neglect Frisian in favor of Dutch or English. Only time will tell. 

 

Slovene-English Bloggers

For communities who don’t use English as frequently in everyday life, English may still be used in online contents. In an analysis of Slovene-English blogs, one author found that English words were used to create a feeling of trendiness or prestigiousness (Šabec 10). As expected, English loanwords were also common to fill lexical gaps for subjects related to technology and the internet (5). Users can also use English alongside Slovenian for playful functions like wordplay (6). Code-switching (switching between using English or using Slovenian) happens both between sentences and within individual sentences (8). 

The most interesting impact of English on these Slovenian blogs, however, might be some changes in syntax, although these changes are fairly minor. In English, if we’re using a noun to describe another noun, the describing noun comes before the described noun – ie, ‘Post-it note’, ‘water bottle’, ‘apple pie’, However, it seems that in Slovenian the describing noun is placed after the describing noun. But some of these code-mixing bloggers have been adopting the English order, especially when one of the nouns involved is an English word or loanword (9). These changes don’t impact the meaning of the sentences, as far as I can tell, but they’re certainly nonstandard.

Some of these blogs are also using expressive features that are not specifically tied to the English language. Expressive punctuation, like ellipsis and frequent/combined use of exclamation and question marks is not tied to the English language (although it could have made its way into these blogs via exposure to English-speaking users) (7).  

Šabec suggests that the mixing of Slovenian and English functions “as a social marker indicating the users’ belonging to a particular online community” (9). English is both a way to appeal to a wider online audience and a way for the users to access English’s linguistic prestige (10). Users also seem to use English when they are expressing more intimate thoughts and feelings; in this case, English may allow them to maintain a sense of distance, whereas using Slovenian might feel too vulnerable (10).

 

English Loanwords in Indonesian Contexts

Indonesian students, like the Solvenian bloggers, use English loanwords to discuss social media and online activities. At least, that’s what researchers found when they surveyed the Facebook and Instagram activity of 336 undergraduate students (Tarihoran 60). Interestingly, the English loanwords they found were not being used to fill lexical gaps. Many of the words – friend/unfriend, follow/unfollow, friends, followers, share, tag, wall, and so on – have native Indonesian counterparts (63). And these counterparts are not obscure – after all, following, sharing, and friends are not uncommon concepts. So why were these students using English loanwords? Was it for prestige, as seemed to be a factor for the Slovenian bloggers? 

Motivations for using these loanwords were varied, but one common motivation seemed to be that using these English loanwords allowed them to specifically refer to online actions (63). This might be due to the fact that, as previously noted, many popular online platforms were initially created with English interfaces. Indonesian users were likely exposed first to the English versions of these websites and apps (or at least to English users of these sites), and adopted these English loanwords as a result. Alternatively, we could argue that there is a usefulness in being able to refer specifically to online actions without having to use more words to do it. Regardless, English clearly impacts how these users discuss their online activities.

 

References

Crystal, David. Internet Linguistics : A Student Guide, Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/smith/detail.action?docID=801579.

Cunliffe, Daniel et al. “Young Bilinguals’ Language Behaviour in Social Networking Sites: The Use of Welsh on Facebook.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol 18, no. 3, 2013, pp. 339–361. doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12010.

Jongbloed-Faber, Lysbeth et al. “Language use of Frisian bilingual teenagers on social media” Treballs de Sociolingüística Catalana, no. 26, 2916, pp. 27-54. doi: 10.2436/20.2504.01.107.

Šabec, Nada. “Slovene-English Netspeak: Linguistic and socio-cultural aspects.” 2009, http://oddelki. ff. uni-mb. si/filozofija/files/Festschrift/Dunjas_festschrift/sabec. pdf.

Tarihoran, N., E. Fachriyah, Tressyalina, and I. R. Sumirat. “The Impact of Social Media on the Use of Code Mixing by Generation Z”. International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies (iJIM), vol. 16, no. 07, Apr. 2022, pp. 54-69, doi:10.3991/ijim.v16i07.27659.

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· 3:27 pm

Week 7: The Use of Dialects Online

This week’s readings involve dialect and how users translate dialect to online written contexts. If we assume that the informal language people use online is influenced by their informal spoken speech, then it would make sense to see dialectal differences being codified through non-standard spellings or other orthographic or grammatical changes.

 

Sakha

Sakha, also known as Yakut, is a language spoken by about 450,000 people in Yakutia/the Republic of Sakha, a region in northeastern Russia. One researcher, Jenanne Ferguson, looked at how Sakha was being used online and found that some users were carrying over dialectal differences into their informal writing (131). She specifically looked at the use of word-initial ‘h’. In some dialects of Sakha, words which begin with an ‘s’ will instead be pronounced as if they begin with an ‘h’ if they are following a word that ends with a vowel. 

For users who write this dialectal difference into their online writing, the feature functions as a marker of local identity (134-135). Even the choice to use Sakha itself reflects this, since many Sakha speakers are bilingual in Russian (134). Since online identity is mainly created through language, the use of a specific language or a change in spelling marks the user as from a specific geographic location and similarly allows them to find other individuals who speak their dialect (132, 138, 140). 

At the same time, this close link between language use and identity opens up users to discourse surrounding cultural preservation through ‘correct’ language (132). Not all dialects of Sakha include this ‘s’ to ‘h’ change, and its use in writing is not sanctioned by any official Sakha language groups (140). Those who don’t have this dialectal difference view users with this spelling difference as seeking their own unique identity, which is only heightened by the contentious relationships between the different regions of Sakha speakers (139). As a result, users from different dialects argue over whether this dialectal difference should be used in writing. 

These arguments are also further complicated by the larger history of Yakutia. Sakha speakers have long faced pressures to assimilate into a larger Russian culture, so modern-day speakers want to push back against this assimilation (143). However, they are split on the best route forward. For ‘h’ users, writing their dialectal difference further separates them from Russia, since Russian phonology does not use the Sakha ‘h’ (141). In fact, these users will even overuse ‘h’ in words where it wouldn’t occur in spoken speech, so their choice to include it in writing is definitely not solely about imitating their own spoken speech (141). Non-’h’ users, meanwhile,fear that nonstandard spellings will further separate Sakha speakers into distinct regional groups, thus splintering a unified Sakha identity and making it more difficult for Sakha speakers to stand up against assimilationist attitudes and actions (143-144). 

As we can see here, the choice to include a specific dialectal feature is not simply driven by the desire to write down oral speech, but is also used to convey specific meaning outside of the content of any given message. For Sakha ‘h’ users, it’s a choice that conveys their specific geographic region and emphasizes their Sakha identity. In some cases this can help to create intimacy between users of the same dialect (147). At other times it leads to arguments with other speakers. Speakers must decide for themselves whether the potential intimacy with other speakers is worth the fallout they might encounter.

 

Dialects in Northern England

Do users in other places who speak other languages also choose to use dialect in their writing? Andrea Nini would say yes, at least in regards to dialects in northern England on Twitter. Nini was able to collect tweets with geographic data attached to them, allowing for researchers to find out what elements of northern dialects were appearing in tweets and at what frequency. 

Researchers had to consider two criteria as they chose what features to focus on within the data. The first was that the features must be “socially salient enough to be used orthographically as an index of local dialects”; in other words, they must be recognized by the speakers as being a feature of the dialect (271). Secondly was that the chosen features “must be plausibly encoded in orthographic representations”; the features needed to translate from spoken language to the written word (271). So researchers would not be able to study features like the dark /l/ , since it can’t easily be represented in writing. 

