Sociolinguistics and CMC

[joshua raclaw]

dude, every week is like that.

my advisor has this awesome archnemesis in don kulick, and there's nothing
better than hearing that one of them has just put out another article beating
hell out of the other.  i think we should do it.

i think you could safely say that SC's and CoP's both exist in the online
sphere, and that these will vary by the nature of the mediation, though all of
the literature i've seen (which is three articles and counting) has made
mention of a speech community, if anything.  if you're going to further split
up johnny and sue based on their different attitudes to language, though, i
don't know if i'd even use the notion of community to differentiate them.  i'd
describe those differences as some sort of lect, for sure, more accurately a
CMC-specific register, but the SC tends to be a social and a linguistic
boundary, right?  if you had sue and jackie and jamie and they met together in
chat to discuss battle plans and all talked in the non-standard, and you had
johnny and willard and don and the met together to talk tactics and they all
talked in the standard, well, then you've got two groups you could probably
call SC's.  of course, we're running into the classic problem in the literature
- nobody knows what a fucking speech community is anymore.  if you want to read
up on the CoP, there's a nice reference article by holmes and meyerhoff from
1999 in language in society 28:2.  that probably explains the concept a lot
better than i could.  and when you get to it, let me know how you think the
concept fits in here.

actually, have you ever read the literature out there on imagined communities?
benedict anderson set out the paradigm, and it would be pretty useful in these
parts.  i've referenced it when talking about lesbian speech and the greater
homosexual community, and i think it could be an essential reference in any
work we'd do about online communities.

okay, so no matter what we're calling that group, i think you're right in that
johnny and sue have totally different language ideologies, and that this is
pretty unconscious on both their parts, and that this is something that really
hasn't been overtly explored in detail.  at least, those three articles i've
got down haven't mentioned a damned thing about it.  you get the same level of
unconscious ideology in offline communication, of course, but the actual scope
of linguistic ideologies can be really different.  take the example of error
correction.  in CMC, i think the most common perception of self-correction and
other-iniated correction (are you familiar with conversation analysis at all?
the notion of repair is relevant as hell for this) is that of stiffness. i
don't know how the hell we'd go about proving that empirically, but i think
it's truth.  in FTF interactions, though, self-correction and other-iniated are
much more the norm and are received somewhat differently.  are the reasons
behind this disfluency sociolinguistic, or just constraints of the online
medium, or a mixture of both?  is it cultural, in that our educational
background has been that much more hellbent on proper written than proper
spoken grammar?  and what about the original comparison between sue and johnny?
 are their language norms the effect of cultures that are online, offline, both?

i think that ellipses may index different functions among different groups, but
that the larger pool of possible functions are pretty finite, so the job of
identifying them can't be that bad.  i wonder about the use of other
punctuation-types, though.  i've personally noted that, at least recently,
speakers in the indie/emo scene are overusing the asterisk more than other
speakers, which i'm thinking is largely iconic of the group's aesthetic
fascination with stars - ask a scenester with a hip myspace page and they'll
typically agree.  i wonder about things like the dash and the semicolon,
though.  simple ideolect or social move?  shit if i know.  that might take a
whole lot of data to solve.

the in-group/out-group distinction isn't as difficult as it sounds using the CoP
model - you can be in-group but still not post and still fit into the notion of
the peripheral member, rather than a more participatory core member.  on a
linguistic level, you'd certainly expect to see less in-group slang or jargon
or even particular discourse markers from them, though.  although that is more
of an offline interpretation.  it's probably worth checking out to see if the
same thing happens in online communities.

i wonder if the format for error correction is standardized throughout a
particular group.  i've never really paid attention to it.  how do you think
that this particular feature would function as a discourse marker?

