Language Change And Digital Media Preprint

Chapter for Language Standardisation in Europe, ed. by Nik Coupland & Tore Kristiansen; date of this version: 16-8-2011

Language change and digital media: a review of conceptions and evidence
Jannis Androutsopoulos
University of Hamburg
INTRODUCTION
While writing this chapter, two personal experiences illustrated language change in computermediated communication (CMC): First, I conducted a quick survey among 20 students taking a course on CMC, in which all of them reported using emoticons and around 90 per cent also reported using written prosody and expressive punctuation in their private CMC exchanges.
The students reported lower frequencies for these features in public CMC contexts, while differences by gender were rather insignificant. Second, I attended a comic interpretation of
Romeo and Julia recontextualized in the digital era. The play’s dialogues were now carried out on facebook walls, with the protagonists’ entries sprinkled with emoticons such as ‘ :-/ ’, laughter acronyms such as rotfl (‘rolling on the floor laughing’), expressive punctuation, and the like. If a discussion of language change and digital media focused on just features of this kind, we could safely assume that a process of change has largely been completed. These anecdotal observations suggest that certain new features of written language are part of the usage of a generation sometimes called the ‘digital natives’, and subject to mediatised stylisation and popular representation. But such a narrow view of language change in digital media is unsatisfactory. It lacks embedding into a broader picture of sociolinguistic change, which would consider written language in its own right, deconstruct the very notion of ‘language’ into various domains of language practice, and distinguish potential trajectories of change within online written usage, from digital to non-digital written language, or to spoken usage.
Questions and scenarios of this kind circulate in the transnational research

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