Researching Language and

Digital Communication

This student guide is an introduction to research on language and digital

communication, providing an overview of relevant sociolinguistic
concepts, analytical frameworks, and methodological approaches
commonly used in the field. The book is a practical guide designed
to help students develop independent research projects on language
and digital communication. Topics covered include: the emergence of
research on Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), interactional
affordances and the design infrastructures of digital platforms, prac-
tical and ethical guidance in designing and implementing a research
project on digital communication, contemporary approaches in the
sociolinguistics of digital communication such as Computational
Sociolinguistics (CS) and interactional analyses, and the impact of
social and digital media on language change.
Chapters are organised thematically, each supplemented with
examples from various platforms and sociolinguistic contexts, as well
as further reading and activities to scaffold students’ learning.
The interdisciplinary relevance of this topic makes it a key reading
for students from A-​ level English language to undergraduate and
postgraduate students in linguistics, English language, media studies,
digital culture, and communications.
Additional online resources are available on the Routledge Language
and Communication Portal.

Christian Ilbury is a Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of

Edinburgh. His research focusses on the interrelation of digital culture
and language variation and change, with a concentration on the lin-
guistic and digital practices of young people.
Researching
Language
and Digital
Communication
A Student Guide

Christian Ilbury
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© 2025 Christian Ilbury

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781032490113 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781032457499 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003391838 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003391838

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by Newgen Publishing UK

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langu​agea​ndco​mmun​icat​ion
To my students, my mentors, and my family.
Contents

1 Introduction 1
1.1 About this Book 1
1.2 About the Chapters 4
1.3 Conventions 6
1.4 References 6

2 Digital Communication and Sociolinguistics 7

2.1 Introduction 7
2.2 What is Digital Communication? 9
2.3 What is Sociolinguistics? 13
2.4 Computer Mediated Communication 18
2.4.1 A New Variety? 23
2.4.2 Beyond ‘Internet Language’ 26
2.5 Current Approaches in Sociolinguistics 27
2.5.1 Offline-​Online 28
2.5.2 ‘TikTok Voice’? 30
2.6 Summary 32
2.7 Activities 33
2.8 Further Reading 33
2.9 References 34

3 Affordances, Audiences, and Contexts 36

3.1 Introduction 36
3.2 Affordances 38
3.2.1 Imagined Affordances 43
3.3 Audiences 44
3.3.1 Audience Design 44
3.3.2 The Imagined Audience 46
3.4 Contexts 49
3.4.1 Context Collapse 50
3.4.2 Managing Contexts 52
3.4.3 Do Contexts Collapse? 54
viii Contents

3.5 Summary 55
3.6 Activities 55
3.7 Further Reading 55
3.8 References 56

4 Identity and Online Communities 58

4.1 Introduction 58
4.2 Identity in Sociolinguistics 60
4.3 Online Identity 63
4.3.1 Digital Identity and Social Networking Sites 66
4.3.2 Anonymity and Identity 69
4.4 Online Communities 71
4.4.1 Communities of Practice 73
4.4.2 Language in Online Communities 75
4.5 Participatory Culture 78
4.6 Memes 81
4.6.1 Language in Memes 86
4.7 Summary 89
4.8 Activities 89
4.9 Further Reading 90
4.10 References 90

5 Methods 93
5.1 Introduction 93
5.2 Developing a Research Project 94
5.3 Research Ethics 96
5.4 Research Ethics and Digital Communication 98
5.4.1 Private Content 100
5.4.2 Public Content and Consent 103
5.4.3 Data from Public Figures 107
5.4.4 Making Ethical Decisions 108
5.5 Common DMC Approaches in Sociolinguistics 111
5.5.1 Variationist Approaches 111
5.5.2 Corpus Approaches 113
5.5.3 Digital Ethnographic Approaches 113
5.5.4 Blended Approaches 115
5.6 Digital Tools 116
5.7 Digital Datasets 118
5.8 Summary 118
5.9 Activities 118
 Contents ix

5.10 Further Reading 119

5.11 References 120

6 Big Data Approaches 122

6.1 Introduction 122
6.2 The ‘Big Data’ Turn 123
6.3 ‘Big Data’ and Sociolinguistics 124
6.4 Computational Sociolinguistics 129
6.5 Twitter Dialectology 131
6.5.1 Case Study: Multicultural London English 134
6.5.2 Beyond Lexis 136
6.6 Limitations 140
6.7 Summary 141
6.8 Activities 142
6.9 Further Reading 142
6.10 References 143

7 Small Data Approaches 145

7.1 Introduction 145
7.2 Language and Interaction 147
7.3 Emoticons and Emoji 149
7.4 Language Alternation 153
7.4.1 Language Alternation in Digital
Communication 155
7.5 Stylisation 159
7.5.1 Stylisation in Digital Communication 162
7.6 Metadiscourse 168
7.6.1 Metadiscourse in Digital Communication 169
7.7 Politeness 173
7.7.1 Politeness in Digital Communication 175
7.8 Limitations 178
7.9 Summary 179
7.10 Activities 179
7.11 Further Reading 180
7.12 References 180

8 Mixed Approaches 183

8.1 Introduction 183
8.2 Case Study 1: Androutsopoulos (2023) 184
8.3 Case Study 2: Ilbury (2019) 186
newgenprepdf

x Contents

8.4 Case Study 3: Lopez and Kübler (f.c.) 189

8.5 Summary 192
8.6 Further Reading 192

9 Beyond the Online 193

9.1 Introduction 193
9.2 Media and Language Change 194
9.3 Media and Sociolinguistic Change 198
9.3.1 Mediatisation 198
9.4 The Post-​Digital Turn 201
9.5 Where Next? 204
9.6 Summary 205
9.7 Activities 206
9.8 Further Reading 206
9.9 References 206

Index 208
1 Introduction

1.1 About this Book

This book is about language and digital communication. The term
digital communication refers to digital sites, platforms, and tech-
nologies that are used by people to share messages, post content, and
interact with others. This includes:

• Social media platforms: such as Sina Weibo, Douyin/​ TikTok,

Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat
• Instant messaging services: such as WhatsApp and Telegram
• Electronic mail (i.e., email) platforms: such as Outlook and Gmail
• Video chat and streaming software: such as Zoom, Teams, Twitch,
and Skype
• Online blogs and forums: such as Tumblr, Mumsnet, and Blogger

On a daily basis, individuals from across the globe will use a range of
digital platforms, services, and apps for a variety of different personal
and professional reasons. This includes interacting with friends,
conducting business meetings, and sharing photographs of recent
holidays.
The aim of this book is to provide an overview of research which
explores the language used in digital communication. Although
researchers from a variety of different disciplines are interested
in digital communication such as those working in media, digital
communications, marketing, and the digital humanities, this book
focusses specifically on sociolinguistic approaches to analysing lan-
guage and digital communication. The main aim of this book is to
introduce and describe sociolinguistic research which explores the
types of interactions and language varieties that people use in digital
contexts. One of the main areas that this book will focus on is lan-
guage variation. The types of research questions and projects that are
discussed in this book include:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003391838-1
2 Researching Language and Digital Communication

1. Are there differences in the distribution of laughter variants (e.g.,

<lol>, <haha>, <hehe>) between men, women, and non-​ binary
users in WhatsApp conversations?
2. Why do people use alternating caps (e.g., WhY AM I LikE ThIS?)
in Reddit posts?
3. What are the linguistic characteristics of doge memes?
4. Why do people describe features of African American (Vernacular)
English (AAE/AAVE) as TikTok language?
5. Does digital communication and social media cause language
change?

All these questions are sociolinguistic in nature because they concern

the interrelation of social (e.g., identity) and linguistic (e.g., language
variation) issues. Given that very many of our daily interactions take
place in and through digital technologies, understanding how language
is used in digital contexts remains a central goal for sociolinguists
interested in contemporary patterns of social interaction.
As this book is intended to be a student guide to studying language
and digital communication, my aim is to provide students of different
levels with a solid understanding of sociolinguistic research on the
topic so that they can design their own research projects. To do this,
I provide a survey of both earlier and more contemporary research in
sociolinguistics and digital communication. This includes discussing
some key foundational studies, as well as summarising the major
methodological and theoretical approaches in studying digital com-
munication from a sociolinguistic perspective.
The book is aimed at students who are more advanced and who
already have some training in sociolinguistics as well as those who
are starting out studying this area. Given the interdisciplinary nature
of this research area, we will introduce perspectives, approaches, and
concepts from related fields, including digital culture and media, soci-
ology, computational linguistics, communications and marketing, and
very many others. Subsequently, although this book focusses mainly
on sociolinguistic approaches to studying digital communication,
I anticipate that the content will be relevant to a wide range of readers
from different disciplines. It is hoped that this book will be useful not
just for the student reader who may be developing a term project or
dissertation on digital language but also for instructors and teachers
who are designing courses that explore topics on language, social
media, and digital communication.
The impetus for writing this book comes from teaching a course
that I designed and now teach at the University of Edinburgh called
‘The Sociolinguistics of Digital Communication’. The content of this
book is based heavily on the course syllabus and the activities that are
 Introduction 3

suggested throughout are those that have been tried and tested in class.
The reason that I decided to write this book is related to my experience
of teaching this course. When it got to the final assignment –​a project
on a digital communication topic of the student’s choice –​I found that
students often struggled to identify a single feasible research project.
They were often overwhelmed by the sheer number of possible research
projects and many found it difficult to approach these issues from a
sociolinguistic perspective. As noted above, very many researchers are
interested in studying digital communication; however, not all those
topics or practices are relevant to sociolinguistics. Although a solu-
tion would have been to use a class textbook, I realised there wasn’t
really a single resource that provided both an overview of sociolin-
guistic research on digital communication and guidance on designing
a student project on these topics. Although there are now numerous
textbooks, edited volumes, and journal articles which use sociolin-
guistic approaches to explore a wide range of digital topics, I felt that
the field was lacking a single resource that could be used by students
on my course. The purpose of this guide is to be this resource: To offer
students a broad overview of sociolinguistic research on digital com-
munication as well as equip them with the sufficient research and ana-
lytical skills to be able to design and operationalise their own research
projects.
Before I describe the outline of this book, I should briefly note
why I use the terms ‘digital communication’ and ‘Digitally Mediated
Communication’ (DMC) throughout this book rather than ‘social
media’ or a term that some readers may be more familiar with,
‘Computer Mediated Communication’ (CMC). First, unlike Page
and colleagues’ (2022) book in this series, ‘Researching Language
and Social Media: A Student Guide’, the current book refers to
research on technologies and platforms that are not typically
grouped under the umbrella label of ‘social media’. This includes
WhatsApp, blogs, SMS, and emails. Although lots of the research
we discuss does focus on language in social media, I consider
these platforms as subtypes of ‘digital communication’. The tools,
approaches, and methods we discuss in this book are not specific
to social media but rather can be used to explore patterns of digital
communication more generally. Second, the use of the term ‘digital
communication’ is intended to signal a theoretical departure from
earlier research CMC which focussed on the influence of computer
mediated infrastructures on language practice. DMC is a label which
more accurately describes the ways in which people use digital tech-
nologies as interactive and communication technologies in contem-
porary society (Androutsopoulos, 2021). We will discuss this issue
in more detail in Chapter 2.
4 Researching Language and Digital Communication