i think you're onto something in that there are lects which don't specifically
index the typical demographics - the oral/written distinction sounds like it
could be interesting.  how would you find/divide a group like that?  are you
basing it on the viewpoints surrounding 'speech' correction?  and then there's
the question of what we're going to call these things.  or what to even call
this paradigm that's beginning to emerge here.  cyberlects and
cybersociolinguistics are a little over the top, though now that i think about
it, i kind of like the notion of the CMC-specific register.  i think the fact
that we even need a term for this notion is validation enough for trying to
build upon existing methodologies to accomodate CMC, especially in that you
have social factors based purely on internet culture to consider.  the above
example of the different norms surround online speech correction and offline
speech correction illustrate that pretty well, no?  i know that anthropology had
that mini-boom of studies on online groups - have they expanded the literature
any in their work?  what's doc keating have to say about that?  do you mind
sending me a copy of your reading list for that course so i can see just what's
out there?

the lame.  i think you're right about the lame being weirded out by smilies and
such.  i wonder if meticulous grammar and correction are an online extension of
some the tendencies of certain FTF registers to superstandardize their speech.
mary bucholtz looked at the speech of self-identified nerds and found they
always shy away from slang and contractions, and never drop their [r]'s or
alveolarize their engmas.  i'd need to see those kids type and see if they're
reflecting those same superstand language ideologies - or maybe sit in on a
star trek chat room or two.

have you considered gendered representations of speech by 'real' male players
using female characters in your game?  i was a dungeons and dragons kid back in
high school, and i'd kill to have had a tape recorder going during the times
that this happened there.  it was interesting - similar to drag, in the way
that the idealized notions of gender were portrayed, but the focus wasn't on
passing as that gender.  it was actually the opposite, better to be recognized
as a fake.  i wonder if passing as a female for that male player is a concern,
even subconsciously, and if so, how this affects their language or in-game
actions.  or if it even does.  or if this varies from player to player, or even
better, from group to group.  it's reeeally interesting that people are
hell-bent on finding 'real' sex identities here.  you get that in chat rooms
constantly.  i did a brief, unofficial, tiny study last year that showed how
guys are much more likely than girls to drop a conversation completely when
they a) find that their conversation partner is a guy too, or b) get a pic and
find that their conversation partner isn't nearly so hot as they hoped.  i
wonder how that plays out in the game dynamic, if at all.

it's worth noting that your black toon grabs the attention of the other black
toons.  i don't know if it's even relevant whether the person behind that toon
is black, because in that online sphere, you both share a marginalized ethnic
identity.  i personally think it's interesting to know these offline
characteristics, but that's taking a completely etic view of things, and i
don't think i want to go there.  at the same time, your linguistic
representation of that black identity is done through the lens of a white
identity, so that has to be considered too.  i take it back.  maybe we have to
go there.  actual speaker identity is relevant here, but it has to be portrayed
as relevant pretty carefully - any ideas on how to find a nice middle ground
when it comes to those concepts?  there's a book on 'race in cyberspace' by
nakamura, kolko, and rodman that may or may not be good, and may or may not
touch upon this.  i'll have to check it out when i don't have the reading load
that i've got this semester. actually, we should probably get into the habit of
recommending articles and books that are actually worth looking over.  have you
seen the article by paolillo on speaker variation in irc?  he references milroy
and milroy, and the analysis is actually sociolinguistic for a change.

it's weird how we don't see people speaking the standard IRL, but people from
marginalized dialect areas will typically view speakers of a more acrolectal
type as sounding standard.  it's also weird that american english has a
standard, when there's no real government institution enforcing it.  we got our
standard from what, grammar books?  i have no idea how we became so
prescriptive.  so this begs the question why the internet isn't nearly so
prescriptive (or do you think it is?) - my mother has impeccable spoken grammar
and has written two masters theses that were outstanding, but you can't instant
message the woman because the text grammar is so bad.  i'm sure this is common
elsewhere, but why?  maybe mom's just a lame too.