For this study, researchers chose eleven features that could be represented in writing, which included variations in both consonants and vowels (271). For example, one feature in Northern dialects is TH-stopping and TH-fronting, where the dental fricative represented by ‘th’ is instead realized by another consonant. Written examples would include “tink” instead of “think” or “wiv” instead of “with” (273). They were then able to match tweets with these features to the geographic location of the user. 

Nini and her team found that although these non-standard spellings of dialectal difference were fairly infrequent, “for most of [the features] clear geographical patterns can be detected and this suggests that the geographical signal contained in these frequencies is also relatively strong” (276). So these non-standard spellings did seem, in general, to be reflective of phonetic differences in dialect (288). Because these variants are overall infrequent, this suggests that users who do use these variants are choosing to use them intentionally. So although these variants may sometimes result in shortened words, brevity is not the driving factor here. Rather, these users are trying to “convey a particular identity or stance” through their linguistic choices (286-287). These features also are not usually appearing in isolation, which Nini suggests indicates interplay between these various features (290). In some cases, users may be using these dialectal features “as part of a wider linguistic style tailored to a user’s own dialectal identity” (290). In other cases, these variants may be used to imitate certain accents and thus invoke certain regional identities (278, 280).  

Due to Twitter’s setup, there is no way for researchers to determine whether the features someone uses in online discourse are the same features they use in spoken language (290). However, researchers may be able to determine the salience of a feature – that is, the extent to which that feature is noticed and linked to a regional identity – by examining how frequently it is being used and where the users employing it are based (289). Researchers may even be able to make solid guesses about which features are seen by outsiders as being emblematic of a particular dialect, versus which features speakers of that dialect recognize as being emblematic of their own dialect (290). 

 

Conclusion

As shown in these two examples, linguistic choices in online communication can allow users to assert regional identities. This both allows users to express pride in their identity, but it also impacts interpersonal interactions by allowing users to find common ground with other users who speak their dialect. Although I can’t make generalizations on how common of a phenomenon this is for other dialects or other minority languages, users of Sakha and Northern English dialects are unlikely to interact frequently due to the geographic distance between the two regions and the fact that Sakha speakers are more likely to use Russian as a lingua franca rather than English. So I think it is unlikely that Sakha users were influenced by Northern English users to use their dialect online, or vice versa. If these separate communities are choosing to use dialect online to assert their identity, I think it’s likely that this is also occurring in other communities as well. 

 

References

Ferguson, Jenanne. “Don’t Write It With ‘h’! Standardization, Responsibility and Territorialization When Writing Sakha Online.” Responsibility and Language Practices in Place, edited by Laura Siragusa and Jenanne K. Ferguson, vol. 5, Finnish Literature Society, 2020, pp. 131–52, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv199tdgh.10. Accessed 25 Nov. 2022.

Nini, Andrea, et al. “The Graphical Representation of Phonological Dialect Features of the North of England on Social Media.” Dialect Writing and the North of England, edited by Patrick Honeybone and Warren Maguire, Edinburgh University Press, 2020, pp. 266–96, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv182jrdf.16. Accessed 25 Nov. 2022.

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· 3:00 pm

Week 6: Emoji and Emoticon

Emoji and emoticon: the fun and playful little pictures you can add to text messages. But that’s not all they are. As it turns out, these little pictures can be used to convey additional meaning and may actually be fulfilling an important function within digital communications.

 

Emoji and Emoticons – What’s the Difference?

Although the two terms look like they should be interchangeable, emoji and emoticon actually are different things. 

Emoticon is a portmanteau of ‘emotion’ and ‘icon’ (McCulloch 178.) They are the little pictures we make by combining keyboard symbols – things like 🙂 and 🙁 and <3, to type a few. They first arose in 1982 on Carnegie Mellon University’s computer message system (177). Emoticons allowed users to integrate these little icons into their texts, as opposed to having a picture attached to the end of a post. 

Emoji originated in Japan in the late 1990s, and the term is a combination of ‘e’, picture, and ‘moji’, character (180). These are the premade illustrations that people often add to texts – things like a thumbs up, a tree, a laughing face, and so on.   

Emoji were actually preceded in Japan by kaomoji, which were more similar to American emoticons in that they used keyboard symbols to make faces or pictures (179). The ‘kao’ in kaomoji means face. Unlike American emoticons and their sideways faces, kaomoji tended to be face on: 0.o and  ^_^ are two examples. 

But what’s interesting is that we have emoticon and kaomoji developing around the same time in two separate environments (although the two would come into contact later, leading some American users to use both kaomoji and emoticon). This could be a coincidence, or it could suggest that both were fulfilling some communication need that users had. 

 

Where do Emoji & Emoticons show up?

Emoji & emoticon tend to appear in synchronous contexts, like texts or instant messages, rather than in more asynchronous contexts like emails or blogs (Herring 261). They also show up less often in conversations that are more serious or work-focused, suggesting that they may carry a sense of informality, light-heartedness, or playfulness (259, 261). With these context, we can guess that their function is likely related to the needs of speech-like interpersonal writing. Within a conversation itself, they’re more likely to appear at the end of sentences or utterances than mid-thought. They can appear paired with text or by themselves.

 

Analyzing Emoji & Emoticon

There are several ways we can approach emoji and emoticon. On the most basic level, they seem to represent facial expressions. Early researchers took this to mean that emoji and emoticon illustrate emotion. Hence, by using emoticon or emoji, we’re conveying information about our emotions that would otherwise be unavailable to our audience (250). However, the “emoticon = emotion” reading breaks down when we examine it further. The 😛 face or 😉 face, for instance, represent facial expressions but don’t represent specific emotions (252). Furthermore, emoticon are sometimes used in contexts where the content of its surrounding text don’t necessarily match the emotion of the face – like in “Stayed up all night working, I’m so tired right now :)”. So to get to the bottom of what these little faces and pictures are doing, we’ll have to look into more complex explanations. 

Some people have described emoji as their own language. But this is clearly not true, since we cannot communicate solely in emoji (McCulloch 157-158). This is for two reasons. First, emoji do not always have singular, fixed meanings, but can have their meaning shaped by the text surrounding them and vice versa (Logi 5). As such, emoji become less and less intelligible as they are disconnected from language (4). Secondly, emoji and emoticon are very bad at illustrating abstract concepts; things like tense, mental faculties, and so on. They also don’t allow us to easily specify through the use of determiners (this, that, these, etc) or proper names (New York, IKEA, etc). So if emoji and emoticon aren’t emotional icons, and they are a language, what are they?

 

The Illocutionary Force Approach

By returning to the first emoticons from 1982, we can see that they were assigned a specific function from the beginning. Amidst joking discussion of speculative situations at Carnegie Mellon Univeristy, 🙂 was suggested as a way to mark statements of humor so as not to confuse or concern other users (McCulloch 178). Over time, this narrow usage would expand, and 🙂 would be used as a marker of general positive sentiment or sincerity (178). So, emoticons were being used not to illustrate facial expressions, but to convey the intention of the author to readers (Herring 255-256). Herring describes emoticons as “indicators of illocutionary force”. Illocutionary acts are acts that are carried out through their being spoken: promises, threats, joking, and so on. Emoticons can clarify what sort of illocutionary act a writer is performing – a joke, a promise, a request, and so on.

If we accept that emoticon and emoji convey intention, many of their uses in context make more sense. A wink in spoken conversation denotes some double meaning or inside joke, and a winking face like 😉 can add an attitude of humor to a message (“I’m blaming you” versus “I’m blaming you ;)”). So emoticons can be used to make utterances less threatening or serious (258). Emoticons that appear by themselves function in very similar ways, and either modify previous messages or express a general sentiment (259). 