1.2 About the Chapters

The book is structured into nine chapters. Each chapter is organised
thematically. The first four chapters focus on theoretical approaches,
introducing some key concepts in studying digital communication.
The methodological and ethical issues of working with digital data
are introduced in Chapter 5. The next three chapters introduce
‘big’, ‘small’, and ‘mixed’ data approaches. The final chapter looks
beyond digital technologies to ask how these practices are embedded
within our everyday communicative practices. The chapters of
this book are organised chronologically but they can be read as
standalone texts. A more comprehensive description of the chapters is
provided here.
Chapter 2 provides an overview of digital communication and
sociolinguistics. I first introduce this field of study before turning to
a discussion of how digital communication and online interaction
has been analysed in the field. This chapter introduces earlier CMC
research which attempted to isolate the language of the internet on a
scale of written-​spoken registers. We consider the emergence of terms
such as ‘netspeak’, ‘txtspeak’, and ‘netlish’, before critically evaluating
these approaches. Finally, it will introduce some more contemporary
approaches in studying in digital communication to sketch out the
agenda for the following chapters of the book.
Chapter 3 introduces some key concepts that have been employed to
analyse patterns of language and communication in digital contexts.
This chapter examines the interactional architectures of digital
platforms, providing a detailed overview of ‘affordances’, ‘audiences’,
and ‘contexts’. The chapter first explores the ways in which the
functions of an app or platform (‘affordances’) influence the content
of what we post and how we post. It then goes on to consider how
people design their posts with a particular viewer or audience in mind
(‘imagined audience’). Finally, the chapter concludes by discussing
the potential for social media to flatten audience dynamics, creating
a space where multiple audiences such as family, friends, and co-​
workers are bought together (‘context collapse’).
An overview of research on language, identity, and online commu-
nities will be introduced in Chapter 4. This chapter first introduces
sociolinguistic approaches to language and identity before expanding
this to the study of digital communication. From here, it provides
a discussion of social and digital media as ‘participatory culture’,
exploring internet memes as a case study. The focus in this chapter is
on how individuals use digital technologies to develop and maintain
(online) communities that establish their own norms, values, and lan-
guage styles. We will ask whether the identities we perform online are
similar to or different from those we perform in the offline.
 Introduction 5

Chapter 5 introduces some common methodological approaches

and ethical challenges in researching digital communication. The aim
of this chapter is to help students take a seed of an idea and develop
that initial idea into a feasible research project. Most of this chapter
focusses on the ethics of using digital data, interrogating the notion
of ‘public domain’, asking students to critically reflect on the types of
content they are analysing in their projects. The discussion is designed
to provide guidance on making responsible and ethical decisions. After
this, some of the main sociolinguistic approaches in analysing digital
communication (e.g., variationist, corpus, ethnographic, blended) are
briefly introduced and described. Finally, the chapter concludes with
some practical advice and recommendations for tools and programmes
that can be used to collect and analyse digital and social media data.
In Chapter 6, I introduce and describe research that takes a ‘big
data’ approach to analysing patterns of language variation and change
in digital communication. The focus here is on the emergence of a new
field of study: ‘Computational sociolinguistics’. Through this discus-
sion, I explore work in ‘Twitter dialectology’, using a recent paper that
uses geolocated tweets to examine the diffusion of a variety of English
across the UK (Multicultural London English) as a case study.
The preceding discussion will be complemented by ‘Small data’
approaches which will be introduced and examined in Chapter 7. The
focus in this chapter is on approaches which have explored discourse-​
level phenomena in digital communication. After a brief discussion
of emoji and emoticons, I cover four interactional issues in more
depth: Language alternation, stylisation, metadiscourse, and polite-
ness. The chapter introduces relevant sociolinguistic concepts and
frameworks in each of these topics before expanding this to DMC.
Chapter 8 brings ‘small’ and ‘big’ data approaches together by intro­
ducing work which has used a ‘mixed methods’ approach. This type
of research uses tools and methods from computational linguistics in
combination with analytical approaches developed in sociolinguistics.
To do this, three case studies are examined in detail. The purpose of
this chapter is to demonstrate how a mixed-​methods approach can be
used to explore a wide range of digital phenomena.
The final chapter (Chapter 9), critically examines a long-​standing
question in the field: Whether (social) media leads to language change.
It first introduces two opposing perspectives, considering arguments
for and against the claim that media influences language change. The
chapter then goes on to introduce more contemporary perspectives
on the relationship between media and language by exploring the
concepts of ‘mediatisation’ and ‘sociolinguistic change’, reframing the
debate away from ‘influence’ and ‘effect’. The chapter will encourage
students to critically reflect on the ways in which digital technologies
are embedded in ‘offline’ structures of social interaction. It concludes
6 Researching Language and Digital Communication

by sketching out an agenda for future research by introducing the

‘post-​digital’ turn.

1.3 Conventions
This book uses several stylistic and linguistic conventions which readers
should take note of. Where necessary, I have transcribed elements of
spoken language into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The
IPA is the standardised phonetic notation system commonly used in
linguistics. Transcriptions in IPA are provided either in ‘broad’ /​/​or []
‘narrow’ form, e.g., [wɔːkɪŋ]. For those who have not studied phonetics
or the IPA before, readers are directed to ‘A Course in Phonetics’ by
Ladefoged and Johnson (2014). Orthographic features (i.e., spellings)
are transcribed using < >, e.g., <fink> vs. <think>. This is to distin-
guish the orthographic representation from the spoken realisation of
that word. Italics are used to refer to specific words, e.g., walking
vs. talking. Bold is used to emphasise words of specific interest. This
includes key words and concepts. Unless otherwise stated, underlined
words and phrases are part of a hyperlink. Where quotes and examples
are used, the original grammar, spelling, and style is maintained. Thus,
spelling errors and non-​standard spellings are commonly found in the
examples in this book. Finally, I briefly explain the use of the term
‘Twitter’. In April 2023, Twitter was rebranded ‘X’. Given that most
of the research discussed in this book predates the rebrand of this plat-
form, I continue to refer to this platform as ‘Twitter’, not ‘X’.

1.4 References
Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2021). Polymedia in interaction. Pragmatics and
Society, 12: 707–​724.
Ladefoged, Peter & Keith Johnson (2014). A Course in Phonetics.
Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing.
Page, Ruth, David Barton, Carmen Lee, Johann Wolfgang Unger, & Michele
Zappavigna (2022). Researching Language and Social Media: A Student
Guide. Abingdon: Routledge.
2 Digital Communication
and Sociolinguistics

2.1 Introduction
In this chapter we cover the following topics:

• Defining digital communication

• Introducing sociolinguistics
• Sociolinguistics and Computer Mediated Communication
• ‘Netspeak’
• Contemporary sociolinguistic approaches.

Very many researchers are interested in studying digital communica-

tion. The topics and aims of this research, however, vary from field
to field. For instance, media scholars are often interested in the social
impacts of digital communication technologies, considering how
digital technologies are used in contexts such as politics, culture, and
society. Researchers in the fields of marketing and business, on the
other hand, are often interested in understanding how businesses use
digital technologies to engage consumers and market new products.
As discussed in the introduction, this book is about sociolinguistic
approaches to digital communication. A sociolinguistic approach
focusses on examining the interrelation of society, digital technolo-
gies, and language and communication. A common aim in this type of
work is on understanding why and how people use different varieties
of language in digital interactions. A productive area of sociolinguistic
research on DMC has been to analyse patterns of language variation
in social and digital media texts. Consider, for instance, the following
post, which is taken from the social media platform, Twitter (or ‘X’ as
it is now known):

(1) User
Work dat pole gurl! @VENUE <link to photo>

The example in (1) is a tweet written by a user from the UK. The
tweet was posted to their timeline and originally was accompanied
by a photo of their friend dancing in a nightclub, represented here as

DOI: 10.4324/9781003391838-2
8 Researching Language and Digital Communication

<link to photo>. The @VENUE is used to tag the nightclub where the
photo was taken. Although this tweet is relatively short (five words),
it contains some interesting features that we might want to explore in
more detail. We might, for instance, start to wonder about the use of
the non-​standard spellings in the tweet. We could ask ‘why did the user
spell ‘that’ as <dat> and ‘girl’ as <gurl>?’ To answer these questions,
we’d need to think about the functions of these spellings: What is it
that these non-​standard spellings ‘do’ that their standard counterparts
<that> and <girl> do not? Perhaps these spellings reference an internet
meme or perhaps they’re being used to emulate someone’s voice. To
understand why they are being used in this way, we’d first want to
collect more tweets and see if the user consistently writes in this way.
This would give us a sense of the distribution of these spellings. We
could then go on to try to determine why the non-​standard spellings
are used. In other words, we could try to identify the social meaning
of the variation.
To take another example, consider the following excerpt taken from
a group chat on WhatsApp:

(2) Kate Guess what guys, I’M COMING HOME IN

AUGUST!!!!!!
Becca SHUT UP! NOOOOOOOOO. Literally the best
news ever ✨

Like the tweet above, we see quite a few features that are potentially
interesting to sociolinguists. Notably, there are a few written features
that appear here that are not common in other written genres. For
instance, we don’t tend to see things like all caps (I’M COMING) or
emoji (✨) in other non-​digital written genres, like letters. However,
these features are common in DMC, like in the WhatsApp message
above. A sociolinguist might want to know why and how people use
these features. This could lead us to ask the following questions:

• What is/​are the function(s) of all caps (e.g., SHUT UP!)?

• Why does Kate use multiple exclamation marks (I’M COMING
HOME IN AUGUST!!!!!!)?
• Why is the vowel in <no> repeated in Becca’s message
(NOOOOOOOOO)?
• What is the function or purpose of the ‘sparkle’ emoji (i.e., ✨)?

All of these questions are sociolinguistic questions. This is because

they consider the relationship between a linguistic feature (e.g., ✨)
and the social identity of the user or the context of the conversation.
To answer these questions, we will need to explore how that feature
is used in conversation, what its function is, and whether it is used by
 Digital Communication and Sociolinguistics 9

a particular demographic of people. In some contexts, the variation

could be explained by the authors’ social identity or background. The
tweet in (1), for instance, is actually drawn from my own research
on Twitter where I argue that this is a linguistic style commonly
used by gay men. The non-​standard spellings here emulate spoken
features of African American Vernacular English but they have also
become associated with a ‘gay style’ more generally (Ilbury, 2019).
Alternatively, it might be that the variation is explained by what is
being said in the conversation. This could include things like the user
trying to signal their emotional response to a message or trying to
convey their politeness. McCulloch (2019), for instance, finds that all
caps are often used to signal excitement or to represent shouting. This
is a very plausible explanation for the use of all-​caps in the WhatsApp
conversation in (2).
The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the study of digital com-
munication as a sociolinguistic area of inquiry. To do this, I will first
provide a brief historical overview of earlier research –​an approach
which has often been referred to as ‘internet linguistics’. I will then go
onto sketch out the research agenda of more contemporary research
on digital communication.

2.2 What is Digital Communication?

This morning, within moments of waking, I picked up my phone
from my bedside table. Shortly after unlocking my phone, I replied
to a WhatsApp message from my friend about my weekend plans,
liked a meme I’d been DM’d (i.e., direct messaged) on Instagram, and
answered an email from a colleague about a meeting. Whilst walking
to work, I uploaded a picture of my morning coffee to my Snapchat
story, and ‘liked’ a recent music video of a band I follow on YouTube.
When I got to work, I logged onto my desktop computer and set
myself up for the day. I then checked my schedule on my Outlook
calendar. My first meeting was on Zoom. I met with a filmmaker
about an upcoming documentary that I’m going to be interviewed in.
I then unlocked my phone and replied to the group WhatsApp chat
about my friend’s wedding this coming weekend. At this point, I check
my watch: The time is now 9.42 am.
Within the span of a couple of hours of waking, I have used a var-
iety of digital platforms (e.g., email, Snapchat, WhatsApp), across a
range of devices (mobile phone, desktop computer) to interact with
people from various different social and professional groups (friends,
colleagues, and unknown users). Many of these people are based else-
where: Most of my friends live in London, my colleague works at a
German university, and the filmmaker is based in Ireland. All these
interactions have been enabled by digital technologies. The email
10 Researching Language and Digital Communication

conversations I send, the Snapchat stories I upload, and so on, are

subtypes of what we can label digital communication. In this book, we
define digital communication as any type of interaction which is made
possible by digital technologies. The subtypes of digital communica-
tion that we explore in this book include:

