The Language of Online Intercultural Community Formation

Abstract

This article examines how linguistic interaction patterns changed over time among a geographically and ethnically diverse group of young people in an online virtual community, the Junior Summit '98 online youth forum. The tools of word frequency and content analyses are paired with evidence from post‐hoc interviews. Results demonstrate the ways in which these young people from different cultural, linguistic, and socio‐economic backgrounds increasingly constituted themselves as a community, speaking in the collective voice, converging on a linguistic style, and concurring on the topics of conversation, the goals of the group, and strategies for achieving them.

Visualizing real-time language-based feedback on teamwork behavior in computer-mediated groups

“…For example, higher rates of agreement words (e.g. yes, agree, ok) can predict low peer ratings on Bales and Cohen's [1] scale for evaluating teamwork practices [27]; the use of individual versus collective pronouns ('I' vs. 'we') can indicate a sense of group belonging [7]; and the use of reasoning expressions can indicate focus on the group task [46].…”

Putting Social Context into Text: The Semiotics of E‐mail Interaction

“…Following Labov (1966Labov ( , 1994, the study of sociological factors in linguistic variation has become the concern of current mainstream sociolinguists (Gal 1989(Gal , 1995Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998;Cook 2004). Our study thus contributes to recent efforts in sociolinguistics to understand how language is changing in e-mail communication (e.g., Herring 1996bHerring , 2002Baron 2000;Crystal 2001;Cassell and Tversky 2005).…”

How to Win a World Election: Emergent Leadership in an International Online Community

“…The use of 'we' words is of particular interest because it can be seen as an index of community building and thus, on an individual level, a signifier of allegiance to a group. In this same population, the use of "we" increased over the first three months of the forum for all participants while "I" decreased (Cassell and Tversky 2005). In addition to demonstrating individual versus group identity (i.e, "I" vs. "we"), pronouns are also thought to be indicative of a person's level of focus or involvement with others (Pennebaker, Mehl et al 2003).…”