This approach also gets around another issue with the emoticon = emotion hypothesis: facial expressions tend to be unconscious or unintentional, while typing is very much intentional (261). But a 🙂 in a message doesn’t feel like a forced smile, because it’s not; it’s a statement of intention (257). Although Herring focuses on emoticon, we can see how this approach can also work for emoji, seeing as how they also include pictures of facial expressions. The variety of emoji available may also allow users to further specify or clarify their intentions (for instance, a simple smiling face and a face with a wide grin might be used to indicate different amounts of humor or excitement).

 

The Gestural Approach

Several authors have suggested that emoji and emoticon function as replacements for the gestures we use in face to face conversation (Herring 260, Logi 4, McCulloch 157). Obviously, gestures and other body language are absent in written texts. In formal texts, this may not present much issue, as they often call for a neutral tone, disembodied from the actual writer. But if users are trying to write text that has speech-like qualities, they might want the ability to write gestures into their messages as well.

McCulloch specifically divides emoji into two categories with two different corresponding types of gesture. First there are emblematic emoji, which function like emblematic gesture (161-162). Secondly, there are more illustrative emoji that function as co-speech or illustrative gestures (166).

Emblematic gestures are those that have a fixed form and meaning. They also often can be named, as with giving a thumbs up/down, flipping someone off, the ok symbol, zipping the lips, and so on. Some emoji are also emblematic; the thumbs up/down emoji, of course, but also the eggplant (which by itself has sexual connotations) and the various flag emoji (which represent a country or identity). They have been given some intrinsic and fairly fixed meaning; people aren’t using a thumbs down as a way to point down, and they aren’t using the Canadian flag to represent maple trees. Emblematic emojis can be repeated, perhaps representing a repeated or drawn-out action. Multiple thumbs-up could represent holding a thumbs-up for a while, while multiple kissing face emojis could symbolize blowing multiple kisses (171). These fixed gestures, like emoji, are used intentionally in conversation (187). 

Illustrative or co-speech gestures are much more fluid. They’re difficult to describe in writing, but we use them all the time to illustrate size, shape, direction, and so on; they reinforce and support what we’re saying (166). The same gesture could mean two different things depending on the context: swiping one’s hand could indicate direction (come here/go away), size (this big/this small), emotion (dismissiveness, surrender, excitement), and so on. Illustrative emoji do the same thing in re-inforcing the subject and perhaps adding to the mood (“Happy birthday!” versus “Happy birthday!” paired with the balloon emoji, cake emoji and present emoji) (167). They also can be used simply to signify that the other participant is reading the conversation and continues to be interested in it, similarly to how body language or meaningless vocalization might be used in spoken conversations to show active listening (189). For the most part, researchers have not found that people use long strings of illustrative emoji to tell complex stories. The vast majority of emojis, in general, appear by themselves or in short strings, and they usually appear alongside words or are short replies to previous messages (169). When illustrative emoji do appear in sets, they are usually simply repeated or placed with matching emoji (snowman/snowflake, different colored hearts, and so on) and the order they appear in doesn’t appear to change their meaning (170). Again, this points toward an illustrative/clarifying function rather than a communicative function. 

 

The Social Semiotic Approach

Both of the aforementioned approaches focus more on the function of emoticons and emoji in a text; the social semiotic approach is a closer analysis of how they can be used to create meaning, and what sort of meanings they can create (Logi 2). Meaning is created through users’ choices and the interactions between those choices within a text (5-6). So, researchers need to consider the literal text, the literal emoji/emoticon (specifically emoji in this paper), and how those two interact to create a full meaning (6-7). 

Emoji can interact with text in several ways; they can appear alongside words or phrases to reinforce their literal meaning, they can replace a word or words, or they can reinforce an attitude or judgment found in the literal text (14). In some cases, text gives emoji meaning, while emoji don’t add much to the meaning of the text. The reinforcement of literal meaning can be seen in the example of “Incheon Airport” paired with an airplane emoji (7). Additionally, this example shows us that in some cases the text assigns meaning to the emoji, while the emoji itself does not assign a meaning to its accompanying words. The airplane emoji could refer to a literal airplane, or to any number of related concepts like a pilot, flying, a trip, or an airport. When paired with the text, the user assigns the “airport” meaning to the airplane emoji (7). However, the emoji only has this fixed meaning temporarily, and later responses within the same conversation could assign it a different meaning (ie, “Hope you enjoy your trip!” paired with the airplane emoji would give the emoji the meaning of “trip” rather than the previously assigned meaning of “airport”) (14-15). 

Emoji paired with text can create a number of kinds of meanings beyond reinforcing the literal meaning of a text. To further study this, Logi and other researchers collected texts from students and interviewed them about how they used emoji (8). They were then able to analyze the types of meaning created by the collected texts. Some of these categories of meaning included attitude (the user’s positive or negative feelings towards something), graduation (intensity of attitude), involvement (identification with a group) and so on (8, 11-12). Emoji, then, are definitely not limited to literal or emotional meaning only. 

Emoji and text can also interact in a more collaborative way (17). The message “Me & My worst frenemy” paired with the heart emoji indicates a specific type of attitude towards the referent (‘frenemy’) that we could not obtain from just the text or emoji on their own (19). Similarly, emoji can act to add information about a situation described in text. Adding a cellphone emoji to the message “I can see how ‘interested’ everyone is” lets us know that the disinterest that the user is actually referring to likely involves people being on their phones rather than paying attention to whatever the event is (18). 

In short, emoji appear to be able to support and help express a variety of different meanings within a text. In some cases they are superfluous, while at other times their inclusion clarifies or adds to the literal meaning of the surrounding text.

 

The Popularity of Emoji & Emoticon

Humans have liked adding images to our texts for a long time, from the illustrations on medieval manuscripts to the little doodles we add to cards or letters (McCulloch 174-175). In that sense, emoji and emoticons are simply the most recent incarnation of textual adornment. But, as shown above, emoji & emoticons are also serving to clarify communication (188). They also tend to coexist with other expressive textual features, like nonstandard spellings and letter repetition (185). So in a sense, we could say that emoji and emoticons are popular and widespread for the same reason these other expressive features are widespread: because they’re providing some layer of additional meaning that the words by themselves do not (192). 

Despite the fact that they are being used for similar, if not identical, purposes, emoji and emoticon don’t seem to be in competition with each other (185). This could be due to user preference – some people just prefer the look of a 🙂 over an emoji face – or it may be due to other factors, like technological support of emoji (Herring 260). Further research would be needed to determine whether there are specific linguistic, demographic, or environmental factors that influence the choice between emoticon and emoji. 

 

References

Dresner, Eli, and Herring, Susan C. “Functions of the Nonverbal in CMC: Emoticons and Illocutionary Force.” Communication Theory, vol. 20, no. 3, 2010, pp. 249-268. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2010.01362.x

Logi, Lorenzo, and Michele Zappavigna. “A Social Semiotic Perspective on Emoji: How Emoji and Language Interact to Make Meaning in Digital Messages.” New Media & Society, Sept. 2021, doi:14614448211032965.

McCulloch, Gretchen. Because Internet : Understanding the New Rules of Language. Riverhead Books, 2019. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,sso&db=nlebk&AN=1617183&site=ehost-live.

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November 6, 2022 · 2:31 pm

Week 5: ‘Textspeak’

Now we can get into the idea of textspeak/textisms. What words and spellings are people using when they are texting or messaging? Do these hold true across different populations? And do these usages have any impact on users’ abilities to use more formal registers of a language?