• Electronic mail or emails: are messages that are sent via electronic
means from one user to others. It is the digital counterpart to mail.
Platforms which facilitate this type of interaction include Gmail,
Microsoft Outlook, and Yahoo! Mail.
• Social media: are digital platforms which enable users to share
messages, information, and other types of content with others.
A more formal definition is offered by Carr and Hayes (2015: 50) who
define social media as ‘[i]‌nternet-​based channels that allow users to
opportunistically interact and selectively self-​present, either in real-​
time or asynchronously, with both broad and narrow audiences
who derive value from user-​generated content and the perception of
interaction with others’. Typical examples of social media platforms
include Facebook, TikTok (or ‘Douyin’), Instagram, Snapchat, and
‘micro-​blogging sites’ Twitter, Sina Weibo, and Tumblr.
• Instant Messaging (IM) platforms: are those that allow users to com-
municate in real-​time via the internet. Typically, instant messages are
text-​based but more recently, platforms have expanded to include
other multimodal content such as photos, videos, and voice notes.
Examples of IM software include Telegram, WhatsApp Messenger,
and WeChat.
• An abbreviation of ‘weblogs’, blogs are centred on informational
content that comprise discrete, informal text entries. Examples of
these platforms include Blogger, Wix, and Wordpress. A subcat-
egory of ‘micro-​blogs’ (short posts without titles) includes Twitter,
Sina Weibo, and Tumblr which are cross-​referenced in the social
media section here.
• Video sharing platforms: are those which focus on the sharing and
creation of videos. Users can often leave comments and responses
on posts. Examples include Dailymotion and YouTube as well as
the social media app, TikTok.
• Platforms which allow users to engage in video-​ based
telecommunications are called video communication platforms.
This includes services and platforms such as Zoom, Skype, and
Microsoft Teams.
• Virtual worlds: are computer-​simulated environments where users
create avatars which they use to communicate with others and par-
ticipate in activities. Examples of virtual worlds include Second
Life, World of Warcraft, and RuneScape.
 Digital Communication and Sociolinguistics 11

Other platforms and services such as websites and chatbots are often
included in definitions of ‘digital communication’. However, these
will be explored to a lesser extent in this student guide. The main
subtypes of digital communication that we focus on in this volume are
social media, video platforms, and instant messaging platforms. This
is largely due to the concentration of sociolinguistic research on these
platforms. Nevertheless, the approaches, methods, and frameworks
we discuss are relevant to most types of digital communication and
can be applied to platforms and services beyond those explicitly
discussed here.

Key Term: Digital Communication

Digital communication refers to those online platforms, tools, and
services which enable users to share ideas, messages, and con-
tent with others. This includes social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter),
email (e.g., Outlook, Gmail), blogs (e.g., Blogger, Tumblr), interactive
streaming services (e.g., TikTok Live, Twitch), and instant messaging
platforms (e.g., Viber, Telegram, WhatsApp).

My morning routine I describe above and the subtypes of digital

communication I have introduced are likely to be familiar to very
many readers. For many people across the globe, the use of digital
devices such as mobile phones, computers, and tablets, and digital
platforms and services are now a common and relatively unremark-
able fact of everyday life. Whilst we still spend a great deal of our
time interacting with people in face-​to-​face conversation, more and
more of our interactions are taking place in and through digital
technologies. It is perhaps uncontroversial to suggest that digital
technologies have had quite a significant impact on language and
society.
One of the most significant developments in the use of digital com-
munication technologies has been the introduction and now wide-
spread use of smartphones and mobile data roaming. Before the
introduction of mobile technologies, accessing the internet was done
via a desktop computer. In the 1990s, when the internet became wide-
spread, users would need to be physically present at a computer which
they would use to ‘log on’ to the internet via a dial-​up modem. Users
would then spend hours ‘surfing the net’ before logging off and leaving
the ‘cyber-​world’ behind. Being ‘online’ was very much constrained to
‘being on the computer’.
Today, however, most people will use smartphones and other
mobile devices such as iPads and laptops to communicate via the
internet without ever actually logging on and logging off. With the
12 Researching Language and Digital Communication

introduction of mobile technologies, users are no longer tethered to a

single location: They can communicate wherever and whenever, often
whilst they are engaged in other activities. People now frequently send
emails, IMs, upload Snapchat Stories, and participate in other types of
digital communication whilst doing other things like taking the dog
for a walk or waiting at a bus stop. In my description of my own
morning routine, I sent emails, organised meetings with colleagues,
and interacted with family who are based in various locations all while
I was engaged in other activities: getting ready for work, leaving the
house, walking to work, and ordering a coffee.
The increasing availability of digital platforms and technolo-
gies –​particularly mobile technologies –​has meant that society is now
‘hyper-​connected’. Digital technologies have become so embedded in
our everyday lives that it is very hard to really and truly be ‘offline’.
Even when you are asleep, it’s likely that some device is still connected
to the internet. If, like me, you sleep with your phone on your bedside
table, plugged in and tethered to the internet you will probably con-
tinue to receive messages through the night. How many times have
you woken up in the morning to a message from a friend or received
a notification of someone liking your Instagram story? The fact that
are always connected to the internet, never really switched off, is
what the researcher, danah boyd has called the ‘always on lifestyle’
(boyd, 2012).
For many people across the globe, the ‘always on lifestyle’ is now the
social norm. People spend more time now than ever using social and
digital media platforms. According to a recent survey, an estimated
4.9 billion people use social media across the world with the average
user spending around 145 minutes on social media per day. Nigeria
tops the global list of social media usage with Nigerians estimated to
spend on average four hours per day using social media platforms
(Buchholz, 2022).
In recent years, global events such as the COVID-​19 outbreak have
accelerated our reliance on digital communications. In March 2020,
when the first coronavirus lockdowns were imposed and directives to
work from home and isolate were enforced, many of us had to move
our lives online. Practically overnight, offices, universities, and schools
became ‘virtual spaces’, with classes, meetings, and lectures hosted via
digital communication technologies like Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
Even doctors offered remote appointments via services like Google
Meet, whilst estate agents offered virtual property tours via Zoom.
There is now a lot of academic research which has argued that digital
technologies were crucial in shielding labour and productivity during
the COVID-​19 pandemic.
Even today, in what is sometimes labelled the ‘post-​pandemic era’,
many companies continue to offer remote working opportunities and
 Digital Communication and Sociolinguistics 13

digital technologies now take a more central role in our working lives.
For instance, many companies continue to conduct business meetings
entirely on video-​conferencing platforms like Zoom and Microsoft
Teams. In some professions and businesses, physical offices may not
even exist. Colleagues might be spread across different countries and
time zones and work activities might be conducted entirely via digital
technologies. Similarly, in a work revolution initiated by the pan-
demic, more and more people are becoming ‘digital nomads’, using
digital technologies to work whilst travelling. Some countries such as
Germany, Norway, and Taiwan, have even introduced ‘digital nomad’
work visas to encourage people to work remotely there.
All of these technological developments have dramatic consequences
for society. As noted previously, very many researchers are interested
in studying these consequences. From the impacts of digital cultures
on personal connections to the potentials of digital communications
in marketing and advertisement, researchers from a range of different
disciplines have studied the effects of this digital revolution on society.
As digital technologies become increasingly embedded in our social
and professional lives, understanding how people use digital tech-
nologies to communicate has now become a central goal of contem-
porary sociolinguistic research. The main aim is to understand the
consequences of these technological developments for language and
social interaction.

Points for reflection

• Make a diary of your digital engagements by recording your use of

digital communication platforms and technologies from the moment
you wake up to two hours later. What platforms do you use? What
types of posts do you upload to those platforms? If you upload
similar posts to different platforms, are there any differences in how
you write/​create them across platforms? Who do you interact with
and where are those individuals based?
• Compare your digital diary with your friends’ or classmates’. Do
you see any similarities or differences in the types of platforms you
use? Why?

2.3 What is Sociolinguistics?

As discussed in the above section, the focus of this book is on sociolin-
guistic approaches to digital communication. For those who have never
studied linguistics before, it’s possible that you’ve never encountered
the field of ‘sociolinguistics’. This section briefly introduces the field
of study that we call ‘sociolinguistics’, before extending this approach
to DMC.
14 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Broadly speaking, sociolinguistics is an academic field of research

which studies the relationship between language and society.
Sociolinguists are primarily interested in understanding how lan-
guage is used in two main ways: (i) as a means of establishing and
maintaining relationships with others, and (ii) as means of deducing
social information about interlocutors.
Let’s explain this using a real-​world situation. Imagine you are at a
bus stop on a sunny day. You take a seat and someone walks up, sits
down next to you, and says ‘nice weather!’. Now, on the face of it,
the comment ‘nice weather!’ isn’t really that interesting: It’s a simple
remark –​an observation of the fact that the sun is shining. We could
stop here and just assume the person is being friendly. But to a socio-
linguist, what’s interesting is that the person is speaking at all. There’s
no real need for the individual to speak to you –​you are, after all,
strangers. And observing that it is a nice day when the sun is shining is,
well, stating the obvious. This type of interaction is what we call ‘phatic
communication’. In this situation, the comment ‘nice weather!’ doesn’t
just comment on the state of the weather (that it’s sunny) but, more
importantly, it fulfils a social function. The comment ‘nice weather!’
initiates conversation and establishes some type of social relationship
between you and your interlocutor (i.e., the person speaking to you).
Now, imagine that the initial ‘nice weather!’ comment leads to a
much longer conversation between you and your fellow passenger.
They might ask you about your day, comment on the fact that the
bus is late, and then ask about your plans for the evening. When you
reply, you obviously give the person a response to their question,
but you also start to reveal things about who you are as a person.
This is because how we speak or sign is influenced heavily by our
social background like where we’re from, our sexuality, our age, and
so on. Simply responding to the individual gives them a chance to
infer what type of person you are from how you speak or sign. For
instance, you might provide clues about how old you are if you start
describing the weather as ‘peng’ (a British term for ‘good/​attractive’
often associated with younger individuals) or, if you are older, ‘A1’ (an
adjective meaning ‘very good’ that was popular in the late 1980s). In
this way, language functions as a ‘social cue’. These cues are used by
your interlocutor to infer things about your social identity, in this case,
your age. We do this type of social inferencing on a daily basis. When
we communicate with others, we often try and deduce an individual’s
social background based on their accent, the words they use, or their
communication style. This type of social inferencing often means that
we don’t have to explicitly ask people about their background. This
is a useful social tool because, whilst it may be socially taboo to ask
someone who you do not know very well their sexuality, for instance,
we might be able to infer this information from how they speak.
 Digital Communication and Sociolinguistics 15

One of the main goals of sociolinguistics is to understand how lan-

guage varies across different groups. Lots of research explores how
social identities (or ‘factors’) like age, gender, social class, and ethni-
city, influence how people use different language varieties. In the UK,
although most people speak a common language (English), there is
a great deal of variation in how different people and groups use that
language. In the previous example, I used the example of variation in
lexis (i.e., words). In the British context, whether you refer to the wea-
ther as ‘A1’ or ‘peng’ might tell us something about how old you are.
Younger people will tend to use the word ‘peng’ whilst older people
may use the phrase ‘A1’.
Language can also tell us about where someone is from. In England,
a good example of this is what has been called the ‘trap–​bath split’.
Speakers in the South of England generally say the word bath as [bɑːθ]
whilst those in the North of England will often say [baθ]. The pronun-
ciation of this vowel often depends on your regional background, i.e.,
whether you are from the North or South of England. Similarly, if you
say the word down /​daʊn/​more like [dʌʉn] ‘doon’, that might mean
that you are from Scotland.
Decades of sociolinguistic research has identified consistent patterns
between social factors like socio-​economic class, ethnicity, sexuality,
and gender with particular linguistic features. For instance, there is
now quite a lot of work on ‘TH-​fronting’. In the UK, in particular, it
is common to hear people pronounce /​θ/​as [f]‌in words like think –​
hence [fɪŋk]. Research has shown this pronunciation to be influenced
by social factors like age, social class, and gender (see Ramsammy &
Schleef, 2013).
The above examples focus on two types of language variation: lexis
or ‘words’ (e.g., A1 vs. peng) and phonology (e.g., [fɪŋk] vs. [θɪŋk]). In
addition to phonology and lexis, we see variation across all levels of
language. This includes:

