Robin Queen and Lauren Squires both presented papers at the 17th Sociolinguistics Symposium, which was held at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam.
Lauren’s paper:
Keeping it offline: the metadiscursive erasure of Standard English from the internet
The semiotic process of erasure has proven a useful tool in understanding how language ideologies emerge and are maintained in various sociolinguistic settings (Irvine and Gal 2000). Erasure is a process whereby some aspect of a linguistic situation - whether a social group, linguistic feature, or style/variety - is rendered invisible to speakers, creating the image of a situation that is consistent with speakers’ language ideologies. Typically, the practices or existence of subordinate groups have been those shown to be the objects of erasure. As Bucholtz (2001) has noted, we have not commonly seen in-depth discussion of dominant languages, linguistic features, or sociolinguistic groups made to seem absent or irrelevant. Such erasure may happen in different ways, or for different ideological reasons, than the erasure of non-dominant language aspects.
This project addresses this kind of erasure through an analysis of metadiscourse about language and the internet. I examine a pair of public comment threads from the internet, both representing readers’ responses to a published college newspaper column about the internet’s negative effects on the English language. Examining the metadiscursive construction of “Netspeak” (Crystal 2001) as a language variety, I focus on how Netspeak is conceived by speakers as related to English, written English, and Standard (in folk terms, “correct” or “good”) English. My paper will home in on two main aspects of the discourse in the data. First, Netspeak is framed as a distinct variety that is used online, which is also negatively valued in juxtaposition to Standard English (echoing Thurlow’s [2006] findings about mass media reports on computer-mediated communication). Second, while Netspeak is generally looked down upon, commenters often claim that it is acceptable so long as it is contained in the online sphere and does not leak into other domains of linguistic practice, including formal writing or spoken language.
I argue that such discourse erases any association of the internet with Standard English, and I suggest that what enables this erasure is the very existence of “Netspeak” as a linguistic artifact (after Preston 1996). The concept of “Netspeak” equates the variety strictly with online discourse: Netspeak happens online, and conversely, Standard English happens offline. The dominant ideology that values Standard English (see Milroy 2001) is reinforced by Standard English’s erasure from a specific field of discourse, protecting “good English” from the internet. I discuss the intersection of two sets of relevant ideologies: ideologies about language, wherein Standard English is to be valued and change is seen as socially threatening, and ideologies about the internet, which is considered a frightening or anomalous social space (Paradis 2005). This intersection is locatable in metadiscourse, a crucial mechanism in processes of erasure and ideological production.
Robin’s paper
“Why are hoomans so stupit?”: Written linguistic variation and blogging as the family dog
Despite significant interest in how written linguistic variation provides insights into various kinds of sociolinguistic processes (Preston 1985; Jaffe and Walton 2000; Preston 2000; Johnstone 2004; Nguyen 2005; Androutsopoulos 2000; Baron 2004; Herring and Paolillo 2006), the assumption has generally been that written variation represents writers’ ideologies concerning spoken variation and its associations with particular social characteristics. However, it is also possible to use written variation to denote social relations that have no clear antecedent in the spoken language. For instance, written variation has been used since at least the 19th century to represent beings who do not normally use language, such as family pets (Grier 2006). Unsurprisingly, there has been little previous attention paid to this kind of variation; however, focusing on the ways people construct the voice of a non-human animal opens a potentially important window into how social meaning generally becomes connected to, and manipulated by, linguistic variation. This is particularly true in the case of family dogs since dogs constitute an undeniable social “other” while at the same time constituting an intimate social interactant often considered to be a “member of the family.”
In this paper, I focus on data from weblogs written in the voice of the family dog, relying on a corpus of 20 blogs (422 posts; 88771 words) randomly selected from the Dogs with Blogs index (http://www.dogswithblogs.com.au). Specifically, I show that the use of phonetic respellings and other non-standard orthographic and grammatical elements represents a complex set of meanings tied to the representation of social difference on the one hand and social affiliation on the other. The linguistic elements include colloquial respellings (e.g. gonna); phonetic respellings (e.g. wuz), prosodic respellings (e.g. SOOOOO), graphic substitutions (e.g. 4 for “for”), non-standard grammar (e.g. it’s hards), novel pronouns (e.g. anydog) and kinship terminology (e.g. my human brother). I show that the dog’s voice depends on creatively using written variation to represent the social affiliation that humans typically have with their companion animals (e.g. Mom gave me her chicken skin jus cuz she luvs me) while simultaneously representing the unquestionable social (and essential) differences between dogs and humans (e.g. my peepol are always doing the wierdest stuff. i will never unnerstand them.) Because a focus on voicing non-human animals forces the examination of linguistic variation independently of human social configurations, such as gender, ethnicity or social class, it necessarily turns attention to a more generalized model of the relationship between linguistic variation and social meaning based more broadly on social differentiation and affiliation. By examining a practice such as dog blogging, this study provides new insights into exactly these meanings and heeds a recent call by Kohn (2007) to explore the semiotic processes that emerge out of human entanglements with other living beings, especially companion animals.
