Technology and language change Flashcards
What was the role of technology in 20th and 21st century language change
provided greater language choices for people in some situations alongside limiting expression in others. The speed at which technology has had huge implications for lexis, grammar, orthography and phonology. Prescriptivist, like Lindsay Johns, would point to the easy spread of “ghetto grammar” as destructive, while descriptivist, David Crystal, states that the Internet is the largest corpus of English vocabulary that has ever existed. Neologisms would traditionally take approximately 10 years to become embedded in the language but, today, a new word can be introduced through online written or spoken text in seconds and, within a few days, an online search could produce thousands of results, accelerating Chen’s S curve language model of codification.
what did text messaging do ?
Text messaging was initially introduced as SMS (short message service) added to mobile phones in the 1990s to ease communication for engineers. However, people quickly recognised the affordances of this technology and adapted it to suit their social and personal needs. Use of text messaging technology has produced a written form of digital talk that employs many of the features of spoken language that is both creative and innovative. The speed and ease of communication has afforded many different language practices, from the formal announcements by schools to parents about weather conditions using standard grammar orthography punctuation and lexis to the informal register of BlackBerry Messenger blamed by MP’s on the police for coordinating the devastating London riots of 2011.
SMS originally had a 160 character limit which led users to adopt creative lexis, orthography, graphology grammar and punctuation
what did Crystal identify?
punctuation marks and letters adapted to express feelings: emoticons such as :)
multi word sentences and response sequences minimised to initialisms and acronyms: IDK and YOLO
homophonic representations: single letters and numbers representing the sounds of words: M8 brackets mate close brackets.
Vernacular writing on the Internet
Writing is central to digital communication and the range of communication is vast from blogs, to search engines, websites, social media chat rooms and forums among others. Mary Hamilton and David Barton (1998) refer to blogs and other forms of everyday writing as vernacular literacy practices. These practices provide interesting examples of people’s language. For example, their informal register facilitates the mimicking of colloquial language. Blogs are a form of online diary with an audience as potentially large as the internet can facilitate. Many bloggers gain enormous followings and showing the continuation of their blog and shaping the agenda and style of language used by the writer: for example, a range of additional features are included such as discussion boards and hyperlinks.
Social networking sites-Susan Herring (2007)
defined computer mediated communication as ‘predominantly text based human to human interaction mediated by network computers or mobile telephony’. Although the written form is the dominant form, social networking sites are multimodal and allow users to share personal information about themselves such as photographs and details of their interests to develop virtual connections or friendships there are many examples of social networking sites such as Facebook and Instagram. Users can communicate synchronously or asynchronously by leaving personals statuses or post that can be read later.
Microblogging and Crystal
Microblogging sites like Twitter/X, Instagram and Snapchat allow videos, photographs, comments and posts to be accessed almost synchronously. Platforms such as Instagram Stories and Snapchat allow users to create content that disappears after a short period of time, again bringing this type of communication closer to speech than writing.
Features of Twitter/X include:
140 character limit per tweet.
Hashtags to signify other tweets on the same topic.
Elliptical sentences (you ok?), sentence fragments.
Crystal (2011) found that the majority of tweets were simple observations followed by advertising; those intended to develop personal relations were in the minority.
