Congratulations, Lauren Squires
Lauren Squires’ Qualifying Research Paper, “Language ideology and the enregisterment of ‘Netspeak’ has been approved by her readers and she now advances to doctoral candidacy.
Congratulations Lauren!
Abstract
This paper investigates the enregisterment (Agha 2003, 2005, 2007) of “Netspeak,” characterized as a unique variety of language used on the internet. Two types of metadiscursive data about language and the internet are presented: print media discourse and online comment threads. These discourses represent “Netspeak” as an identifiable set of linguistic and orthographic forms such as abbreviations, phonetically-based spellings, and a general lack of standard English writing practices. Yet instant messaging conversations, a third type of data, show that few of these features are consistently found in online discourse. Consequently, the paper highlights differences between “Netspeak” and other cases of enregisterment (e.g., Agha 2003; Johnstone et al. 2006), namely that the enregisterment of “Netspeak” features does not presuppose their sociodemographic distribution. Rather, “Netspeak” is enregistered centrally through its ideologically-grounded construal as a variety in contradistinction to “Standard English.” I introduce “Netspeak” as a conceptual artifact of a language variety, arguing that such artifacts can play key roles in processes of enregisterment, carrying primacy over what have typically been considered first-order indexical properties such as sociodemographic distributions or pragmatic functions (cf. Silverstein 2003).