 

Features of ‘Textspeak’

On a general level, it seems like the same categories of (English) textisms appear in samples both from native speakers and from non-native speakers. Abbreviations and omitted words tend to be common (Fenianos 68, Haas 386). Non standard spellings may be used to indicate informality, to cut down on keystrokes, or to “suggest pronunciation or, more precisely, to draw attention to associations between…ways of pronouncing words and certain regional and cultural dialects” (Haas 386). This latter function would include spelling differences like ‘partay’ for ‘party’ and ‘goin’ for ‘going’. Meanwhile, acronyms (‘lol’, ‘omg’) and alphabetisms (‘c’ for ‘see’, and similar examples) seem to be used less frequently by non-native speakers. This may be because extracting the meaning of these forms requires another step of coding/decoding which non-native speakers may find to be more labor-intensive (Fenianos 70-71).

Message content tended to include vague references – although this is more likely a reflection of the informal register, rather than a reflection of the message format itself (68). Pronouns were frequent, and determiners were used when discussing time (specifically future plans), shared experiences, or when referring to the conversation itself (67-68).  Users also made frequent use of “response tokens”, which are messages which are not communicating new information but are simply acknowledging and displaying interest in what a user has said (68-69). My guess these response tokens occur frequently because we lack the simultaneous feedback we usually receive in face-to-face conversations (check out Week 2 for more discussion of simultaneous feedback).

Some features added to a message, rather than abbreviating words. Users used emoticons “meant to mimic the human face and capture what is communicated…in face-to-face communication” (Haas 396) – in other words, to convey expression and tone. In a similar vein, sound words (like ‘haha’ to indicate laughter) showed up in multiple samples (Tagliamonte 15). Phatic words or phrases, like ‘lol’ or ‘wow’, also appeared frequently, and usually acted more to show participant engagement or to move the conversation along than to communicate actual information (15-16, Haas 392, 395). In Tagliamonte’s sample, for instance, ‘lol’ occurred more often at transitions in the conversation, in a final position, or by itself than at the beginning or middle of a message (16). 

Some things were generally left out of messages. Determiners referring to a location tended to be rare, since conversation participants do not have a shared experience of space and location (Fenianos 67). Sign-offs or goodbyes were less frequent than greetings (69). This may be because conversations can take place over an extended period of time, making it difficult to partition where one conversation ends and another begins. Greetings, on the other hand, could be used to draw a user’s attention back to the ongoing conversation in a polite way (“Good morning! Are we still planning to meet up later?”).

In terms of structure, the sampled messages tended to be limited in the number of clauses included per message. In the sample of non-native speakers, most utterances tended to include a single clause; there were no utterances which contained more than three clauses (67). When there were multiple clauses, they tended to be connected via a comma or simply forgo an explicit connector, like ‘and’, altogether.  

 

Why Nonstandard Features?

Why are we seeing some of these nonstandard features? Fenianos says “The participants have seemingly resorted to this writing style because it is easy, fast, and time-saving” (70). Haas disagrees with this assessment, saying that “brevity and speed are not of primary importance for these writers”, because if this were the case we would not be seeing “tensions between abbreviated and elaborated forms” (389). These elaborated or additive forms made up 67% of the features of her corpus of instant messages (389). Haas points out that these additive features “inscribe… oral features of language use into the written conversation” (390).  So Haas argues that users are adding features to their messages in order to evoke some elements of oral speech that would otherwise be unmarked. But these users are not marking every element of oral speech or their exact pronunciation (394). So the goal of these users is not to transcribe their own speech, but to use these nonstandard features strategically in order to convey the meaning they wish to convey. 

But it does seem like brevity does play some sort of role when it comes to choosing how to convey a message. Take the use of ‘so’ and ‘going to’; in both cases, these phrases are becoming more frequent in spoken language in the Toronto region, where Tagliamonte’s study was based. In the SMS portion of her data she did find that ‘so’ was being used at roughly the same rate as it was in face-to-face conversations (20). On the other hand we have ‘going to’, which has been displacing ‘will’ in the Toronto region (23). But in the SMS data, ‘will’ and its contracted forms were much more frequently used than ‘going to’ (24). If texting language is solely influenced by a texters’ spoken speech, then ‘going to’ should be overtaking ‘will’ in the data sample. Because we see this is not the case, we might guess that ‘will’ has remained in common usage because it is much briefer than ‘going to’ and that ‘so’ is appearing more frequently because it is shorter than other intensifiers such as ‘very’. 

In short, it seems that neither brevity nor spoken language are the sole drivers of what word choice and features people are using when they communicate through means like texting or instant messaging. 

 

Impact on Formal Writing Skills

The formal language skills of young adults, at least according to Tagliamonte’s 2016 study, do not appear to be negatively influenced by their texting habits (27). This study was unique in that it collected formal writing samples from each of the 45 college-aged participants (7). Their writing samples had intact standard grammar, and did not have nonstandard word forms (13). It is possible that there might be more confusion of registers among younger students, but this study seems to indicate that young adults who text or message in nonstandard English are not doing so due to lack of education or knowledge about standard English. 

 

Remaining Questions

One thing that does need to be considered is all of the studies cited drew from populations of teenagers or young adults. Studies looking at a different or wider age bracket could give us some insight as to whether these features tend to be retained by users as they age, and whether there is any divide between the habits of older and younger texters. Ensuring that these samples also come from populations who are diverse in other ways (race, class, etc) would help to provide an even better picture of how common these forms are across different groups. 

 

Citations

Fenianos, Christelle Frangieh. “Internet Language: An Investigation into the Features of Textisms in an ESL/EFL Context.” Journal of Arts and Humanities, vol. 9, no. 2, 2020, pp. 63-74. https://theartsjournal.org/index.php/site/article/view/1848/835. Accessed 6 Nov 2022.

Haas, Christina, et al. “Young People’s Everyday Literacies: The Language Features of Instant Messaging.” Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 45, no. 4, 2011, pp. 378–404. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23050580. Accessed 6 Nov 2022.

Tagliamonte, Sali A. “So Sick or so Cool? The Language of Youth on the Internet.” Language in Society, vol. 45, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43904632. Accessed 6 Nov 2022.

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November 3, 2022 · 4:34 pm

Week 4: Writing Conventions

This week is the first week where we’ll really start to look at some of the content we see when it comes to online language. Specifically, we’re looking at writing conventions – what choices do people make when it comes to punctuation, capitalization, and structure? 

 

Structure

As mentioned in a previous post, one benefit of online writing is that we don’t usually have to worry about the space our writing is taking up. Hence, we can use a linebreak to show a new utterance or a new thought (McCulloch 110-111). In informal contexts, this also allows for users to drop sentence-final punctuation (which will be expanded upon later in this post). The use of linebreaks applies not only to texting, but also to more formal pieces of writing, like newspaper articles. Rather than using line indents, online publishers can include line breaks between paragraphs (111). However, publishers do usually maintain standard punctuation in these situations.  

Online contexts also offer some spaces in which users can use traditional writing structures – but often with some adjustments. One 2012 study looked at how Facebook users interacted with one college’s Facebook posts. Many of the comments on these posts tended to use openings and closings, making them more akin to little emails than to straightforward direct messages. Most of these openings were mentions of the addressee rather than more elaborate greetings (Pérez-Sabater 87). Closings tended to be expressions of thanks or the slogan of the college’s athletic department (89). In general, commenters who were native speakers of English tended to use a similar register throughout their comment. Non-native speakers tended to use more formal greetings and closings in their comments, but mixed in more informal stylistics (89). All of this is to say that less formal stylistics are not necessarily viewed as such by all users, but that native speakers (at least in this study) seemed to draw a strong connection between nonstandard stylistics and informality, and vice versa.

 

Punctuation

Punctuation, or the lack of it, seems to be a recognizable feature in online writing. For instance, because line breaks are so often used in texts/direct messages, there is not necessarily a need for a period at the end of a text message in the same way we need a period in a longer text. So to a young text-savvy person, the presence of an unrequired period might suggest that it is indicating some additional meaning, like a serious or falling tone of voice (McCulloch 113-114). In general, punctuation can be used in nonstandard ways to indicate emotion, intention, or emphasis in a message (Crystal 63). 