• Grammar, e.g., she were/​was home

• Discourse, e.g., he was running to me and he said ‘yes’/​he was like
‘yes’/​he goes ‘yes’
• Spelling, e.g., I love u/​you

Given that lots of digital communication is text-​based (e.g., WhatsApp,

IM, Twitter), in this book we will focus heavily on spelling or ‘ortho-
graphic’ variation. Orthographic variation refers to spellings which
are not typical, conventional, or standardised. In other words, these
spellings aren’t typically those that you’d find in the dictionary. For
instance, in the above example we can see that the word ‘you’ can be
represented in two ways: The standardised spelling <you>, and the non-​
standard spelling <u>. We could say that <you> is the ‘standardised’
16 Researching Language and Digital Communication

spelling because it’s the one that has been ‘codified’ and put into a dic-
tionary. <u>, on the other hand, is the ‘non-​standard’ spelling because
it deviates from the expected spelling. These spellings have often expli-
citly been taught to learners, and the rules of the spelling system are
enforced by gatekeepers. Most editors and teachers would correct <u>
for <you> in written texts.
Whilst orthographic variation like the use of <u> for <you> is gen-
erally rare in formal written registers like books, letters, and public
notices, these types of spellings are very common in DMC because this
is a ‘deregulated space’. In other words, on platforms like Twitter and
WhatsApp, the ‘formal rules’ of written communication which we asso-
ciate with letters and published work, are not always followed. There
is no expectation that people will write in the same way that they do
in a formal letter. In fact, people often use non-​standard spellings for
creative and stylistic purposes. Similar types of non-​standard spellings
are found in other ‘deregulated spaces’ like graffiti, magazines, dialect
literature, shop signs, and so on.
Orthographic variation and non-​standard spellings are not just a
quirk found in English language DMC. We can find lots of examples
of non-​ standard spellings and inventive written practices in other
languages too. For instance, although Greek speakers generally write
in the Greek alphabet, in social media, emails and other types of DMC
many users will write in ‘Greeklish’. Greeklish is a spelling system or
orthographic style in which authors use the Latin alphabet to represent
Greek. An example is found in Georgakopoulou’s corpus of Greek
emails (1997: 151):

(3) Katarxin se epishma keimena parakalo to onoma mou na

anagrafetai ws XXXXX kai se epishma documents efoson
etsi me kseroun oli tous edo. 2. I tipissa lei oti mas voleyei na
katevoume san Ellhniko prama …
‘First of all, I request that my name is written as XXXXX
in formal documents since this is how I am known here.
2. The chick says it’s better if we go on the pitch as a Greek
team ...’

As we will see throughout this book, this type of variation is especially

common in DMC. It is perhaps unsurprising that many researchers
have therefore applied tools, concepts, and theories developed in
sociolinguistics to understand why and how people use non-​standard
spellings, creative punctuation marks, and other strategies across a
variety of different platforms and contexts.
Although the variation in these messages may appear, at first, to look
random or unprincipled, a great deal of sociolinguistic research has
demonstrated that language variation is systematic and rule-​governed.
 Digital Communication and Sociolinguistics 17

People don’t just write (or speak or sign) in whatever way they want.
The variation is influenced by particular social and linguistic rules or
constraints.
The systematic nature of language variation was first described in
two seminal studies that are often thought of as the foundations of the
field of sociolinguistics: Fischer (1958) and Labov (1963). These were
the first studies to demonstrate that language variation was systematic
and could be explained by a series of linguistic and social factors. In
Fischer’s (1958) work in New England, he found that the variable pro­
nunciation of the suffix <-​ing> (i.e., [ɪn] vs. [ɪŋ]) in words like running
and fishing was predicted by the speakers’ sex and class. Similarly, in
his work on rhoticity in New York City, Labov (1966) demonstrated
that the pronunciation of post-​vocalic /​ɹ/​in words like forth and floor
was influenced by the social class identity of the speaker and whether
the word was produced in a ‘careful’ or ‘casual’ manner.
Because linguistic differences map onto social differences (e.g.,
young vs. old, working-​ class vs. upper-​class), we go through life
learning to recognise these differences, associating forms of language
with different types of people. In other words, we learn the social
meaning of variation. If we return to the example of the pronunciation
of bath above, it’s very unlikely that anyone in the UK is ever expli-
citly told that one pronunciation is typical in the North and the other
in the South of England. But over the course of our lives, we come
to recognise these differences and we learn their social associations.
The ability for language to refer to social information like where the
individual is from is what sociolinguists call indexicality. Simply put,
social indexicality refers to the fact that language can point to non-​
linguistic (i.e., ‘social’) meanings. This includes social information like
where the person is from, how old they are, their sexuality, and so
on. To use our earlier example, we could say that ‘peng’ and ‘A1’
might index different types of people or qualities associated with those
people, like being ‘young’, ‘cool’, or ‘old’.

Key term: (Social) Indexicality

Indexicality refers to the property of linguistic signs to point to or
signal non-​linguistic attributes. This includes social categories like
‘woman’, ‘working class’, or ‘gay’, or more fine-​grained meanings like
‘coolness, ‘dominance’, or ‘masculinity’.

Given that the field of sociolinguistics emerged in the 1960s, it is per-

haps unsurprising that most sociolinguistic research has focussed on
variation in speech and face-​to-​face conversation. For most of its his-
tory, the most common approach in the field has been to record and
18 Researching Language and Digital Communication

analyse variation in spoken interactions. However, other researchers

have demonstrated that the concepts and approaches developed in
this field can be usefully applied to other modalities, including signed
languages, written registers, and –​most relevant to the focus of this
guide –​digital communication. In the 1990s, as the internet became
widespread, very many sociolinguists started to turn their attention
to the language used online –​to the study of ‘Computer Mediated
Communication’ (CMC).

2.4 Computer Mediated Communication

The earliest sociolinguistic research on digital communication can be
traced back to the early 1990s. Following the emergence of the World
Wide Web (WWW) in 1991, many researchers started to become
interested in understanding the types of language that were used in
this new domain of interaction. The focus here was on documenting
and describing linguistic patterns found in ‘Computer Mediated
Communication’ (CMC). In this work, CMC was defined as ‘any
human communication achieved through, or with the help of, com-
puter technology’ (Thurlow, Lengel, & Tomic, 2004: 15). Work which
followed this trend started to examine the language used in CMC
subtypes, including emails, blogs, and Instant Messaging (IM).
Given that CMC interactions of the time were largely text-​based
on platforms and services such as IMs, emails, and weblogs, most
of this work focussed on describing patterns of orthographic or
spelling variation. A common approach was to develop taxonomies
of CMC features which were said to be typical of the language used
on the internet. Many of these accounts included features such as
abbreviations (e.g., <u ok?>, <hun>), non-​ standard spellings (e.g.,
<fink>, <wot>), and alphabetisms (e.g., <gr8>, <2> for to).
Observing these trends, a consensus started to emerge regarding the
nature of CMC. Many researchers claimed that the language used in
CMC was a ‘new variety’ that was a hybrid of spoken and written
registers. This perspective is evident in Davis and Brewer’s account,
where they claim that CMC is writing that ‘very often reads as if it were
being spoken –​that is, as if the sender were writing talking’ (1997: 2).
Subsequently, many researchers set about attempting to determine
where CMC could be placed on the spoken-​written continuum (e.g.,
Ferrara, Brunner & Whittemore, 1991; Collot & Belmore, 1996).
This agenda influenced the output of CMC research for some time,
with investigations directed specifically at answering what David
Crystal referred to as the fundamental goal of CMC research: To iden-
tify which features the variety takes from speech and which features it
takes from writing (2006: 20).
 Digital Communication and Sociolinguistics 19

Research which addressed this question concluded that CMC had

features of both spoken and written registers such that it could be said
to exist ‘on a continuum between the context-​dependent interaction
of oral conversation and the contextually abstracted composition of
written text’ (Foertsch, 1995: 301). Synchronous genres of CMC –​
where the message is sent and received in real time –​were said to
resemble spoken discourse more closely, whilst asynchronous genres
of CMC –​where there is a delay between the sending and response of
a message –​were claimed to be more like written discourse.

Key Term: (A-​)synchronous

Synchronous CMC occurs in real-​ time: The message is sent,
received immediately, and then (typically) responded to by the inter-
locutor. All parties involved in the conversation are simultaneously
engaged at the same time. Examples of contemporary forms of syn-
chronous CMC include Skype conversations, FaceTime, and Zoom
meetings.

In asynchronous CMC, there is a time lapse between the message

being sent and the message being received. In these conversations,
there is unlikely to be an immediate response from the receiver of the
message. Examples of asynchronous CMC include emails, forums,
and SMS messages.

This type of perspective is found in David Crystal’s highly influential

book, Language and the Internet, where he categorises the different
types of CMC (e.g., web, emails, IMs) based on which features they
take from written and spoken language. Table 2.1 is adapted from
Crystal’s (2006) book. The first three elements (time bound, spontan­
eous, and face-​to-​face) are features of spoken language. The last three
qualities (space-​bound, contrived, and visually decontextualised) are
typically associated with written discourse. According to Crystal’s tax-
onomy (Table 2.1), Instant Messaging –​a synchronous type of CMC
interaction –​exhibits more features associated with spoken discourse
(time bound, spontaneous) than blogging, an asynchronous type of
CMC, which is more comparable to written discourse (contrived, visu-
ally decontextualised).
Having concluded that the language used on the internet was an
‘emergent register’ (Ferrara et al., 1991), researchers developed a
set of terms and labels which referenced the written-​spoken hybrid
of CMC. This included terms such as ‘netspeak’, ‘netlish’ (Crystal,
2006), ‘electronic language’ (Collot & Belmore, 1996), ‘electronic
discourse’ (Davis & Brewer, 1997), ‘chatspeak’ (Vandekerckhove
& Nobels, 2010) and ‘interactive written discourse’ (Ferrara et al.,
20 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Table 2.1 Spoken and written discourse features of ‘netspeak’ (adapted from
Crystal, 2006)

Web Blogging e-​mail Virtual Instant

worlds messaging
1. time bound no no yes, yes, but yes
but in in different
different ways
ways
2. spontaneous no yes, but variable yes, but yes
with with
restrictions restrictions
3. face-​to-​face no no no no no, unless
camera
used
4. space-​bound yes, with yes yes, but yes, but yes, but
extra routinely with moves
options deleted restrictions off-​screen
rapidly
5. contrived yes variable variable no, but no
with some
adaptation
6. visually yes, but with yes yes yes, but yes, unless
decon- considerable with some camera
textualised adaptation adaptation used

1991). Features which were often considered characteristic of this var­

iety included:

• Smileys and emoticons: :-​) :-​( ;-​( :-​]

• Paralinguistic glosses: <laughs>, *coughs*, ~eye roll~
• Letter homophones: lol, cya, lmao, IMHO, tldr
• Non-​standard spellings: wot, u, gr8, fankz, luv, dese
• Non-​standard punctuation: !!!!!!!!, ?!?!
• Non-​standard grammar: how pronounce, very disagreement

Points for reflection

• Do you use ‘netspeak’ features (e.g., abbreviations, non-​standard

spellings) on social media?
• If you do use ‘netspeak’ features, why do you use them? If you do
not use features of netspeak, consider why you avoid using them.

As is evident in Crystal’s taxonomy (Table 2.1), a common assumption

in this type of work was that the medium (e.g., written vs. spoken
language, instant messaging vs. email) was the main influence on the
language used on the internet. Variation in text –​like turn length,
 Digital Communication and Sociolinguistics 21

non-​ standard spellings, and other novel linguistic features –​were

understood not in reference to the context of the interaction or the
users’ identities, but were rather assumed to be determined directly
by the medium. This assumption led to an outpouring of work which
attempted to define specific features of CMC subtypes. This included
publications which described ‘the language of emails’ and the ‘lin-
guistic features of IM’. A tendency in this work was to compare the
language used in different CMC genres, leading to generalised claims
like ‘the language of text messaging is more ‘conversational’ than the
language of emails’.

Points for reflection

• Is it possible to identify a distinct language variety used on the

internet?
• Do you agree with the claim that the language of text messaging
(e.g., SMS, WhatsApp) is more ‘conversational’ than emails?

