So sick or so cool? The language of youth on the internet

Abstract

This article presents the results of a two-year study of North American youth which produced a 179,000 word corpus of internet language from the same writers across three registers: email, instant messaging, and phone texting. Analysis of three linguistic phenomena—(i) acronyms, short forms, and initialisms; (ii) intensifiers; and (iii) future temporal reference—reveals that despite variation in form and contrasting frequencies across registers, the patterns of variant use are stable. This offers linguistic evidence that there is no degeneration of grammar in internet language use. Instead, the young people are fluidly navigating a complex set of new written registers, and they command them all. (Internet, language change, youth)*

Textese and Singlish in multiparty chats

“…Within the textism variants of laughter, lol and haha are the most popular in terms of occurrence in the data. Based on a total occurrence of 55 laughter textisms, lol and its related variants lolx and lol z registered 34 occurrences while haha and its variants hahaa and haahaaa registered 14 occurrences, similar to Tagliamonte's () finding that lol and haha are the most popular laughter variants. Tagliamonte () accounts for the popularity of lol over haha by arguing that lol was used as a phatic filler.…”

“…Based on a total occurrence of 55 laughter textisms, lol and its related variants lolx and lol z registered 34 occurrences while haha and its variants hahaa and haahaaa registered 14 occurrences, similar to Tagliamonte's () finding that lol and haha are the most popular laughter variants. Tagliamonte () accounts for the popularity of lol over haha by arguing that lol was used as a phatic filler. She compared data recorded in 2009 and 2010 and noticed a shift from an equal occurrence of lol across three positions, namely, closing of a turn, stand alone, and initial position of a turn, to higher frequencies in closing position and stand alone position.…”

“…Her findings support the hypothesis that the formal nature of email discourages textisms while the space constraint of SMS encourages text entry reduction and brevity of every word to its minimal intelligible form. Although Tagliamonte () did not account for the similar numbers of textism occurrences in instant messaging and SMS, we can deduce that the more prevailing maxim of brevity and speed in multiparty quasi‐synchronous chat would similarly encourage abbreviated messages. Grace and Kemp's () seminal meta‐analysis of textism categorization used by various studies concluded that textese can be analyzed according to a typological framework of three major categories of textism types, namely, contractive, expressive and other textism types.…”

“…In an affirmative study across three computer‐mediated communication registers, namely email, instant messaging and SMS, Tagliamonte () found that contractive textisms are statistically higher in instant messaging and SMS than in email. Her findings support the hypothesis that the formal nature of email discourages textisms while the space constraint of SMS encourages text entry reduction and brevity of every word to its minimal intelligible form.…”

Analysis of the presence of Anglicisms in a Spanish internet forum: some terms from the fields of fashion, beauty and leisure

“…Discussion forums are a perfect way to interact with other people, as well as to share or exchange information and publish news, among other activities. Despite the numerous studies that have been referred to above, so far not many pieces of research have focused on the analysis of Anglicisms in the particular context of Internet forums: for instance, Garley and Hockenmaier (2012) reported on the use of Anglicisms in a German hip hop forum; Zhang (2015) examined multilingual creativity in a Chinese microblog, Shanghai Release, involving English among other languages; Crespo-Fernández (2015) examined the use of taboo and euphemistic words in some Internet forums; Tagliamonte (2016) has recently studied the linguistic uses of the Internet by North American youth focusing on different linguistic aspects, such as acronyms and intensifiers. All these studies have contributed to shedding some light on this fascinating field of research, which is constantly developing as social media technologies expand in the contemporary world.…”