Ellipses (…) may also create similar confusion to periods. In informal writing offline, writers use them to mark spaces between thoughts or sentence fragments in a space-efficient way (McCulloch 111). A postcard writer, for example, might write “Went to the beach yesterday…took a walk in the afternoon…beautiful area”. But because space efficiency is not as urgent in text messages, ellipses are generally not used this way. Rather, many users have claimed them as a way to indicate a trailing off tone. This can lead to confusion if two users who use ellipses differently interact. What reads to one person as a perfectly normal message (perhaps, “Saw Alex this morning…it was her birthday this weekend”) in which the ellipses are marking a separation between two clauses might read to another person as indicating a tone of voice. This tone of voice may in turn appear to a user as confusion or passive aggression (something like, “Alex’s birthday was this weekend, why didn’t you send her a card?”) (112-113). However, ellipses may be retaining their original function in at least one online space: blogs (Crystal 69). In these contexts, where communication is mostly one-sided and asynchronous, ellipses can be used to punctuate streams of thought, as they might in diaries or journals.

The exclamation mark has kept its old meaning of excitement or emphasis, but also seems to be used online to indicate warmth and sincerity (McCulloch 123-124). This extension likely came from the linking of excitement to sincerity; “After all,” McCulloch says, “to be excited to meet someone or help someone is also to be sincere about it”. One 2006 study found that exclamation marks in a sample of emails were used to express excitement in 9.5% of the sample, expressed emphasis in 29.5% if the sample, and expressed friendliness in 32% of the sample. Why has this new usage become popular? Well, in a context where you don’t have extralinguistic markers of emotions from your conversation partner, it can be helpful to have an explicit mark of sincerity or genuine excitement. 

Asterisks (*) and underscores (_) have been used to emphasize text (Crystal 64). This usage originated with software that allowed users to use asterisks and underscores to code their text as bold or italicized (McCulloch 127). This is not something universally available across all software. But these symbols are easy to notice visually and are easily accessible on a computer or phone keyboard, so they continue to be used to emphasize text even if the text is not being visually bolded or italicized.  

The tilde (~) has gained the ability to mark sarcasm in some online contexts (137). This mark, having very few functions in everyday written English, was first used as simple decoration in digital writing or to indicate drawn out words (138). This second function evolved from how Japanese internet users used the tilde to indicate a drawn out utterance. Since Japanese is written with a syllabary (one symbol for every syllable), they could not simply repeat the final symbol of a word to indicate a drawn out utterance; instead, they used the tilde (131). This usage was adopted by some English speakers, so the tilde now was established as a marker of how words sounded. The first use, for writing decoration, often indicated enthusiasm (why else would you spend time decorating your writing?). Taken together, both of these uses indicated a non-serious utterance. Over time, users seemed to narrow the meaning from simply non-serious to sarcastic (138). It is also possible that the tilde was adopted because its shape could be interpreted as reflecting a sarcastic tone which oscillates in pitch – but this may be a fun fancy more than a proposal with actual evidence (138).  

The hashtag, originally known as the pound sign (#), also had precious few uses in standard written English. Now, its most often used now as a way to self-categorize posts with other posts discussing the same topic (“So impressed with the renovations at the #NeilsonLibrary”). But it could also be used in a more tongue-in-cheek manner to emphasize certain words (“I am #exhausted of the midterm coverage”) or to provide metacommentary (“I’m sure this will all blow over soon #sarcasm”) (130). 

Metacommentary can also be provided via carrots (<>) and slashes (/) (127). These marks are, again, not commonly seen in standard written English, but are readily available to keyboard users. They provide a nifty way to designate notes or commentary as being apart from the text in a way parenthesis or brackets do not (since we’re used to them providing asides to the main text, not metacommentary!). The use of these marks also likely grew out of the earlier days of computers and the internet, where coding was much more frequently used by users. If something like <text color: blue> hi everyone! </text color> could be used to affect the appearance of text without changing its content, then <sarcasm> I’m so excited to be here  </sarcasm> could do the same – only now the user would be signaling this information to other users, and not to the software. The slash, used in examples like /rant, also acted in a similar manner. Speaking anecdotally, I haven’t noticed the use of < >  as much in my time online. It may be that these have become less common as the average user has had to deal with coding less often. The function that these serve, however, still seems to be needed. I have noticed that some communities on Instagram and TikTok have grown fond of using “tone indicators” with the / in order to more explicitly clarify the intention behind any given message. Maybe it just comes down to the fact that typing a slash requires a lot less effort than creating a pseudo-coding bracket using < >. 

 

Capitalization

Capitalization has had a long history of being used to indicate “yelling”, whether it be happy and excited or angry (Crystal 63, McCulloch 115). This goes back at least to 1984 in regards to the internet, and there are pre-internet examples of this in print as well (116). But use of only capital letters was actually normal for regular communication in the early days of the internet, so why did its meaning change and why did it seemingly become so well-known outside of an online context (117)? Capitalization was (and in some contexts, still is) the only way to play with text when writing online. Italics, bold, underline, and choices of color and font are available in word processors, but not when you’re writing a Facebook post or texting your friend (Heath 69). Capitalization is also something that doesn’t usually carry a ton of meaning in offline writing. It indicates the beginning of sentences and proper nouns, but the majority of sentences are still fully understandable without it. So capitalization would be a perfect thing to use for other functions of online writing. 

And capitalization does seem to have a strong influence on how we interpret a message, at least according to one 2021 study. Specifically, it seems to affect not the content of a message, but how we “[produce] the text subvocally” – how we imagine the text to be said (69). Participants tended to rate messages in all caps as being higher pitched and louder, which tends to correlate with how we vocalize strong emotion in face-to-face conversations (74). The author, Maria Heath, suggested that since laboratory environments tend to reduce the effects of any given stimuli on participants, the effects of all caps are likely stronger than they appeared in the results of her study (74). However, she suggests that the visual nature of all caps messages is likely not the reason why we have these associations – ie, we don’t perceive the texts as “louder” because an all caps message has bigger and taller text – but rather that we simply learned these associations over time. 

Or, to say it in another way, it’s likely that capitalization first was used to emphasize certain words and only later did it gain prosodic connotations.

 

Lengthening Words

Lengthening words by repeating letters (“no” versus “nooooo”) allows for users to indicate a drawn-out utterance, often to emphasize a certain word. This phenomenon did occur before the internet was around, although in limited capacity (McCulloch 119-120). Many of these early uses appeared in dialogue as a way to convey how a character was speaking. Lengthened words are used for a similar effect today as a way to show which words would be drawn out if the written conversation were occurring in a spoken context.

There are some unspoken rules about how words are allowed to be lengthened. Generally the repeated letter is either the rightmost letter in a word (“noooo”) or the rightmost letter in a smaller unit of sound (“Boooooring”) (120-121). The only exceptions are with consonant clusters; “both” can be lengthened as “booooth” or “bothhhhh” but never “botttth” (121) . But besides this consonant cluster rule, letters are duplicated regardless of whether they can actually be drawn out in a spoken context. Plosives (like the p in “stopppppp”) or silent consonants (“sameeeee”) cannot actually be held for an extended period of time, but this doesn’t seem to prevent them from being lengthened in a written context (121). 

 

Why Use These Conventions?

On one hand, we could chalk these conventions solely up to the desire to indicate tone in written messages. But these conventions also create an in-group, in a sense; there are those who understand what a tilde means and those that do not (148-149). Using a hashtag for something other than its primary purpose suggests one might be playing off the joke that some people overuse hashtags to the point that they are useless (130). Using these conventions competently may create a shared sense of camaraderie, even if the users in a conversation are strangers. 

