The Sociolinguistics of Digital Englishes

Patricia Friedrich, Eduardo Diniz de Figueiredo

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317399391
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Languages & Linguistics
• Sous-sujet: Linguistics

The Sociolinguistics of Digital Englishes introduces core areas of sociolinguistics and explores how each one has been transformed by the current era of digital communication and the Internet. Addressing the changing dynamics of English(es) in the digital age, this ground-breaking book:

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• discusses the spread of English and its current status as a global language;

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• demonstrates how key concepts such as language change, speech communities, gender construction and code-switching are affected by digital communications;

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• analyzes examples of the interaction of Englishes and social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Urban Dictionary; and

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• provides questions for discussion and further reading with each chapter.

Accessible and innovative, this book will be key reading for all students studying sociolinguistics and digital communication or with an interest in language in the globalized multimedia world.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Language, Englishes, and technology in perspective

This chapter will help you understand that:

1. Language use is a social activity, and humans are part of networks and speech communities.
2. Englishes spread through several different waves of influence, including during the industrial revolution, in the post-World War II period, and with the development of the Internet.
3. Linguistic change and technological advancement have often had a close historical connection.
4. The Internet caused us to fuse oral and written modes of communication and thus adopt new norms and strategies for effective interaction.
5. Dialects, both in the real world and the digital world, can be construed to be as large as a nation and as small as a person.
6. The English language has spread so far that it has become both many Englishes and a global language.
7. New communication technologies tend to bring about fears regarding the future of language.
8. Questions about standard language are better addressed if we take into consideration issues of power and attitude; Internet standards are no exception.

Language: A prequel

The details surrounding the origin of human languages are much disputed in linguistic circles. We often joke that the absence of recording devices (and apps!) makes it very hard for us to indicate with any precision the exact moment humans started to engage in oral communication. Several researchers claim humans have used language for at least many thousands of years, while others date language as existing even earlier.

The human capacity to produce language depends on both brain function and, in the case of oral communication, suitability of the speech apparatus, that is, the group of organs and structures involved in speech such as the mouth, the tongue, and the larynx with its attached vocal cords. Hence, not only does the brain need to be ready for language, but also the parts of the body involved in speech have to have certain characteristics to be able to produce the complex sounds of natural languages. Natural languages stand in contrast to artificial ones: while the former emerge unplanned and unpremeditated given the communicative needs of a population and the natural evolution from ancestor languages, the latter are created “on purpose” for a given end. Such is the case of computer-programming languages used for coding purposes, or Esperanto, a romance-based language created in the 1880s by Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof and envisioned to become a lingua franca and an element of international understanding.

Were artificial languages to be used in the world within the same parameters of natural languages, they would be subject to the same dynamics of change, competition, and invention. That is, natural and artificial languages alike, once linked to the societies they serve, behave in patterns that can be described by sociolinguistics, that is, the study of language in society, and can be predicted and observed. A big part of the central argument in this book is that we can change the language, the medium, and the users, and yet core language dynamics remain the same regardless, allowing us to make certain predictions about the behavior of language use in context. For example, it is observable that when a group of users of one language moves to an area/country where another language is used, the second generation of users born in the new place tends to be the one to lose the original language by more uniformly adopting the new one (the first generation is often bilingual). Likewise, we can predict that youth language will usually have a transformative power and a central role in language innovation. Finally, sociolinguists can predict that language change will happen to any living language. Only dead languages such as Latin do not change any longer.

As for writing, many of us will have seen pictures of the early drawings found in caves and carved in stone. Evidence of (written) counting dates back to about 9,000 years ago, while the development of writing itself is currently dated around 3500–3000 BC, pending, of course, a momentous discovery of even earlier evidence. We have come to live in a highly literate society (the fears that “standards” are declining notwithstanding), and as we will see in this book, writing has taken over several functions of synchronic communications, which were traditionally more often associated with oral modes.

No matter how we look at it, it is clear that language (the ability for it) and languages (as distinct entities) have been around for a long time; language is also a defining feature of our humanity, the aptitude for verbal communication further inserting us in a community of our peers and giving us an additional ability to be part of a collective, in which we can express our wants, our feelings, our fears, and our aspirations.

Human beings are part of speech communities, that is, groups of people who share similar linguistic varieties and use language for specific purposes. In our professions (those we can call communities of practice; Lave and Wenger, 1991), social circles, families, and hobbies, we develop certain language skills and features to better communicate with those around us, and we can speculate that fine-tuning our language to serve the society in which we live has been an element of our linguistic life from the early stages of human oral communication.

But to begin this book, we will skip most of such formative years. We will also jump over the development of the ancestors of English, especially Proto-Indo European (PIE), the reconstructed common antecedent of all of the Indo-European languages, likely spoken from around 3700 BC. We will leave out many years of invasions of Britain by Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and Jutes, and subsequent incursions by Normans, too. We will flash by the continual waves of Latin and French influence, the history of contact with Old Norse, even if in modern times we find opportunity to study the results of such instances of language contact (for more on the history of English, refer to Gramley, 2012).

We will do all of this jumping ahead because, while the history of language and the advent of Old and Middle English are fascinating and important, we are in this book interested in studying the intersection of language and contemporary technology, and especially what happens when we put the English language and digital media together, especially on the Internet. We are interested in providing a description of digital communication fitted into a sociolinguistics framework and a world Englishes perspective.

As for technology itself, we will also skip over an intriguing history, which includes the first tablets for counting, invented much earlier than our ubiquitous digital tablets, and whose earliest example available dates back to about 300 BC. The tablet anteceded the abacus, which in turn is the early inspiration for our modern computers. These histories, of language and technology, have always had points of intersection, and in this book, we are bringing them together again. After all, what is sociolinguistics if not a systematic study of how language interacts with the most important social aspects of life in a given place and time?