The approach I have outlined so far which argued that language

variation in CMC was determined by the medium subscribes to a
determinist view of the relationship between technology and society.
Technological Determinism (TD) is the idea that technology independ-
ently influences society. Within CMC, a TD perspective can be seen in
the extent to which scholars argued that users’ linguistic choices were
determined by the medium (e.g., spoken vs. written) or the CMC genre
(e.g., IM, email, blogs), as opposed to contextual or conversational
factors like topic, identity, or interlocutor.

Key Term: Technological Determinism (TD)

The idea that technology autonomously influences society. Technology
is the primary cause of major social, cultural, and historical change. In
earlier work on CMC, scholars often subscribed to a TD perspective
by arguing that the medium (e.g., written vs. spoken) and the genre
(e.g., email, IM, blogs) of interaction determined the linguistic style
(e.g., turn length, non-​standard spellings) used online.

As the field became more established, researchers started to consider

not just the effects of the medium on language, but also whether social
and contextual factors influenced different styles of interaction. Some
of this research asked whether variation in CMC could be explained
by users’ identities. This included work which attempted to iden-
tify differences between CMC styles used by men and women. For
instance, in Herring’s (2000) research on gender in CMC, she finds
22 Researching Language and Digital Communication

significant differences between the types and content of messages

that men and women post. She observes that, in discussion lists and
newsgroups, men were more likely to post longer messages, start and
end discussions in mixed-​sex groups, and use taboo and crude lan-
guage such as insults and swearwords. Women, on the other hand,
were more likely to post short messages, qualify and justify their
assertions, apologise, and express support of others.
Nevertheless, whilst work by Herring (2000) and others signalled a
departure from medium-​focussed analyses of CMC, these approaches
still seemed to neglect the relevance of context. To take Herring’s
(2000) study of gender in CMC as an example, the content and style
of the message is assumed to be predicted solely by the gender iden-
tity of the author. What the users were writing about or who they
were communicating with is not considered here. We know little to
nothing about the context of the message. This seems like an over-
sight. Evidently, both men and women can be crude and use ‘taboo’
language. But crucially, it often depends on who we’re talking to (i.e.,
friends vs. family) and what we’re talking about (i.e., a positive vs. a
negative topic). It’s possible, then, that while gender might be a rele-
vant factor in patterns of CMC, it might not be the only factor that
influences how people use language online.
The type of work I have been describing so far has often been
called the ‘first wave’ of CMC research. In Georgakopoulou’s (2006)
overview of the field, she argues that, whilst this line of work was
important in establishing CMC as an independent area of linguistic
inquiry, the first wave approach has various methodological and
theoretical shortcomings. One of the main issues with this type of
work was that many of the claims made in first-​wave studies were
generalisations based on anecdotal observations or small datasets.
The relatively modest sized datasets used in the first-​wave is likely
indicative of the fact that accessing digital data at this time was still
relatively difficult to do. Ideally, to make claims about the nature of
‘the language of CMC’ (as scholars were attempting to do) we would
need lots of examples to argue that our examples are representative
of broader patterns. This wasn’t always feasible and so researchers
often had to rely on anecdotal or fabricated examples. For instance,
in his book, Language and the Internet, Crystal (2006) acknowledges
the ‘difficulty of obtaining large samples of [CMC] data’, which he
attributes to concerns about the public or private nature of CMC.
As a workaround, Crystal uses ‘constructed examples’ (i.e., hypothet-
ical examples he created himself) throughout his book to demonstrate
CMC phenomena (2006: x). Whilst fabricated examples might help
illustrate certain features or processes, we have next to no idea of
knowing how widely they were used.
 Digital Communication and Sociolinguistics 23

Another shortcoming of the first-​wave of CMC research is this work

seldom considered how the context may have influenced how a fea-
ture or language style was used. As we discussed above in relation
to Herring (2000), it seems that context and topic are likely to be
relevant to how crude or long a message is –​not just the authors’
gender identity. The omission of contextual issues was likely indica-
tive of the agenda of first-​wave CMC research: To develop an account
of CMC/​internet language as a distinctive and unique variety –​as
opposed to considering how context might shape different types of
digital interactions.
A final shortcoming of first-​wave CMC research was its apparent lack
of engagement with other fields of study. Problematically, early CMC
research seldom engaged with theories, concepts, and frameworks that
had been developed in related fields like sociolinguistics, media studies,
and digital sociology. Although concepts developed in these fields
were clearly relevant to studying digital communication, first-​wave
approaches rarely engaged with work in related fields. Subsequently,
researchers inevitably dealt with issues that had already been resolved
or discussed elsewhere. The outcome of this was that CMC scholars
continued to focus on answering a very restricted set of research
questions mainly concentrating on the effects of the medium on lan-
guage use or explaining language in terms of broad social categories
like ‘men’ and ‘women’, rather than responding to contemporary
developments in sociolinguistics and other fields.

2.4.1 A New Variety?

As we have discussed above, a core argument of the first-​wave of
CMC research was that the linguistic variety used online was funda-
mentally different to that used elsewhere. Whether scholars referred to
this variety as ‘netspeak’, ‘chatspeak’, ‘txtspeak’, ‘netlish’, or ‘internet
slang’, it was generally agreed that the language used on the internet
was a fundamentally new variety that was specific to the medium of
the internet. This type of perspective is evident in Crystal’s definition
of ‘netspeak’ which he calls ‘a type of language displaying features that
are unique to the Internet’ (emphasis added 2006: 20).
However, though ‘netspeak’ features like <bbz> babes, <2> to,
<!!!!!> were perceived to be new features that had emerged on the
internet, in reality, the novelty of these features was overstated. Many
of the supposedly ‘unique’ features of the ‘internet variety’ were found
to actually predate the internet. Similar kinds of abbreviations and
respellings to those found in CMC were observed to be common in
older written genres including notetaking, telegrams, and magazines
(see Janda, 1985; Baron, 2008; Androutsopoulos, 2000).
24 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Points for reflection

• Have you ever seen ‘netspeak’ features in other contexts than DMC?
If so, why do you think these features are used in these contexts?
(Hint: Think about graffiti.)
• Do you associate the use of ‘netspeak’ with any types of people or
users?

We see similar types of spellings and written conventions across written

genres because they share similarities in their structure, form, and
design. In the case of SMS and telegram messages, both are technologies
constrained by character limits. Similar to SMS messages, which are
charged based on the number of characters, telegrams were charged by
the number of words. Abbreviations and other non-​standard spellings
were often used to minimise the costs of sending a message. This style
of writing became known as ‘telegram style’. Unsurprisingly, the types
of abbreviations and the style of telegram messages look very similar
to those used in SMS. Consider, for instance, the following example
(4) from a textbook on telegraphs in the early 1900s (Dodge, 1901):

(4)
Q. Hw sun wi 1st 74 b rdy
‘How soon will 1st No. 74 be ready?’
A. Sun as ty gt C & W
‘Soon as they get coal and water’
Q. Wr r ty gg r 9
Where are they going for No. 9?’
A. SX
‘Wanatah, office call’
Q. Cld ty mk K A if I gv em 10 mins on 9
‘Could they make Hanna if I gave them 10 minutes
time on No. 9?’

The above example contains many abbreviations which look very

similar to those we defined as ‘netspeak’ in earlier sections –​just some
90 or so years before the internet was introduced! Importantly, like
those used in CMC and SMS, the abbreviations and spellings people
used in telegrams weren’t random or illogical. They are linguistically
principled: Vowels tend to be omitted (e.g., <Hw> how, <rdy> ready,
<Cld> could) or reduced (e.g., <Sun> soon), whilst other spellings
appear to represent processes commonly found in speech (e.g., <em>
them → [ɛm]).
Similar spellings and abbreviations are found in SMS. For instance,
consider the following data from Thurlow and Brown’s (2003) paper
on SMS messages sent by young people in the UK (Extracts (5) and (6)):
 Digital Communication and Sociolinguistics 25

(5) AS IF,wot ugly unsespectin minga has got u?only jokn fatsy,I
new ud laf,dats i sent it-​erd ur doin levis proj,did u 12 borrow
mine?
‘as if, what ugly unsuspecting minger has got you? Only
joking, fatsy. I knew you’d laugh. That’s [why] I sent it-​heard
you’re doing Levi’s project. Did you 12 borrow mine?
(6) R WE DOIN LUNCH THIS WK?CHE
‘are we doing lunch this week? Che’

We see very many similar spellings and abbreviations in these messages

to the telegram in (4). This includes the deletion of vowels (e.g., <R>
are, <WK> week, <u> you) and representations of spoken language
phenomena (e.g., <erd> heard [ɜːd], <dats> that’s [dats]). These
spellings, like the telegram style, are not random or incoherent, but
are principled and systematic.
Based on this evidence, it seems that the language used in CMC was
unlikely to have ever been truly unique to the internet (cf. Crystal,
2006). Rather, it seems that features and strategies common in other
genres of written communication (e.g., telegrams) were recycled and
extended in CMC. On the internet, these features were used in similar
ways and, perhaps, for similar reasons. A more accurate definition of
CMC language, then, is not that it is ‘a variety unique to the internet’
but rather: ‘A linguistic style that is characterised by standard and
non-​standard spellings, abbreviations, emoticons, and other features
that are found in other written genres, but are often associated with
the internet’.
So far, we have focussed on one main critique of internet lan-
guage: The novelty of netspeak forms was overstated. A second
and related issue, however, focussed not on the supposed novelty of
‘netspeak’ forms per se, but more the extent to which these features
were actually used in CMC. Although features like <bbz>, <gr8>, and
emoticons were claimed to be typical or iconic of CMC, there was
little evidence on the extent to which these features were used in prac-
tice. As noted previously, many of the arguments made in earlier work
about the nature of the language of CMC were often based on limited
datasets and/​or anecdotal observations (e.g., Crystal, 2006). It was
unclear to what extent these arguments could be generalised.
In fact, when researchers examined the quantitative distribution
of ‘characteristic’ CMC features in naturalistic conversations, they
found these to be much less common than initially claimed. For
instance, in Tagliamonte and Denis’ (2008) analysis of ‘netspeak’
forms in a corpus of over 1.5 million words of Instant Messages (IM)
sent by 72 Canadian teenagers, the authors find that features previ-
ously described as characteristic of IM were used very infrequently.
Notably, they find that, in the corpus of 1.5 million words, the
26 Researching Language and Digital Communication

abbreviations <ttyl> ‘talk to you later’ and <btw> ‘by the way’ were
used very infrequently: <ttyl> was used 298 times, whilst <btw> was
used only 249 times. Although perhaps the most surprising finding
is that the abbreviation <lol>, which is often claimed to be an iconic
CMC feature, was used just 4506 times. Instead, the variant <haha>,
was used more frequently than <lol>, occurring 16183 times in the
corpus. Overall, the authors conclude that the use of so-​called ‘char-
acteristic IM forms’ were actually very infrequent in the corpus,
with all forms combined representing only 2.4% of the word count
of the dataset. Together, these findings suggest that whilst ‘netspeak’
features may be relatively interesting features of digital communica-
tion, their novelty and frequency were heavily overstated in earlier
research on the topic.