is it too out there to say that spoken vernacular is the cmc-text standard?  is
prescriptivism a minority view in the sphere of online communication?  i know
there are more standard mediums than others (professional emails, for example)
- are the changes that occur from that medium to a more casual medium, such as
standard capitalization (haha), standard punctuation, etc. a styleshift of
sorts?

you know, this is a lot of work.

all right, onto my background.  right now i'm a second year master's in the
linguistics department at colorado.  i'm applying to the phd program this
december and anticipate staying here to finish that out, but i'm told that
formally applying to less than three programs is absolute madness.  i'll
probably send one out to either texas or nyu, and one to a UC-something.  from
what i hear the texas funding situation isn't that uncommon, and it's making me
reeeeeeal thankful that phd students here get guaranteed teaching and research
assistantships for at least five years.  i actually lucked out and got a TA
position for an undergrad intro to socioling course this semester, and will
supposedly get the same deal next semester for an undergrad language and gender
course.

haha, with the length of these damned things, it would be a waste not to turn
them into an article or three.  i mean, i'm going to need some reference point
when i start doing some variation fieldwork over the summer.

so what's your theoretical background?  i know you mentioned taking walters'
intro to socio course this year - is your background mostly in ling anth?  i
started looking through your data, and man, that's a lot of data.  for
starters, you've got a lot to work with on the use of language as group
cohesion.  it looks a lot like the IRC logs i've got floating around on my hard
drive just waiting to be looked at - i'm thinking this winter break is going to
be a nice time to pore over those.  any ideas on what you want to focus on for
your group?

