Textese and Singlish in multiparty chats

Abstract

Prior research has shown that orthographic Singlish often occurs with textese features in asynchronous Internet registers. This article presents findings from multiparty chats among Singapore youths, which suggest that a principle of decipherability governs the textisms based on standardized Singapore English and Singlish. Most textisms were contractive due to the pressure to abbreviate messages to keep up with the rapidity of multiparty chats, although orthographic Singlish was largely not abbreviated. The results indicate that the preponderance of abbreviation in standardized Singapore English and the relative dearth of abbreviation may be explained by the effects of ‘abbreviation asymmetry’ as an enregistered variable distinguishing the two Englishes.

Digital communication, social media, and Englishes

“…The journal World Englishes has previously published several articles related to the Internet and computer‐mediated communication including Pandey (, the Ebonics debate on an electronic bulletin board); Dimova (, computer‐related English loanwords on Macedonian business websites); Hardy and Friginal (, Filipino and American opinion columns and blogs); Troyer (, English in Thai online newspapers); Zhang (, multilingual creativity in Chinese microblogging); Ai and You (, syntactic features of English on an online discussion forum); Daud and Mclellan (, linguistic choices in Bruneian Facebook status updates); and Ong (, Singlish textese in multiparty chats). However, more contemporary social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube are hardly discussed as a main topic in the journal.…”