In a way, this work is the result of our asking the following question: given the sociolinguistics of English(es) in the “real world,” what happens to this flexible, adaptable, resulting-from-multiple-influences language when we observe its dynamics in the “virtual world”? Our main effort is neither to condemn nor to endorse digital uses of English, but rather, since they are a significant part of our current sociolinguistic reality, to observe, describe, and try to attribute linguistic meaning to them. If, at times, such attribution sounds subjective, it is because it is; we are aware that complete objectivity (especially when it comes to issues in the humanities and social sciences) is not possible (or even desirable). We are human beings observing human behavior, so in a manner of speaking, we are researchers and the researched at the same time. On the other hand, we are critical of a few specific phenomena, such as trolling and flame wars, because they do not contribute to communication and understanding; we do, however, need to understand the sociolinguistic aspects of them to avoid them where possible and educate self and others as needed.

A complete appreciation of this or any broad topic is no easy task. The more we know, the more we realize there is to know. In our time, the sources and the raw material for linguistic investigation are interminable. Since the advent of the Internet, any exhaustive coverage of an issue is in the very least exhausting and more likely impossible. If the subject matter is the Internet itself, we can pretty much assume that every time we look, our object of study will have already changed and multiplied several times. We do not think that invalidates any systematic study: quite the opposite, because technology changes the way we live, and it is important to document such change before things adjust once more! And because we are claiming linguistic dynamics are pretty stable, the knowledge we gain from investigations of the present can help us interpret what happened in the past and envision what can happen in the future.

So our primary goal is not to comprehend the whole of the Internet in relation to English use, but rather to document and look at certain sociolinguistic phenomena that we normally observe in the world around us and see if the dynamics, the processes, and the terms we use elsewhere can be applied to some of the trends we now experience virtually. If we focus on language dynamics, what we find does not have to be self-limiting; it will inform us about the mechanisms through which language and societies change beyond the particular environment in question. Do people use English creatively when they communicate online? Absolutely. Does the language change as a result of that? Without a doubt. Does English influence, and is it influenced by, other languages it meets online? Most certainly.

When we observe a linguistic phenomenon, such as the ones we observe on the Web, and report on what we see (i.e., the ways people use language and the way they interact), we are usually within the realm of linguistic descriptivism. For instance, if we take inventory of the specific linguistic features of the discourse of a given speech community (e.g., gamers, sports enthusiasts, technology majors), we are within the realm of description. A speech community, as Gumperz (1968:381) points out, is “any human aggregate characterized by regular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregates by significant differences in language usage.” Descriptivism involves observing and analyzing, without passing too much judgment, the habits and practices within speech communities, focusing on language users and uses without attempting to get them to modify their language according to standards external to the language itself. Descriptive linguistics aims to understand the ways people use language in the world, given all of the forces that influence such use. Prescriptivism lies at the other end of this continuum and is usually associated with stipulating rules and norms for language use. When we utter rules such as “Do not end a sentence with a preposition” or “Do not split your infinitives,” we are engaging in linguistic prescriptivism; when, on the other hand, we explain that “Out of 10 blog posts analyzed, 9 contained sentence structures ending in prepositions,” we are in the realm of descriptivism. See Table 1.1 for additional examples of descriptivism and prescriptivism.

Table 1.1 The difference between descriptivism and prescriptivism

Descriptivism	Prescriptivism
e.g., Soda, soda pop, and pop are all found in American English and tend to be geographically distributed.	e.g.,When referring to a kind of fizzy drink, people should use the word soda.
e.g., Some words that are considered “uncountable” in American and British English are often pluralized in Indian English (for instance, staffs)	e.g.,You should never pluralize uncountable nouns.

Like every language user, English users fall within different points of this continuum depending on both their personal/professional beliefs about language and on the situation of communication in question. A teacher of academic writing, for example, probably engages with prescriptivism more often and to a greater degree while grading compositions and providing feedback to students than when chatting online (although oftentimes, language teachers report revising and editing their comments before and after posting). If that is the case, the teacher is in a way indicating that she/he has a good level of awareness of purpose and audience. That is, the purpose and audience of academic compositions usually require greater standardization than informal chats. Every user of language is already engaged in some level of adaptation to the context of communication, even those people who are not very aware of doing so. That is, we all have a socially acquired knowledge of what linguistic elements work better in different environments, in a way learning by experience, avoiding those choices that were not successful in the past, and investing in those that gave us the results we wanted.

For instance, if we notice the language forms we use for talking to our grandparents, our teachers, our kids, and a close friend, we will realize that they vary in vocabulary, syntax, style, and a number of other linguistic features. A certain degree of trial and error, as well as awareness of purpose and audience, gets us to such differences. Chances are that our utterances were better received when they complied with people’s perceptions of what was called for in those situations, and thus we learned to use them the way we do through reinforcement. To an extent, rules of grammar and rules of usage were externally prescribed to us through stimulus and response: use a standard form in a test and you get a high grade; break the rules and the grade will go down. Speak too formally at an informal social gathering, and you can stifle the conversation; use fresh, context-appropriate slang and people will respond positively, smile, and look relaxed. Because sometimes users of languages forget that external standardization markers and internal linguistic rules are different things, we will often in this book remind you that whether we look at languages prescriptively or descriptively, these languages have an internal system and consistency regardless of external prescribed norms; languages are, therefore, rule-governed, even when such internal consistency differs from the more educated norm, what we call the acrolect. As Brinton (2000:6) puts it, “Language consists of signs ...