Lauren Squires (second-year PhD student) presented a paper last weekend at the first Interdisciplinary Conference on Culture, Language, and Social Practice, held at the University of Colorado-Boulder.  The conference brought together scholars from many different fields working within sociocultural linguistics, broadly defined.  Lauren’s talk, People who type ”lyk dis all da time”: exploring language ideologies and linguistic artifacts through meta-Netspeak, addressed metadiscourse about language and the internet.

Abstract 
Linguistic variation in computer-mediated discourse (CMD) has received the recent attention of scholars seeking more adequate sociolinguistic approaches to studying the internet (e.g. Paolillo 2001; Raclaw & Squires 2006). This research has worked with impoverished knowledge about speakers’ linguistic orientations to the internet and to text-based variation in general. The internet’s effects on language seem to be of great concern to English speakers around the world, as is well-documented in Thurlow’s (2006) analysis of media reportage about CMD. Yet despite documentation of linguistic variation in online practice (Baron 2005; Raclaw 2006; Squires 2007), there is little analysis of internet users’ own understandings of such variation.

This project explores folk perceptions of CMD, taking folk metalanguage as a fruitful site of language ideologies (see Blommaert & Verschueren 1998; Niedzielski & Preston 2003; Coupland & Jaworski 2004). My point of departure is an interrogation of the concept represented by terms like “Netspeak”: a distinctive variety of language used in CMD (Crystal 2001). I analyze two English-language comment threads formed in response to a published college newspaper column about the internet’s negative effects on English. The threads’ topic is explicitly language used online, hence they represent a fertile source of focused, naturalistic metadiscourse. I first discuss the profile of Netspeak that emerges from the comments: what features does it consist of, and who speaks it? I find that features such as acronyms (< LOL > for < laugh out loud >) and rebus-like letter replacements (< u > for < you >) are highly salient and often subsumed under evaluative categories like “bad grammar,” and that speakers often attribute Netspeak to teenage girls and lazy people. I next discuss language-ideological underpinnings of the comments, namely that “good English” exists and is in danger, though the internet is just one factor contributing to its demise.

Situating this speaker-produced metadiscourse within a larger context of institutionally-driven public discourse about the internet and English, I suggest that these differently-sited metadiscourses echo one another to construct Netspeak as a linguistic artifact (after Preston 1996). In the construction of Netspeak, variation is ignored; of particular interest is the erasure of standard English practiced online, since “Netspeak” effectively equates internet discourse with nonstandard language. The dominant ideology of standard English is reinforced by erasure of the ideologically dominant variety (itself an artifact) from a specific field of discourse, protecting “good English” from the perceived dangers of the internet–a feared social space (see Paradis 2005). I hope to illustrate that language ideologies set sociolinguistic parameters for licensing variation in practice, but that both discourse (linguistic practice) and metadiscourse (talk about practice) are also active mechanisms of ideological production. In explicitly relating ideologies, discourse, and metadiscourse in this way, we are compelled to attend to the dialogue between metadiscourse from different layers of social interaction.

Lauren will be presenting a related paper next week at the 8th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, held in Vancouver, British Columbia.  Her paper will be part of a themed panel she organized, called Mediating Play: Perspectives on Playful Language in Online Discourse.

CLASP-goers take a break from talking about sociocultural linguistics: Madeleine Adkins (UCSB), Lauren Squires (UMich), Bryan Gordon (UMinnesota), Lal Zimman (CU-Boulder), Mary Bucholtz (UCSB), Norma Mendoza-Denton (UArizona), and Lauren Hall-Lew (Stanford). [photo by Jenny Davis]

After successfully defending his dissertation (Shifting Dunes: Changing Meanings of Urdu in India) in August, Rizwan Ahmad joined the faculty of the American University of Kuwait as Assistant Professor of English. In this three-year appointment, he will teach courses in composition and history of the English language.

Rizwan is also currently collaborating with Elabbas Benmamoun of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is a Fulbright fellow at the American University of Kuwait. Their project explores aspects of language and ethnicity in Kuwait, focusing on speakers of Egyptian and Lebanese dialects who were born and raised in Kuwait.

After successfully defending his dissertation in April, Robert Felty started a post-doctoral fellowship at Indiana University in July, under the tutelage of Prof. David Pisoni. The Speech Research Lab at Indiana University has been in operation for over 30 years, and Prof. Pisoni has funded post-docs throughout this time with an NIH training grant. The lab is built in an interdisciplinary and collaborative manner, with a variety of psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, speech and hearing scientists, and linguists.

Robert is currently working on two projects in the lab:

Discovering neighborhoods through recognition errors

In this collaborative project with Adam Buchwald, we have developed a large (> 1400 words) stimulus list which is designed to be representative of the entire English lexicon in terms of lexical frequency, number of syllables, syllable structure, and initial phoneme. We are presenting these materials in open-set word recognition tasks in order to discover what words are actually being activated in the mental lexicon

A new perceptually robust test of spoken word recognition

In this project with David Pisoni, we are developing a new spoken word recognition test battery to be used in clinical situations, which more accurately represents normal communicative situations, by including sources of variation that we commonly encounter, including speaker specific characteristics such as gender and dialectal variation, as well as a variety of degraded listening situations

You can learn more about Robert’s research from his website.

Carmel O’Shannessey received a grant from the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (HRELP), administered by School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, to document a traditional Warlpiri ceremony in northern Australia next summer. The project has supplementary funding from the Warlpiri community, and has been developed in response to a request from community elders.