 

Citations

Crystal, David. Internet Linguistics : A Student Guide, Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/smith/detail.action?docID=801579.

Heath, Maria (2021) “NO NEED TO YELL: A Prosodic Analysis of Writing in All Caps,” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Vol. 27 : Iss. 1 , Article 10. https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol27/iss1/10.

McCulloch, Gretchen. Because Internet : Understanding the New Rules of Language. Riverhead Books, 2019.

Pérez-Sabater, Carmen. “The Linguistics of Social Networking: A Study of Writing Conventions on Facebook“. Linguistik Online, Vol. 56, Nr. 6, Nov. 2012, doi:10.13092/lo.56.257.

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October 16, 2022 · 1:49 pm

Week 3: Ethics, Limitations, and Challenges

This week’s theme is Ethics, Limitations, and Challenges. The sources I looked at focused more on how to collect and analyze language samples from online, rather than the content of these samples. What ethical questions do we need to consider when collecting linguistic data? What challenges are involved with data collection? 

 

Ethics

Researching online language, like all research, requires us to consider how to make ethical research choices. One of the largest issues might be the blurred line between public and private online content. Although most people are aware that anything posted on the internet is no longer private, most users also expect a degree of privacy when it comes to their emails and texts. Furthermore, even if a person publicly posts to a public social media account or website, they may not be intending for their words to reach a large audience. But researchers might also prefer this sort of data point, since the users are not being influenced (consciously or not) by the idea that someone might be analyzing their writing (Hou 36). The issue of informed consent and permission to use material is thus a relevant issue when looking at research being done on digital language (Lewis 14). Issues of privacy also arise. Although it is unlikely that any singular quoted tweet could be traced back to an English-speaking Twitter user, what if researchers are analyzing a smaller linguistic community? 

Depending on the research question, it might be easiest for researchers to collect data from users who are clearly public figures or organizations (Hou 41). But if research is focusing specifically on informal language, slang, or other linguistic phenomena that are less likely to appear in a corporate or professional context, the usefulness of data from public figures might be low. 

 

Challenges

Besides ethical considerations, there are multiple other challenges that may impact data collection and analysis. First of all, there is an extensive amount of data available to researchers (Crystal 10). Of course this can be a good thing, but filtering data to create a usable sample may pose some difficulties depending on the specific questions researchers are asking. The sheer amount of data also may influence researchers to focus on the sites/platforms that are easiest for data collection (such as Twitter) and overlook sites/platforms that are more difficult to research. If you can get all your data from Twitter, why would you choose to look elsewhere? (This is of course a generalization, but researchers only have so much time, manpower, and funding).

The second challenge is that some of this data may not be relevant to some research due to the rate of change online. Site updates may impact the type of data being produced (like Twitter raising the character limit for tweets) and site demographics may shift in just a few years time (Facebook at its inception was primarily used by college-aged young adults, but now is being used more by adults in their 30s and older). This is also true with studies done on traditionally published works or offline communities, but in general traditional publishing is more conservative and less inclined to abrupt, rapid change. 

Anonymity can also pose issues when trying to determine demographic data for any given sample. Factors like age, geographic location, and gender may not be readily shared by a user. So any analysis that wants to look at differences within or between specific demographics will be missing some data (14). In some contexts anonymity might pose less of a problem; for example, if a researcher is looking at vlogs of individuals using ASL, then this demographic information might be more obvious. But this type of data collection brings us back to the question of ethics and informed consent – the more information that researchers have about any one person in the data set, the higher the possibility that that person’s privacy might be compromised (Hou 40).  

Another challenge arises simply from the formatting of different sites. For example, how should retweets be treated if a researcher is analyzing language use on twitter (Crystal 40)? Reduplication in the data set could skew results, but removing  retweets entirely could ignore how users are interacting with each other or how they are reacting to or interpreting certain linguistic structures. Similarly, users may compose tweets which have incomplete utterances or whose meaning is difficult to figure out without additional context (41, 45). Removing these tweets might be necessary in some cases, but it does mean that researchers will be losing some data. The difficulty of 

The ability for posts to be edited or deleted might also cause issues. When citing data from someone else, including the data’s provenance – its line of history from you to its original creator – can allow for someone to check for errors and, if there are errors, to pinpoint where and possibly how they occurred (Lewis 8, 13). What should be done if a research cites a particular post, and that post no longer exists? Or what if that post has subsequently been changed? 

 

Final Thoughts

As time goes on, more tools will be developed to help researchers filter data, and more people will bring forward ideas as to how we can best overcome these challenges of collecting online linguistic data without compromising the privacy and informed consent of those users that data is being collected from. 

And, as we continue on this semester, we’ll have to consider how these challenges may have impacted the data we are looking at.

 

Citations:

Crystal, David. Internet Linguistics : A Student Guide, Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/smith/detail.action?docID=801579.

Hou, Lynn, et al. “Working with ASL Internet Data.” Sign Language Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, 2020, pp. 32–67, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26984276. Accessed 21 Sept. 2022. 

Lewis, W., Farrar, S. & Langendoen, T. (2006), Linguistics in the Internet Age: Tools and Fair Use, in ‘Proceedings of the EMELD’06 Workshop on Digital Language Documentation: Tools and Standards: The State of the Art’. Lansing, MI. June 20-22, 2006.

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· 1:22 pm

Week 2: Practical Effects of Technology

Welcome back to week two! This past week I looked at what I called the “practical effects of technology” on online language. 

The biggest takeaway from this week was that the online world offers a unique context in which to use language because it combines factors from both written and spoken language. This is not to say that the language itself becomes especially unique as a result, but we’ll dig into that more a bit later.

One benefit of the internet is that it contains a multitude of different people who are writing in a variety of settings. Traditionally published writing tends to be found in a limited number of contexts, like books and newspapers. These mediums tend to have more standard and formal varieties of the language (although not always!). Additionally, publishing in these formats is inaccessible  for many people. The internet, on the other hand, can be used by anyone with an internet connection and time. As such, it can be used to explore people’s everyday casual and informal language (if we assume that people’s tweets, texts, and emails reflect people’s spoken speech) (McCulloch 5). The other benefit of the internet is that it allows these informal forms of language to be explored outside of a laboratory and research context, which may influence individuals to change their language if they are aware it will be analyzed by other people later. 

So, what practical effects does the internet and other technology have on the recording and publishing of written and spoken language? Are there distinct differences between offline and online writing? How do online conversations differ from offline face-to-face conversations?

Let’s jump in.

 

Writing Online vs. Offline

Writing online is just that – writing. However, online contexts do present some differences from handwritten and traditionally published writing. Offline writing is static and subject to space constraints  – the back of a postcard, the space allocated to a newspaper column, and so on (Crystal 17). It tends to be easily categorized as public or private (Jucker 42). Often there is a delay between when something is written and when it is published, and writers need to take that delay into account when considering how a reader might interpret their writing. This delay means writers have the time to read over and edit their work before it is published, often resulting in “the development of careful organization and compact expression, with often intricate sentence structure” (Crystal 18). Traditional writing usually produces coherent and internally consistent pieces, since collaborative work with multiple authors will usually either attribute specific elements of the text to specific authors or will be edited so as to produce a similar style throughout the entire piece.  

Digital writing presents some differences to these traits. Articles and posts don’t need to be abbreviated due to the amount of space available, and oftentimes can be edited after they are originally published, either to correct for errors or to update the piece with more relevant information (30). Some digital writing, such as Wikipedia articles, is created by multiple authors over time. Thus, there exist articles and pages which may not be fully internally consistent, as different authors and editors have different ideas of both what content should be included (and what should be emphasized, explained, or glossed over) and what style is appropriate for the piece (uses of narration, figurative language, register, and so on) (31). In other cases, work by a singular author might be difficult to classify as a text at all. For example, tweets on a timeline might not add to a coherent “text” because the content of each one may be totally separate from the next (Jucker 52). 