2.4.2 Beyond ‘Internet Language’

Acknowledging the limitations of the first-​wave, researchers started
to advocate for a move away from analysing features of CMC in
relation to spoken-​written registers or examining how a particular
medium shapes language use or how macro-​identities, such as gender,
correlated with language choices. Scholars like Georgakopoulou
(2006) and Androutsopoulos (2006) argued instead for a greater focus
on the contextual aspects of digital communication. The call was made
for research to examine how broader contextual, social, and cultural
dynamics shape digital communication.
CMC research which followed this call started to focus less on
the medium specificities of email, IM and other genres (cf. Crystal,
2006) but rather emphasised individual agency in digital communica­
tion. These types of studies demonstrated that users actively engaged
in creative and sometimes unpredictable linguistic practices, appro-
priating and styling linguistic resources to do conversational and
interactional work, as opposed to reproducing a set of expected and
conventionalised practices determined by the medium of interaction.
The focus in this new line of inquiry was not on defining the ‘lan-
guage of the internet’ or the ‘linguistic characteristics of netspeak’
per se, but rather on how linguistic variability was used in social
interaction and its role in the construction of sociolinguistic iden-
tities. Androutsopoulos (2006: 419) summarises this development
as a shift from studies which analyse the ‘language of CMC’ to
those which focus on ‘socially situated computer-​ mediated dis-
course’. Research which followed showed that CMC was not a
single homogenous variety but rather that there was a great deal of
linguistic diversity in users’ digital interactions. These analyses did
not attempt to explain the linguistic diversity solely in terms of the
medium (i.e., email or IM), but rather emphasised the relevance of
 Digital Communication and Sociolinguistics 27

social, interactional, and contextual factors in shaping the content

and style of digital communication.
The refocussing of research priorities away from medium-​related to
user-​related language practices gave rise to what some scholars have
termed the ‘second wave’ of CMC studies (Georgakopoulou, 2006;
Androutsopoulos, 2006). Along with this development came a more
sustained effort to engage with insights and arguments in related fields,
such as sociolinguistics, sociology, and media studies.
An illustration of this development is found in Siebenhaar’s (2006)
analysis of code choice and code-​switching in Swiss-​German Internet
Relay Chat (IRC) rooms. In that study, Siebenhaar finds that the vari-
ation in the use of Swiss-​German dialects and Standard German in
Swiss-​German depends on both individuals’ preferences and also the
predominant variety used within a particular thread. Thus, in that
analysis, it is not the medium (IRC) that is perceived to determine
which style or type of language is used. Rather, it is social and con-
textual factors (individual preferences, the predominant dialect in a
thread) that are argued to influence the code choice.

2.5 Current Approaches in Sociolinguistics

Since the publication of the special issue on ‘Sociolinguistics and
computer-​mediated communication’ in the Journal of Sociolinguistics
(Androutsopoulos, 2006), sociolinguistic research on digital commu­
nication has gone from a relatively specialised and fringe research area
to a productive and vibrant field of inquiry. Digital data and methods
are no longer unusual or noteworthy. Rather, analyses of DMC take
centre stage in contemporary sociolinguistic research.
This development reflects the changing technological landscape over
the past 20 or so years. Over this period of time, digital technolo-
gies have become increasingly embedded in our lives to the point that,
for most people today, social media and digital communication have
become fairly unremarkable facts of social life. The types of digital
media we engage with and the ways in which we engage with them
have dramatically changed too. As noted in the introduction, mobile
devices such as smartphones and tablets have replaced computers as
the primary way that most people get online and users now access
platforms primarily through apps rather than web-​based browsers.
As mobile technologies have become more sophisticated, the digital
media content that we upload and interact with has shifted from pri-
marily text-​based to multimodal. That is to say that, along with text,
we now upload content that combines images, music, and videos.
Sociolinguistic research on digital communication has responded
to these developments. As discussed in Section 2.4, the earliest CMC
research focussed mainly on ‘text-​based’ CMC platforms and services,
28 Researching Language and Digital Communication

like IM and SMS. I suspect that most readers of this book, how-
ever, will be more familiar with multimodal platforms like Snapchat,
TikTok, and Instagram. All these platforms place an emphasis on
audio-​visual content. As new platforms and practices emerge, sociolin-
guistic approaches of digital communication have shifted from focus-
sing solely on textual patterns and orthographic variation towards
approaches that analyse the interplay of visual, textual, and aesthetic
features of platforms and messages.

2.5.1 Offline-​Online
Arguably, one of the most dramatic developments that has complicated
how we approach the study of digital communication is the increasing
convergence of ‘offline’ and ‘online’ space. As described in the intro-
duction, we don’t really ever ‘log off’. Instead, we move seamlessly
between interactions in face-​to-​face and digital contexts. This reality
is considerably different to the one that researchers were describing
in the 90s. As I have already discussed, in the earliest CMC research,
users’ digital practices were assumed to be specific to the context of the
internet (e.g., Crystal, 2006). Individuals were argued to use features
of a distinct variety that was bounded to this domain, i.e., ‘netspeak’
or ‘internet language’. This conceptualisation is heavily influenced by
the framing of the online as some separate ‘cyber world’ or dimension.
Today, given that digital technologies are so embedded in our
everyday lives, it no longer seems feasible to try to define a distinct
‘digital world’. It seems unlikely that individuals will use a discrete lin-
guistic variety that is restricted to the internet when people often con-
tinually move between offline and online contexts of communication.
To illustrate how difficult it is to separate offline-​ online contexts
of social interaction, I’ll introduce a hypothetical situation, partially
illustrated in Figure 2.1. Imagine you are messaging a friend (Jack) on
Snapchat about your day at school or uni. The conversation is initially
text-​based. You ask Jack how he is, he responds, and then he asks you
what you’re up to. Instead of sending a text message back, you decide
you will send a picture of what you’re doing at that time. Perhaps you’re
working on your coursework. Along with an image of your coursework,
you add a Snapchat sticker of the time (22.19), along with two emojis
that suggest you’re not entirely happy to be working on your coursework.
After 20 minutes or so, you make little progress. You decide to send
Jack a video selfie of you with the ‘dog lens’, and the comment ‘#bored’.
By the time your friend has responded, you’ve finished your homework
and you’re relaxing by watching a film before bed. You send Jack a
quick video of the film you’re watching followed by a voice note saying
you’ll snap (i.e., message) him tomorrow. This very mundane –​and
 Digital Communication and Sociolinguistics 29

Figure 2.1 An example of a multimodal snapchat conversation

hopefully relatable –​example which many of us engage in on a daily

basis demonstrates the slippery offline-​online divide. When you send
an image of your homework, a context which we typically think of as
‘offline’ –​your desk, your writing –​becomes transformed into a digital
message (a Snapchat). And when you see Jack in class tomorrow, your
Snapchat discussion –​the film, the coursework –​becomes available as
a potential topic to be discussed in face-​to-​face conversation. In this
way, the boundaries between offline-​online contexts of communication
become blurred, if not indistinguishable.
Another issue which complicates any attempt to distinguish between
offline-​online contexts of interaction is the fact that many of us com-
municate across platforms. Although earlier research was focussed
on defining the language used in specific platforms –​‘IM’, ‘email’,
‘SMS’ –​today, people regularly engage in interactions that move across
different networks, platforms, and devices. Returning to the Snapchat
conversation above, it is possible to imagine a scenario in which the
interaction takes place across multiple platforms. For instance, when
‘coursework’ becomes a topic of conversation, your friend Jack might
send you a work-​related meme on Instagram. It is then possible that
the rest of the conversation will continue on a different platform
even though it was initiated on Snapchat. This tendency is part of a
30 Researching Language and Digital Communication

phenomenon that the digital anthropologists, Madianou and Miller

(2012) have called polymedia.

Key Term: Polymedia

A concept introduced by Madianou and Miller (2012), polymedia
describes the tendency for mediated communication to take place
not on a single platform, but across services and apps. People choose
from this range of media platforms not based entirely on what that
platform allows the user to do but rather on the social relationships
that can be formed there.

As we will see, all these developments are extremely relevant to socio-

linguistic approaches to digital communication. Today, the reality that
we are faced with is really very different to that discussed in earlier
work on ‘CMC’. The computer has largely been replaced by a var-
iety of different digital and mobile devices that we use. As platforms
become more sophisticated, the new multimodal styles of social and
digital media now look very different to the text-​based conversations
that were discussed in earlier work on CMC. Given that our rela-
tionship with technology and our digital practices have very clearly
changed over the past 20 or so years, the label ‘CMC’ now seems a
little outdated. It seems odd to refer to conversations on ‘Snapchat’
or ‘Instagram’ as types of CMC because these are very different
platforms to those analysed in the first-​wave of CMC research. At a
very obvious level, they are accessed via a mobile device and whilst
mobiles are technically computer-​based devices, people don’t really
think of mobiles in this way. For these reasons, and to distinguish the
approaches and research I discuss in the remainder of this book from
earlier CMC research, I use the terms ‘digital communication’ and
‘DMC’ (see Androutsopoulos, 2021).

2.5.2 ‘TikTok Voice’?

The above discussion on the offline-​online separation of social life
brings me to an issue that I often get asked to provide some media
commentary on. Over the past few years, I have been inundated with
journalist requests asking me to comment on and describe the new
variety of ‘TikTok language’ (or whatever platform was popular at the
time!). There are now a good few newspaper articles which have been
written on an apparently new TikTok voice or accent whilst others
have claimed that Twitter has led to more informal or casual styles of
interaction (presumably due to the character limit).
Before we progress, it is worth critically assessing some of these
claims. I often argue that many of these claims are reflective of a
 Digital Communication and Sociolinguistics 31

tendency for people to overestimate the influence of (new) technolo-

gies and social media platforms on language and social interaction. As
discussed above, in earlier research on CMC, researchers concluded
that the internet had led to the emergence of a new variety of language.
Many of the claims I see about ‘TikTok voice’ (or whatever platform
voice) are reminiscent of those made in earlier CMC research. Most
researchers who work on this topic, however, are less convinced that
new platforms will lead to new varieties of language.
So why then do these narratives exist? In my work on this topic,
I have argued that it is often to do with visibility. TikTok, especially,
puts a lot of the language practices that we probably do in everyday
face-​to-​
face interaction under the microscope. You may not have
recognised that people use words like ‘rizz’ or ‘slay’ or that when
people speak, they use lots of hesitation markers (e.g., erm, err, hmm),
or you may have never even heard a speaker from Shetland. But, on
TikTok, those words, dialects, and other types of language practices
are put on display and are intensely scrutinised. Those practices have
likely existed for some time but platforms like TikTok and YouTube
increase the visibility of those practices as they become viewed by
new audiences. We now attend to something we’ve never thought
of or heard about before, and so it’s possible that we jump to the
conclusion that those practices emerged on the app/​platform simply
because that’s where we first heard or saw them. In a recent article,
I was asked to comment on a new ‘influencer voice’ used on TikTok.
However, what the journalist had heard on TikTok, predates the app.
Before TikTok, it was Instagram. Before that, it was YouTube. We
often have a tendency to assume that things are much newer than
they are!
In fact, lots of the practices described as ‘influencer voice’ or ‘TikTok
language’ are actually things people already do offline and have done
for some time. Very recently, lots of journalists have asked me to
comment on the emergence of a ‘TikTok accent’. When I’ve analysed
the content of the videos sent to me, many of the people in the videos
use features of language we hear and see elsewhere. For instance,
many influencers use ‘uptalk’ or ‘High Rising Terminals’ (HRTs), that
is, the use of a rising intonation on a declarative statement (e.g., I went
to this party?) –​and creaky voice or ‘vocal fry’ –​where speakers use a
deep, creaky, breathy sound when they speak. Of course, whilst some
influencers might use these features in an interesting way, it would be
inaccurate to say that these features are distinct to TikTok or even part
of a platform specific ‘accent’.
To me, as a sociolinguist, a more compelling question is why
do some influencers use these features? In my work, I have argued
that these features are often used in TikTok (and other platforms)
because they potentially make the content more engaging. For
32 Researching Language and Digital Communication

instance, sociolinguistic research on HRTs in speech has shown that

these are often used to engage the audience in what the speaker is
saying. It’s highly likely that influencers and other creators who are
fighting for space and attention on TikTok, use linguistic strategies
in an attempt to engage their audience and keep them on their page.
On many platforms, engagement means money. If you’re a highly
engaging creator, people will stay on your page and you will make
more money!
In other work, journalists have been more interested in the
appearance of so-​ called ‘new words’ or ‘internet slang’. Much of
this discussion neglects the fact that lots of what people think of as
‘TikTok slang’ –​e.g., ‘slay’, ‘ate it up’, ‘left no crumbs’, and so on,
have a much longer history than most people recognise. Many of these
words and phrases originated in a variety of English called ‘African
American English’ and/​ or are words which have been historically
associated with queer communities. Most people are unaware of the
etymologies of these words and so when they see words like ‘slay’ and
‘yaas’ being used on TikTok, they often assume that those words and
phrases originated on that platform. In reality, they were used a long
time before TikTok and by communities who have a long history of
using the language. In this way, social media appears to raise the visi-
bility of language varieties and their use, and so potentially increases
the uptake of these words and phrases. We will continually to critically
evaluate these issues throughout this book, but it’s worth keeping in
the back of your mind that language varieties and practices that we
think of as being ‘TikTok’ or ‘Twitter’ language, for instance, often
have a much longer history than we think.

