Analyzing online communication from a social network point of view: questions, problems, perspectives

This programmatic paper investigates the possibilities, chances, and risks of analyzing personal and professional online communication from the point of view of interactional sociolinguistics combined with modern social network analysis (SNA). Thus, it has two complementing goals: One is the exploration of adequate, innovative concepts and methods for analyzing online communication, the other is to use online communication and its ontological and functional specificities to enrich the conceptual and methodological background of SNA. The paper is organized in two parts. It begins with an introduction to recent developments in sociolinguistic social network analysis. Here, three interesting new concepts and tools are discussed: latent versus emergent networks (Watts 1991), coalitions (Fitzmaurice 2000a, Fitzmaurice 2000b), and communities of practice (Wenger 1998

Chinese Internet language: A sociolinguistic analysis of adaptations of the Chinese writing system

This paper examines the adaptations of the writing system in Internet language in mainland China from a sociolinguistic perspective. A comparison is also made of the adaptations in mainland China with those that Su (2003) found in Taiwan. In Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), writing systems are often adapted to compensate for their inherent inadequacies (such as difficulty in input). Su (2003) investigates the creative uses of the writing system on the electronic bulletin boards (BBS) of two college student organizations in Taipei, Taiwan, and identifies four popular and creative uses of the Chinese writing system: stylized English, stylized Taiwanese-accented Mandarin, stylized Taiwanese, and the recycling of a transliteration alphabet used in elementary education. According to Coupland (2001; cited in Su 2003), stylization is “the knowing deployment of culturally familiar styles and identities that are marked as deviating from those predictably associated with the current speaking context”. Within this framework and drawing on the data in previous publications on Internet language and online sources, this study identifies five types of adaptations in mainland China’s Internet language: stylized Mandarin (e.g., 漂漂 piāopiāo for 漂亮 ‘beautiful’), stylized dialect-accented Mandarin (e.g., 灰常 huīcháng for 非常 ‘very much’), stylized English (e.g., 伊妹儿 yīmèier for ‘email’), stylized initials (e.g., bt 变态 biàntài for ‘abnormal’; pk, short form for ‘player kill’), and stylized numbers (e.g., 9494 jiùshi jiùshi 就是就是 ‘that is it’). The Internet community is composed of highly mobile individuals and thus forms a weak-tie social network. According to Milroy and Milroy (1992), a social network with weak ties is often where language innovation takes place. Adaptations of the Chinese writing system in Internet language provide interesting evidence for the innovations within a weak-tie social network. Our comparison of adaptations in mainland China and Taiwan shows that, in maximizing the effectiveness and functionality of their communication, participants of Internet communication are confronted with different language resources and situations, including differences in Romanization systems, English proficiency level, and attitudes towards English usage. As argued by Milroy and Milroy (1992), a weak-tie social network model can bridge the social class and social network. In the Internet community, the degree of diversity of the stylized linguistic varieties indexes the virtual and/or social status of its participants: the more diversified one’s Internet language is, the higher is his/her virtual and/or social status.