joshua




* It’s been a busy week.
*
* I bet we’ll have to duel as well
 or at least get in a shouting match about
* some irrelevant point in order to look cool in front of our “colleagues” at
* some snooty conference. Then I’ll publish an article talking about how your
* ideas suck, and you will reply with an article about how my ideas suck (and
* about how I beat my dog). i will respond in kind about your drunken sex
* orgies with george and babs bush. only then will be ture researchers.  It
* seems to me that everygreat research has to have a nemesis, so we should
* agree now to be arch enemies now. actually, it would be nice if we didn't
* agree on everything.
*
* I think i understand the distinction you’re making between CoP and speech
* communities (SC). Using you definitions, I think that there are both online,
* depending on the nature of the mediation (chat, message board, blog,
* contextualized chat (i.e. in a game), email). The group I’m looking at is not
* aware of their shared language practices. They are very much aware when
* people break the norms that they (and those who “speak” like them) have. For
* instance, I’ve collected a number of examples where people use non-standard
* writing as a point of insult
 Johnny and Sue are arguing about how Sue was
* rude for killing the guy that Johnny was trying to kill (sounds silly but
* lots of arguments in
* the game are based on this). Sue says “i don give a Shiite bout u so stfu”.
* Johnny replies with “Why don’t you try to insult me once you learn how to
* spell. You’re an idiot!”. So while Johnny and Sue aren’t really aware of it,
* they’re ascribing to very different linguistic norms. Now, does this place
* them into a speech community? I’m not entirely sure because there is no sense
* of shared identity amoung the “standard written people” and  the “I’ll write
* like I talk people”. But are they a community of practice? Again, I’m not
* sure because, according to your definition, they certainly are not self
* defined. Do
* you have a reference I can look at for this notion of the CoP?
*
* ---------------------------------
* “i think discourse markers are a good place to start, in particular in-group
* slang and any notable large-scale use of the extralinguistic features
* available to the medium.  it all depends on how we want to draw the line
* between what is and what isn't a linguistic variable - take the use of
* ellipses ... for example.  i don't think there are any studies on its use as
* a discourse marker, or even how its use is patterned and predictable, which
* i'm banking on it being.”
* -----------------------------------
*
* We need to do a study to look and see if discourse markers are indeed
* regular. Do people use ellipsis to the same effect. The colon, the dash, the
* star
 are they context bound (are they different from one
* website/game/message board to another.) These are the kinds of things we need
* to figure out in order to actually define the communites we’re looking at,
* whether we term them CoPs or SCs. In group/out group is also tricky online,
* because there are people who are very much in group, but who may not post
* hardly at all. Where do they fit, especially if we’re looking at their
* language practice?
*
* One way I’ve thought about trying to establish whether or not these kinds of
* discourse markers are standardized is to first begin with one community and
* see if there is a standard practice for doing one task. In my case, this
* would be how people correct their spelling (if they feel the need to do so-
* this in itself is interesting
 when do they change, to who are the talking
* when they change, doi they change regularly). So I’ve seen a number of ways
* people do this: 1) *correct spelling, 2) correct spelling*, 3) “er
 correct
* spelling” etc. There are a number of other ways as well.  Are these discourse
* markers regular? Do the same people do it the same every time? Do they change
* their marking based on what other people in the group are doing? I think that
* we have to answer questions like this before we’re really
* able to define who our communities (SC or COP) are. In FTF, it’s easier. You
* listen and the people, they listen to each other, and they sound different.
* This difference in sound indexes (usually, at least from an emic POV) sex,
* possibly gender, socio staus, geographical orientation, age, etc. It doesn’t
* work like that online
 or maybe it does. It’s tricky.
*
* Dialect. I want to say that there are online dialects that don’t index sex
* geography, social class, etc, but they index different things like how people
* view the internet as a special phenomenon. For instance, those who refer to
* the internet as an oral/aural space, and those that refer to the internet as
* a written/reading space. For instance, do people “say” , “did you hear what I
* said” or “did you read what I wrote”. Do they actually refer to their
* interactions as “saying” or “writing”. From this, they may think of the
* interent as aformal or informal space (mirroring either speaking or writing).
*  These are the kinds of things that people’s language choice indexes online,
* so I
* don’t think we really have dialects here, but I’ve been calling  cyberlects
* (so that I don’t become labov’s archnemesis). By using this new term
* (although it’s pretty weak and trendy to throw “cyber” in front of anything
* internet), we’re able to point to the idea that there is something in common
* between the online and offline without making this commonality explicit.
*
* Hopefully, we’re not talking about idiolects here
 where each person is doing
* their own thing. If this is indeed what we find, then the implication for our
* discussion thus far is pretty catastrophic. Why are we predicting that people
* online will organize themselves linguistically? We have no prescedent, except
* in FTF theories. So for us, I think that methodologically, the main goal is
* to show that it is in fact relevant to extend these FTF theories to the
* internet, as opposed to looking strictly at the interent as a place of text
* and text mediation.
*
* The lame. Actually, I just read an article that sited this study. I’ll check
* it out once I get the time. It sounds to me like it definitely has some
* correlate in the online world. In many cases, I’ll bet the distinction is one