2.6 Summary
This chapter has provided an overview of research on digital com-
munication in sociolinguistics. In the chapter, we defined digital com-
munication as any type of interaction that takes places via digital
technologies. This includes services such as email, social media, video
conferencing platforms, and weblogs. Earlier sociolinguistic research
on digital communication focussed on describing patterns of ‘CMC’.
Much of this work tried to identify the distinctive features that were
thought to be characteristic of the ‘new variety’ used on the internet
(often labelled ‘netspeak’). More recent approaches instead analyse
the ways in which users creatively appropriate linguistic resources to
perform their identities and to do conversational work, such as signal
sarcasm or irony.
The chapter concludes by briefly summarising current approaches
in the field. Research in sociolinguistics and digital communication
has moved in lockstep with more recent technological developments
 Digital Communication and Sociolinguistics 33

such as the emergence of ‘image-​first’ platforms like Instagram and

TikTok. In contemporary sociolinguistics, researchers have turned
their attention to multimodal social and digital media interactions,
exploring the interplay of text, images, video, and emoji. Along with
these developments, researchers have also questioned the traditional
dichotomy of the offline-​online. As we will see in later chapters, this
has led researchers to explore how digital interactions are embedded
in broader systems of sociolinguistic differentiation and use.

2.7 Activities
1. Make a list of linguistic features you consider to be typical of
DMC. Now compare that list with that in Crystal (2006, Chapter
2). What similarities and differences do you observe?
2. Keep a diary of your ‘polymedia’ practices throughout the day.
Are there particular platforms that you use to interact with spe-
cific people? Are there particular types of messages you send on
one platform that you don’t on another?
3. Navigate to a conversation on a text-​based app or platform (e.g.,
a WhatsApp chat). Now search for the following features: <lol>,
<haha>, <hehe>, <lmao>. First, write down how many times each
of these are used. Do you use one form more than another? Are
there any forms that you don’t use at all? If you use more than one
form, try to think about how that is used in your text messages.
For instance, do you use <lol> in a different way to <hehe>?
4. After completing the task above, attempt to define the function
of <lol>. Some scholars (e.g., Tagliamonte & Denis, 2008) con­
sider <lol> along with <haha>, <hehe> and <lmao> to be ‘laughter
variants’. Do these features always function as signifiers of
laughter in your texts?
5. Do you think there is a ‘TikTok voice’? If yes, what are some
features of this voice? Do you see these features being used else-
where in face-​to-​face interaction or other contexts?

2.8 Further Reading

Sociolinguistics
Holmes, Janet & Nick Wilson (2022). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 6th
edition. London: Longman.
Jones, Rodney & Christiana Themistocleous (2022). Introducing Language
and Society. Cambridge Introductions to Language and Linguistics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van Herk, Gerard (2018). What is Sociolinguistics?, 2nd edition. Oxford:
Wiley-​Blackwell.
34 Researching Language and Digital Communication

CMC
Crystal, David (2006). Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra & Tereza Spilioti (2016). The Routledge
Handbook of Language and Digital Communication. Oxford: Routledge.
Herring, Susan (1996). Computer-​ Mediated Communication: Linguistic,
Social, and Cross-​Cultural Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

2.9 References
Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2000). Non-​standard spellings in media texts: The
case of German fanzines. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4: 514–​533.
Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2006). Introduction: Sociolinguistics and computer-
mediated communication. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 10(4): 419–​438.
Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2021). Polymedia in interaction. Pragmatics and
Society, 12: 707–​724.
Baron, Naomi S. (2008). Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile
World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
boyd, danah (2012). Participating in the always on lifestyle. In Michael
Mandiberg (ed.), The Social Media Reader, pp. 71–​76. New York: New York
University Press.
Buchholz, Katharina (2022). Which countries spend the most time on social
media? World Economic Forum. www.wefo​rum.org/​age​nda/​2022/​04/​soc​
ial-​media-​inter​net-​conne​ctiv​ity/​ (accessed 21 April 2024).
Carr, Caleb T. & Rebcca A. Hayes (2015). Social media: Defining, developing,
and divining. Atlantic Journal of Communication, 23(1): 46–​65.
Collot, Milena & Nancy Belmore (1996). Electronic language:
A new variety of English. In Susan Herring (ed.), Computer-​Mediated
Communication: Linguistics, Social and Cross-​ Cultural Perspectives,
pp. 13–​28. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Crystal, David (2006). Language and the Internet, 2nd edition. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Davis, Boyd H. & Jeutonne Brewer (1997). Electronic Discourse: Linguistic
Individuals in Virtual Space. New York: State University of New York Press.
Dodge, George M. (1901). The Telegraph Instructor. Indiana: Institute of
Telegraphy.
Ferrara, Kathleen, Hans Brunner & Greg Whittemore (1991). Interactive
written discourse as an emergent register. Written Communication, 8: 8–​34.
Fischer, John L. (1958). Social influences on the choice of a linguistic variant.
WORD, 14(1): 47–​56.
Foertsch, Julie (1995). The impact of electronic networks on scholarly com-
munication: Avenues for research. Discourse Processes, 19: 301–​328.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2006). Postscript: Computer-​mediated commu-
nication in sociolinguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 10: 548–​557.
Herring, Susan C. (2000). Gender differences in CMC: Findings and
implications. The CPSR Newsletter, 18(1).
Janda, Richard (1985). Note-​taking English as a simplified register. Discourse
Processes, 8: 437–​454.
 Digital Communication and Sociolinguistics 35

Labov, William (1966). The Social Stratification of English in New York City.
Washington, DC: Centre for Applied Linguistics.
McCulloch, Gretchen. (2019). Because Internet: Understanding the New
Rules of Language. London: Penguin Random House.
Schleef, Erik & Michael Ramsammy (2013). Labiodental fronting of /​θ/​ in
London and Edinburgh: A cross-​dialectal study. English Language and
Linguistics, 17(1): 25–​54.
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Journal of Sociolinguistics, 14: 657–​677.
3 Affordances, Audiences,
and Contexts

3.1 Introduction
In this chapter we cover the following topics:

• Platform affordances
• Audience design and the imagined audience
• Contexts and context collapse.

Imagine you’re on an exotic holiday in some far-​flung destination.

You’re spending a day on a beautiful white sand beach surrounded
by palm trees with a nice cold drink in hand. As the palm trees
sway and the sun starts to set you think to yourself: ‘I can’t wait to
upload this moment to social media so all my friends can see what
an amazing time I’m having’. Now, here comes a dilemma: Which
app do you use the document this moment? You’ve got accounts on
all the main platforms (Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and
Snapchat). Do you post the same video across all your accounts?
Or perhaps you upload a photo to Snapchat and a video to your
Instagram story.
What we post and where we post, is often a carefully made decision.
We tend to create content and upload posts with an awareness of what
the platform allows you to do (affordances) and who we expect to see
that post (audiences). Take, for instance, the example above of uploading
a post whilst you are on your summer holiday. On an app like Instagram,
you could upload a single post with multiple images that documents
various aspects of your trip to the beach: Relaxing on a sunbed with an
ice-​cold drink in hand, snorkelling in crystal clear waters, and an aes-
thetic shot of the sun setting over the beach (see Figure 3.1 for example).
For the purposes of this discussion, let’s say that your Instagram profile
is public. You then carefully curate this post by adding some related
hashtags (e.g., #holiday, #summer2024, #sunset). You might even tag
the location of the beach. By tagging the post in this way, you have now
linked the post to others which have also used the same hashtags and
location. It’s possible that people looking for their next summer holiday

DOI: 10.4324/9781003391838-3
 Affordances, Audiences, and Contexts 37

Figure 3.1 An Instagram post of a day at the beach

may come across your post and interact with it, possibly leaving a
comment or a like. Your followers may also interact with the post. All of
these possibilities are enabled because of the affordances of Instagram.
Now, let us imagine that you want to post about your day at the
beach on a different platform. Let’s use BeReal as a counterexample.
BeReal is a French social media app launched in 2020 where posts are
uploaded as part of a daily randomly selected 2-​minute window. When
users receive a daily notification, they are encouraged to upload a post
of what they are doing within that given moment. What that post will
look like will depend entirely on what you’re doing in that 2-​minute
window: You may be relaxing on a sunbed; you may be watching the
sunset go down; or you may miss this window entirely because you’ve
gone for a swim. But unlike Instagram where you’ve uploaded a post
with multiple different images of your day, the BeReal post will cap-
ture only a small part of your day. And unlike the post on Instagram
which becomes a permanent fixture of your profile (unless you delete
it), the BeReal content will disappear once opened by those you sent it
to. And, unlike on Instagram where users who do not know or follow
you might interact with the post, on BeReal, posts are shared only with
friends. This example reveals that different platforms have different
affordances which leads us to design our posts in different ways.
38 Researching Language and Digital Communication

For sociolinguistic analyses of DMC, audiences are important because

concerns about who might see a post are likely to have an influence on
the content and style of a post. Because posts might be seen by different
audiences, users will often design posts with an intended audience in
mind. For instance, in reference to the example above, on Instagram,
where profiles are very often set to public, an awareness that the post
may be seen by people who are not close friends might lead you to design
a relatively inoffensive post that can’t be misinterpreted by people who
don’t know you. Whereas on apps and platforms that are ‘closed’ (i.e.,
your post can only be seen by your friends, such as BeReal), it’s possible
that you might design this post in a different way. It may be more casual
or include ‘in jokes’ that only you and your friends know.
What we’ve acknowledged here is that people don’t just upload the
same post to different platforms. Rather, they design their posts and
messages based on the affordances of the platform and the perceived
audience of that post. As sociolinguists and researchers interested in
language online, when we analyse DMC, we want to ask whether audi-
ence effects or platform affordances influence or constrain the style and
content of a post. We might be interested in the following questions:

• Do users create different styles of posts across different platforms?

• Are users language choices influenced by the design of the app or
platform?
• What types of linguistic strategies and resources do users employ
to negotiate different audiences (e.g., friends vs. family) on different
apps and platforms?

In this chapter, we explore these questions in more detail. We start out

by introducing some important concepts that have been employed to
understand the language of DMC. Our focus here is on three main
issues: Affordances, audiences, and contexts. We consider how these
issues might influence how we design our posts and the implications of
these issues for sociolinguistic analyses of DMC.

3.2 Affordances
Any person who has spent more than five minutes on Facebook or
Instagram or on any other social media will quickly be aware that
different digital platforms allow users to do different things. For
instance, on Facebook –​a platform typically associated with the
affordance of the ‘status update’ –​we can respond to the prompt
‘what’s on your mind?’ by creating a post about what we’ve been
up to or how we’re feeling. If we wanted to, we could write quite
a detailed post. Facebook currently permits status updates of up to
63,206 characters. If we compare the status update with the ‘tweet’,
we’ll quickly realise that the style, length, and type of update is going
 Affordances, Audiences, and Contexts 39

to be quite different on Twitter. This is because Twitter, as a platform

which has long emphasised brevity, generally limits tweets to a max-
imum of 280 characters. What we have identified here is one main
difference between Twitter and Facebook: Character limit.
There are very many other differences beyond the length and size of
posts on the two platforms. For instance, on Facebook, we can share
posts with our friends and family to our own profile. These posts will
only be seen by those who we have accepted a request from. Whereas,
on Twitter, we can retweet the post so it’s seen by people from a
much larger audience, many of whom we do not follow. Similarly,
on Facebook, we can now respond to a post by ‘liking’ it or using an
appropriate emoji reaction to convey ‘anger’, ‘care’, ‘sadness’, ‘love’,
‘laughter’, or ‘surprise’. Whereas on Twitter, the button responses are
more restricted –​we can only ‘like’ a tweet (by pressing the ‘love’
button). An example is found in the tweet below (Figure 3.2), taken
from my public profile. The affordances of comment, retweet, like (or
‘love’), bookmark, and share are below the tweet. As the owner of the
tweet, I can also post a comment, see the ‘post engagements’, and see
the number of views the tweet generated.
What a platform or digital technology allows you to do and what
activities are enabled by those functions are called affordances. We can
think of affordances as properties of social and digital media. Often these
affordances are shared across social and digital media platforms. For
instance, Instagram and Snapchat both afford users the ability to upload
posts to their stories. On both apps, users can upload a 24-​hour ‘story’
that is accessible by followers (and potentially others if their account is
public). In this way, the story function is an affordance that both Instagram
and Snapchat (and some other platforms, e.g., WhatsApp) share.