In some regards, however, digital writing retains similarities to traditional writing. In some contexts there is a character limit for posts or texts (58). And asynchronous writing still exists online, so writers of articles and emails do need to account for a delay between when they are written and when they will be read. As in offline publishing, users in these contexts are likely to double check their grammar and spelling before releasing their work into the world. Similarly, emails cannot be edited once they are sent, and many messaging applications also do not allow for edits to be made, maintaining the static nature we see in offline writing. But users may use more ambiguous language in texts or chats, since the rapid back and forth of such a conversation allows for more room for correction or elaboration (43). Meanwhile, when handwriting a letter or writing a newspaper article, you might be more careful to make sure your message was as clear as possible. The delay between writing and reading makes it more difficult to quickly clarify what the author intended to say.

Multiple articles and authors seem to share the sentiment that digital writing (especially texting or messaging features on apps/social media) can be a hybrid medium that includes features we usually associate with spoken language. Speech is spontaneous and quick, often with blurry sentence boundaries. Similarly, texting or direct messages tend to expect a timely response, and make use of sentence fragments (a very common feature in spoken language) rather than sticking solely to complete sentences (Crystal 18, 20). These messages often cannot be edited, so any errors must be corrected in later messages – just like in spoken language. 

Some features of spoken language do not translate as easily – for instance, facial expressions and gestures can be indicated, to some extent, by emoji and emoticon, but they certainly are not the same thing (23). Features like intonation, prosody, volume, and tempo are also largely lost. But the largest difference may be the lack of simultaneous feedback. In spoken language, participants in a conversation can shape how a speaker is talking even when it’s not their turn. Facial expression, body language, and filler words can indicate a listener’s comprehension and engagement with a conversation. A confused look might spur the speaker to elaborate, while a bored or irritated look might cause a speaker to trail off or finish their thoughts quickly. This feedback is missing in digital writing because the audience cannot access the writer’s utterance until they send it. So a writer will receive feedback on a previously sent message, but they cannot access feedback on a message they are currently typing (21).

With all of this in mind, David Crystal describes internet language as “writing which has been pulled some way in the direction of speech rather than as speech which has been written down” (21). 

 

Technology and Turn-Taking

Conversations between two or more people are made up of a series of turns. Generally, only one person has the floor at any given time. Through spoken and physical signals, often unintentional, the speaker can cede the floor to another person. In the early days of computers and the internet, how to translate face to face conversations into a digital written context was not immediately obvious. In the early 1970s, the TENEX system used a single text file which both users shared; if you started typing before the other user had finished, your words would overlap with each other (McCulloch 210). Later systems tried using chat boxes; each user had a box and typed all of their turns in this box (211). However, this made it difficult to follow a conversation chronologically, as one had to look between each of the chat boxes to see who had said something new. Today’s upward scrolling chat first appeared in the 1980s. Unlike the TENEX or chat box systems, these scrolling chat systems did not show messages keystroke-by-keystroke, but rather only showed the full message when it was sent by a user. 

In face-to-face conversations we have what is called ‘turn monitor’, meaning we hear utterances as they are being constructed (Jenks 79-80). A keystroke-by-keystroke approach to digital writing would give users this turn monitor, but it also poses some issues. We tend to read more quickly than we can type, which could cause irritation as other users waited for someone to finish typing (McCulloch 211). Pauses in typing might indicate that the writer was done typing or that they were trying to decide how to phrase something. Without the body language and tone we can utilize in face-to-face conversations, readers might not be able to tell the difference. 

But on the surface, message-by-message chat also seems like it would pose problems. Wouldn’t users be more easily interrupted? Won’t there be issues with ambiguity if there are multiple conversations occurring at once? But in practice these potential problems don’t seem to present much difficulty to users. For one thing, most typed utterances are directly adjacent to the utterance they are related to or responding to (Crystal 25). But when they aren’t, users are often looking for the specific lexical terms or phrasing that would be relevant to their earlier message, so they can recognize that some messages in a chat are not being directed towards them (26-27). Users could also clarify their language to ensure clarity of their message, such as addressing a specific recipient or reintroducing the topic in their text (“I can’t” versus “I can’t come to the party”) (Jenks 84, McCulloch 25). 

Furthermore, although the lack of turn monitor might cause some issues for users, texts and chats do offer the advantage of ‘turn recall’ – we are able to scroll back to earlier messages to remember what was said, rather than having to rely on memory as happens in face-to-face conversations (Jenks 79). This allows for more pauses and gaps in chats and allows for multiple conversations to occur at once (85-86). 

As a result of these differences, turn-taking in online chats and texts does differ from turn-taking in face-to-face (FTF) conversations. In FTF conversations, turn transitions between individuals tend to occur near the end of someone’s turn rather than after they are done speaking; in online conversations, turn transitions by necessity occur after someone’s turn, since turn monitor isn’t available (80). Hesitation and restarts are used offline to ensure we are not encroaching on someone’s else’s turn, while in the digital realm any hesitation or restarts that occur will not be seen by the other participants, again due to the lack of turn monitor and simultaneous feedback (83). But these differences don’t seem to inhibit the speed and efficiency with which users are able to have conversations via text or direct message.

 

Sign Language Online

ASL and other signed languages are used online in specific contexts. The largely written format of the internet has for a long time meant sign language users need to use a written language in order to interact with others online. But newer technologies like virtual reality offer a way for speakers of signed languages to have synchronous conversations with each other in sign language. The specific technology involved presents two unique challenges to the language, as explained by TikTok user dillonthecheeseman. The first is that the handheld controllers do not allow for the full range of hand shapes needed to sign or fingerspell. VR users have developed modified fingerspelling signs to overcome this problem. The second issue is that VR does not allow for users to share their facial expressions, which are an important aspect of ASL grammar. Some users have tried using more dramatic body language to replace facial expressions. Since VR is a fairly new technology, we will have to see whether these sorts of modifications change over time or if they will impact offline signing in any way. 

 

Citations

Crystal, David. Internet Linguistics : A Student Guide, Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/smith/detail.action?docID=801579.

Dillonthecheeseman. “I’ll you guys what its like signing in Virtual Reality in a later video! #asl #americansignlanguage #signlanguage #virtualreality #vrsignlanguage #interesting.” TikTok, 23 Jul. 2022, https://www.tiktok.com/@dillonthecheeseman/video/7123725161181924654.

Dillonthecheeseman. “Let me know what you guys think! Would you like to see more VR signing? #asl #americansignlanguage #signlanguage #vr #virtualreality #vrsignlanguage #vrsign #vrasl #vrchat.” Tiktok, 14 Aug. 2022, https://www.tiktok.com/@dillonthecheeseman/video/7131668536522493226. 

Jenks, Christopher J. “Turn-Taking in Chat Rooms: Texting Versus Talking.” Social Interaction in Second Language Chat Rooms, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2014, pp. 76–94.  JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g0b2g8.9. Accessed 14 Sept. 2022.

Jucker, A. H., und C. Dürscheid. „The Linguistics of Keyboard-to-Screen Communication: A New Terminological Framework“. Linguistik Online, Bd. 56, Nr. 6, November 2012, doi:10.13092/lo.56.255.

McCulloch, Gretchen. Because Internet : Understanding the New Rules of Language. Riverhead Books, 2019.