* that I’ve described above
 namely, those who view the interent as a place of
* writing (and standard academic literacy is what I’m talking about here) while
* others see it as a place of speaking (with all of the “errors” associated
* with speech). In many cases, I’ll bet that the lame is lame because they are
* unable to adopt
* non-tradititional writing practices like weird punctuations, smilie useage,
* capitalization norms, etc. (As an aside, I find people who are meticulous
* about their grammar and capitalization and punctuation to be a bit stiff
* online. This ties back into my interest in the language ideologies of other
* people). So I think that by referring to the concept of the lame, it helps to
* bring FTF methods/theory in line with what we’re doing online.
*
* ---------------------------------------------
* do you think the physical characteristics of the way that players are logged
* affect the way that discourse happens?  have you noticed any speaker shifts
* that might be attributed to sex or looks?
* ---------------------------------------------
*
* I don’t really even want to go here. it gets really complex. in some
* situations, the people will all know the "real" sex, age, race of their
* interlocutors. in orhter cases they won't. so their presentation doesn't
* matter in the first instacne, and it may matter in the second instance.
* methodologically, i don't know who you would ascertain whether people know
* each other or not. there are some linguistic clues, but i think you'd have to
* ask them. this compromises your role as sociolinguistic researcher here i
* think (but not as a linguistic
* anthropologist). the elegance of this context is that i can be both
* participant and observer, not participant observer. when i'm actually playing
* the game, i'm not thinking about the linguistics. i'm playing the game,
* working with my team, have a good time, etc. every once in a while i'll take
* a screenshot so that i can remeber the "faces" of the people i interact with.
* then i go back and obsevre the chat logs. by having to ask these people in
* the middle of the game " so, do you know each other... how long... how ofter
* do you guys play the game... what's your real life sex, age, etc.", i'm
* compromising my position as
* participant. it also means that everyone else on my team has to stop playing
* the game and wait for me to do my schpeal.
*
* so, this can get really complicated and I’m not sure how to look at it
* really. but, I’ve noticed some general trends that are interesting. For
* instance, I have a couple black toons, and I tend to get comments from other
* black toons about my outfit, or my story, etc. but I think it’s dangerous to
* try and draw any conclusions about whether or not the person behind the
* screen is in fact black. I have about 9 toons on that game: 1) old sea
* captain, 2) abusive husband turned superhero, 3) abused wife turned
* superhero, 4) female scientist, 5) female “siren”-type creature, 6) female
* incan goddess
 maybe that’s it. I really haven’t noticed whether or not I’ve
* been treated any  ifferently as any of these toons. Of course, when I play
* female toons, at times people make comments about my chest size or the
* shortness of my skirt. But these don’t really have any thing to do with
* language (so far as I can see).
*
* What is a bit interesting is that some people will immediately ask you if
* you’re female IRL (I hate the term by the way but will use it beacsu it’s
* productive) if you’re playing a female toon. I’ve also been asked for my real
* name while playing the game so that they could “refer to me accurately”.
* There are some interesting things going on, but I’m not sure how they tie
* into language use. and this is really where the kind of previous research on
* gaming has gone. more of the online social experiment and questions of
* anonymity.
* --------------------------------------------
* i'm surprised that formal written english is considered the online
* standard,when i've never seen it used in CMC.  for now i'd be wary of calling
* acybervariety anything but a vernacular, which raises the question of how
* todivide the speech styles used on the internet into standard and
* vernacularvarieties.  i wonder if you even can do such a thing - i mean, can
* you everhave a prestige dialect that's universal throughout the medium?
* -------------------------------------------
*
* This is an interesting parallel to the language situation in the US. Who
* exactly speaks the standard American English? While we don’t see people
* speaking it, it certainly exists (albeit in different forms) in the minds of
* speakers. In a sense, it’s how people know that they’re speaking a dialect,
* or that at least they speak something that sounds different from other
* people. That's a good point about who defines the standard online. I have
* always assumed that formal written English to be the standard (as well as all
* the people who write those annoying nettiquete things), and I think that
* those people who don’t speak in this standard are speaking in vernaculars.
* Now, is there one vernacular, or do different communities have their own set
* of norms. This goes back to our question about the definiton of the SC/CoP.
* But again, there isn’t any work done on establishing what people believe is
* the standard online. right there is a study. what is the standard for what
* context? is the
* standard contextually bound? moving back, IS there a standard, or an imagined
* standard? is there neither (although i don't see how this can be the case).
* This question really needs to be answered before we can even begin to talk
* about variation.
*
* *Sigh* so much work to do :(
*
* And our coorespondences could be turned into an publishable article you know
* :) we'd need to add some references and get some faculty feedback, but i
* think it may be worth our time. even if we didn't publish it, it would be a
* good exercise to help solidify our agreements and disagreements and figure
* out where we want our research to go, and what we want it to encompass (along
* with what it will not encompass).
*
*
* --
* Josh Iorio, 2nd year PhD Student
* Department of Linguistics
* University of Texas at Austin
* 519A Calhoun Hall
* http://personal.ecu.edu/iorioj
*
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