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September 18, 2022 · 8:32 pm

Week 1: Early Studies in Internet Linguistics

For week one, I thought it made the most sense to start at the beginning to see how people have approached the topic of internet linguistics in the past. Because technology changes so quickly, “the past” is here being roughly defined as before 2012.

The materials for this week:

  • Crystal, David. Internet Linguistics : A Student Guide. Chapter 1 pg 1-10
  • Cook, Susan E. “New Technologies and Language Change: Toward an Anthropology of Linguistic Frontiers.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 33, 2004, pp. 103–15.
  • Crystal, David. Language and the Internet, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pg 6-23 
  • Squires, Lauren. “Enregistering Internet Language.” Language in Society, vol. 39, no. 4, 2010, pp. 457–92.

[full citations at the end of the post]

Let’s jump in!

Why is it important to study language on the internet?

There are two primary arguments that the authors I read for this week made about why we should study language on the internet. 

Firstly, the internet allows us to study linguistic interactions in a unique way. Because the internet is majority text-based and often anonymous, users can withhold the visual or auditory markers of gender, age, race, and ethnicity that people take note of when interacting with people offline (Cook 104). 

Secondly, technology is an increasingly omnipresent factor in our everyday lives. It’s good for us to understand it! By understanding it we can make more informed choices when it comes to internet use and management, both as individuals and in the public sphere (Crystal 2011, 7). 

How do we talk about language on the internet?

It’s more complicated than you might think. One early choice was to refer to it as “computer-mediated communication” or CMC for short. However, as David Crystal asserts in Internet Linguistics, this term is too narrow – computers are not the only way we access the internet nowadays, so this term leaves out phones and tablets (2). Terms like “digitally-mediated communication” (DMC) or “electronically-mediated communication” (EMC) are more inclusive, but they are in fact too broad. This is because communication is not synonymous with language (1). Texting someone a selfie might communicate something – be it an emotion, information about one’s location, and so on – but it doesn’t involve using language. 

In the 1990s and early 2000s, netspeak and chatspeak became seemingly common ways to refer to internet language. These two terms are not ideal for my purposes, however, since (1) they presume that all internet users are using English in the same way, and (2) they are tied to particular features that are seen as being emblematic of English on the internet. Lauren Squires expands on this in her 2010 article “Enregistering Internet Language”. Enregisterment is defined as “how a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms” (459). In more accessible terms, it’s how a type of language usage becomes recognized as a distinct variety of language with distinct features. As Squires explains, “Netspeak” and “Chatspeak” are essentially social constructions of what “Internet Language” is thought to be, and the enregisterment of these terms was mostly done by people who were outsiders to the chatrooms and other online spaces where these nonstandard uses of English were occurring (466). 

In my experience ‘chatspeak’ and ‘netspeak’ have now fallen out of fashion anyway and feel pretty dated (I can’t remember the last time I heard someone call the internet “the net”).

So how do we describe language used on the internet? Perhaps a term like  “electronically-mediated language”, EML for short, would be helpful – and we could specify EME for when we’re specifically talking about English. But there is no singular way that English is being used on the internet, and I do worry that using a term like “electronically-mediated language” might imply some sort of homogeneity. In any case, “language on the internet” or “English on the internet”, especially with specifiers for specific contexts, genres, and demographics may be the most accurate (and most easily accessible) way to discuss how people are using language online. 

Things to keep in mind as we discuss language on the internet

Although technology allows for rapid transnational communication, that doesn’t mean internet users don’t exist in a vacuum. Offline events may impact uses of languages just as much as new technologies or sites do, and we should avoid taking a “technological determinism” outlook and assuming that technology has an “inevitable consequence” on how users interact (Cook 108, Squires 461).

We should also be wary of generalizations, as is true in most any field. Internet users come from a variety of backgrounds, so thinking of nonstandard language use as being primarily driven by youth or by uneducated people may cause us to overlook what is objectively occurring (Cook 109, Squires 479-480).  

How do we discuss different aspects of language on the internet?

In Language and the Internet, David Crystal lays out some different categories for language features:

  1. Graphic features: these describe how language is presented and organized, and includes things like font, page design, spacing, and color.
  2. Orthographic/Graphological features: these describe how a language utilizes its writing system, including capitalization, spelling, punctuation, and any type effects (bold, italic, underline, etc).
  3. Grammatical features: these describe the grammar of the language, like its syntax (sentence structure), morphology (word formation), and word order.
  4. Lexical features: these describe the vocabulary being used.
  5. Discourse features: these describe the larger organization of language, like how a text is structured, how it uses coherence and relevance, how it structures paragraphs, and how it progresses and transitions between ideas.

He also adds two other categories for spoken language:

  1. Phonetic features: describes how speech sounds, and includes tone of voice, quality of voice, volume, and so on.
  2. Phonological features: describe how sounds create meaning, and include features like the distinctive use of vowels and consonants, and how one uses intonation, stress, and pauses.

The first five categories will be the most helpful for me this semester.

How does language on the internet differ from offline language?

The internet is a very different forum compared to traditionally published written works. But whether there are specific differences between language on the internet and spoken and written language in other contexts is still somewhat unclear. One’s individual context – the websites being used, the communities one is joining, and so on – will impact how exactly one uses language online, and each online community will use language a bit differently. The language one is using online may not be radically different from the language one uses while speaking and writing offline.

One thing that has not changed in the twenty years since Crystal wrote his 2001 article is that users tend to absorb much more language than they produce, and the internet is “almost entirely dependent on reactions to written messages” (18). An internet user is an unseen audience member taking in a large amount of language, unlike offline face-to-face conversations. But unlike traditional written media, the internet is also interactive. There is the potential to comment, to interject, to edit or correct. Some people have described internet language as a “hybrid variety of language” because it combines features traditionally associated with spoken language and written language (Squires 461-462). 

One commonly cited element of internet language is its vocabulary and writing style – lingo, slang, abbreviations and phonetic spellings. However, the extent to which there is strictly internet lingo is debatable. Abbreviations, acronyms, and nonstandard spellings have long been a part of written English texts, and slang and writing conventions can differ wildly between sites, genres, and age groups. For instance, apostrophe usage can vary greatly between individual users, as can patterns of capitalization and frequency of acronym usage (481-482). Internet language is not a singular variety of language, but rather an umbrella that encapsulates many different ways that people write online. 

Reflections

One fascinating thing from this week was seeing what from these older pieces felt incredibly dated and what held up as still relevant. 

Take, for example, these examples of “terms from underlying computer technology” bleeding into offline conversations, from page 19 of David Crystal’s 2001 book, Language and the Internet:

I recognize three of these terms as they are used in the list – “bandwidth”, “multitasking” and  “get with the program”. The rest feel incredibly dated. As with all slang and new terminology, the number of words/phrases that remained within the general lexicon of English speakers is far smaller than the number of words and phrases which were short-lived and remained within niche groups. 

Let this be a reminder to us that the observations we make about language on the internet apply to a specific context! What’s true five years ago may not be true today, and the language we see on Twitter may not reflect the language we see in texts, emails, or Facebook. 

 

See you next week, where we’ll look at how technology shapes online writing and how it may shape the language and writing conventions of its users.

References

Cook, Susan E. “New Technologies and Language Change: Toward an Anthropology of Linguistic Frontiers.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 33, 2004, pp. 103–15. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25064847. Accessed 15 September 2022.

Crystal, David. Internet Linguistics : A Student Guide, Taylor & Francis Group, 2011, pp. 1-10. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/smith/detail.action?docID=801579.

Crystal, David. Language and the Internet, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp 6-23. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/smith/detail.action?docID=201947. 

Squires, Lauren. “Enregistering Internet Language.” Language in Society, vol. 39, no. 4, 2010, pp. 457–92. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40925792.

 

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