Figure 3.2 E
 xample tweet showing Twitter’s various ‘like’, ‘retweet’ and ‘share’
affordances
40 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Not all platforms will have the same affordances. For instance,
although Instagram and Snapchat have similarities (e.g., the story
function), there are also several differences in their design. The main
difference is the way content and user profiles are organised on the two
apps. On Instagram, user profiles comprise a grid of historic image
uploads which users can scroll back through. Whereas on Snapchat,
user profiles are only likely to contain the users’ most recent content,
such as uploads from the last 24 hours.
An often-​made distinction in the literature is the difference between
so-​called ‘high’ and ‘low’ level affordances. Low level affordances are
things that are dependent on the specific medium or platform or inter-
action, such as particular features, buttons, and styles of post. This
includes those already discussed such as the like button on Facebook
and stories on Snapchat and Instagram.
High level affordances are those dynamics enabled by social and
digital media technologies that operate above specific platforms. In
other words, these are affordances that are typical of social and digital
media platforms more generally. danah boyd (2014) argues that social
media are principally defined by four high level affordances. These are
(1) persistence, (2) visibility, (3) spreadability, and (4) searchability.
Persistence refers to the fact that social and digital media services
exist beyond the specific moment that the user is online or active.
Unlike in face-​to-​face interaction which occurs within a specific time
and space and ceases to exist beyond that moment (unless recorded!),
conversations on social media are often ‘on record’. In other words,
messages, conversations, posts, and other online content persist
beyond the moment in which they are sent. Users do not need to be
online or using the service to receive the content. This means that
platforms like Snapchat which enable users to send disappearing con-
tent are still considered persistent platforms because those services are
continuously accessible, even if particular messages are not.
The persistent nature of content means users can often retrieve and
review historic posts. A good example is the ‘memories’ affordance
on Facebook (see Figure 3.3). This function allows users to review
past moments shared with friends, including posts and photos, new
friendship connections, and major life events. It is precisely because
content persists that we can view and access this historic content.
Some institutions have even capitalised on the persistent nature of
social and digital media data by creating archives of social media data.
For instance, the British Library added Twitter to its UK Web Archive
whilst in the US, the Library of Congress kept a Twitter Archive.
The persistent nature of social media is relevant to sociolinguistic
analyses of DMC because the fact that posts stick around might lead
to new engagements and interactions. For instance, imagine you are
rifling through an old friend’s Instagram posts from 2016 and ‘like’ a
 Affordances, Audiences, and Contexts 41

Figure 3.3 Facebook Memories (Meta, 2018)

post before commenting something like ‘old memories!’. Liking and

commenting on this historic post could lead to a new conversation
between you and the user about the memories you made back in 2016.
Another, albeit dramatic, example of the interactional potentials of
‘persistence’ is the common request for evidence or so-​called ‘receipts’.
Because social media posts are on record in a way that face-​to-​face
interactions usually are not, users can often provide screenshots of
conversations to support their claims. In this way, persistence has
implications for sociolinguistic analyses of social and digital media.
The next affordance of social media that boyd discusses is visibility.
This refers to the fact that posts on social media are highly visible.
Although we often design posts with a specific audience in mind, they
are often seen by users beyond those who we intend to engage with.
For instance, when we post a tweet, we might write that tweet as if
that tweet is only going to be seen by other users who follow us. But
Twitter also has built in affordances that maximise the visibility of the
tweet meaning that it is likely to be seen by a larger audience of users
than just our followers. This includes the ‘retweet’ function which
enables users to re-​post tweets, which in turn shares that tweet with
their own followers. The hashtag also functions in a similar way. If we
upload a tweet with a hashtag, that tweet is directed into a larger con-
versational stream of tweets each containing the same hashtag. Say,
for instance, we were watching a television programme, we could use
the hashtag for that programme to filter our tweet into a ‘channel’ of
other tweets about that programme.
The heightened visibility of social media posts can lead to situations
where posts are viewed by people who are not part of our expected
42 Researching Language and Digital Communication

audience. This is discussed at length by boyd (2014) in her ethno­

graphic account of US teenagers’ social media practices. In that work,
boyd recounts that she had been contacted by an admissions tutor at
an Ivy League institution who was concerned about the application
of a young Black student. The student had submitted an outstanding
application which detailed his aspirations of getting a degree, enab-
ling him to leave behind his crime-​ridden neighbourhood where he’d
grown up. However, after Googling the candidate, the admissions
committee came across his MySpace profile which was filled with
gang symbols, explicit language, and references to criminal activities.
The committee concluded that the candidate had fabricated a back
story in order to increase his chances of being accepted at the presti-
gious institution. boyd, however, argued that was this was a misinter-
pretation of the candidates’ online persona. Rather than viewing his
online persona as an indication that he was attempting to trick the
admissions panel, boyd proposed that the student was using his profile
as a ‘survival technique’ to get by in his neighbourhood. The difference
in understanding here is indicative of the heightened visibility of the
students’ MySpace profile and the fact that it was seen by someone
outside of his intended audience. The user evidently wasn’t posting for
the university admissions officer –​he was posting for his classmates
and peers.
Another high-​level affordance is spreadability. This refers to the
fact that digital and social media technologies enable us to circulate
content far and wide. In face-​to-​face interaction we often communi-
cate with a ratified (i.e., known) and restricted set of individuals. That
information tends to stay with those individuals unless they discuss it
with other people. The transmission of information from one person
to the next is likely to be relatively slow. On social and digital media,
however, information can be spread from user to user very easily and
very quickly.
In fact, we’ve already discussed one example of the spreadability of
social media in the above. The ‘retweet’ function on Twitter is a great
example of the potential for social media content to become spread-
able. As discussed above, we often write tweets intended to be read by
our followers, but they’re often seen by people beyond these contexts.
This is because the retweet function is especially useful in spreading
the content of that message beyond the limited number of followers
that a user might have.
Spreadability is also enabled through ‘screenshots’. For instance,
on WhatsApp, a closed platform where users communicate with rati-
fied users in a private conversation, users could share screenshots of
messages with individuals who are not part of the group. Similarly, if
users follow a private Instagram account that their friends do not, they
might take screenshots of content to share with their friends. In this
 Affordances, Audiences, and Contexts 43

way, content can be spread easily and quickly beyond the immediate
audience in which the original message was conveyed.
The final high-​level affordance that boyd discusses is searchability.
This refers to the fact that social media content can be found and
uncovered via search functions. On Instagram, for instance, we can
search for specific hashtags to follow, on TikTok we can find our
friends by searching for their username, and on Facebook Marketplace
we might use filters to narrow our search to find the perfect second-​
hand item we’ve been looking for.

Key Term: Affordances

Affordances refer to what a platform allows you to do. We can make
a distinction between ‘high’ level affordances which are properties of
social/​digital media technologies more generally (e.g., the fact that
digital conversations generally persist beyond the moment), and ‘low’
level affordances which refer to the specific functions of a platform or
service (e.g., On Twitter: The ‘like’ button, the retweet function).

Points for reflection

• Think about some of the main (low-​level) affordances of a social

media platform (e.g., Twitter).
• Consider how these affordances influence the types of interactions
that people engage in on that platform.
• Reflect on whether other platforms share these affordances.
Are these affordances designed to be used in similar ways across
different platforms?

Although affordances like persistence and searchability have been

suggested as general properties of social media technologies, we should
be mindful that users may engage with platforms in ways that subvert
or question these affordances. In Costa’s (2018) ethnographic work
in Mardin, Turkey, she argues that persistence is only partially found
in the users’ practices, given that they would regularly open and close
accounts. Similarly, users would intentionally subvert searchability by
using fake names or accounts. She argues instead for affordances-​in-​
practice emphasising the situated nature of affordances and the rele-
vance of user engagements in exploiting those affordances.

3.2.1 Imagined Affordances

Some scholars have proposed an additional type of affordance that
are not specific to the app or service –​so-called imagined affordances.
44 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Nagy and Neff (2015: 1) define imagined affordances as those that

exist between ‘users’ perceptions, attitudes, and expectations; between
the materiality and functionality of technologies; and between the
intentions and perceptions of designers’. In other words, imagined
affordances are those perceptions and expectations about how a
platform or technology works which ultimately impact how a user
engages with those platforms/​technologies. This includes expectations
about how the algorithm of a platform works. A good example of
an imagined affordance is the Facebook News Feed. Often, people
perceive this to be an objective and chronologically organised stream
of their friends’ and families’ posts. In other words, people presume
that their News Feed just presents them with a stream of users’ latest
updates. However, in reality, this is an algorithmically tailored selec-
tion of posts arranged in a non-​chronological order according to the
user’s interests and past interactions.

3.3 Audiences
So far, we’ve discussed a few properties of social media that influence
the style and content of how people post. Many of these relate in some
way to the perception or response of the viewer –​or the audience.
Lots of research has examined the role and effect of audience on
DMC. This is because there are often considerable differences in the
types of audiences in face-​to-​face and digital communication and how
we manage them. In face-​to-​face conversation we generally interact
with a known and ratified person or group of individuals. The style
of interaction that we use (e.g., the words, the formality, etc.) is likely
to be influenced by who we are speaking to. We often change the
way we speak or communicate depending on the interactional con-
text. This includes things like the age, gender, or social status of our
interlocutor(s), as well as the context of the interaction. We can say
then that we design our language based on the norms and expectations
of the speaking context and the audience(s) we are communicating
with. We’re usually quite good at doing this because we have developed
an awareness of the typical expectations of the context over time.

3.3.1 Audience Design

What we have started to describe above is called stylistic variation.
Also called intra-​speaker/​signer variation, this refers to linguistic vari-
ation within the language of a single individual. For instance, you may
use the word ‘peng’ with your friends, but ‘nice’ when speaking to
your parents. This is called style-​shifting. We all style-​shift to some
degree. Very clearly –​and for good reason! –​young people do not
speak the same way to their friends as they do to their grandparents.
 Affordances, Audiences, and Contexts 45

Rather, they will style shift: They will use words, pronunciations, and
phrases associated with ‘young people’ (sometimes labelled ‘youth lan-
guage’ or ‘slang’) with their peers and then shift to a more formal style
of interaction when speaking with their grandparents.

Key Term: Stylistic Variation

Stylistic or intra-​speaker/​signer variation refers to variation within the
language of a single individual. Style-​shifting occurs when we move
between different styles of interacting. For instance, you may speak
or communicate one way with your friends and then style-​shift to
another way of speaking/​communicating when interacting with your
colleagues or family.

Decades of sociolinguistic research has showed that people are very

adept at doing this type of stylistic variation. Several models of stylistic
variation have been proposed to explain why people shift. In the earliest
research on the topic, it was the formality of the speech context that
was argued to be the central motivation for style-​shifting. Sociolinguists
such as William Labov (1966) and Peter Trudgill (1974) found that, as
the formality of the interaction context increased, speakers used more
of the standard or prestige speech style. For instance, research on the
variable pronunciation of (ING) (i.e., the alternation of the pronunci-
ation of –​ing as either [ɪŋ] or [ɪn]) found that speakers were more likely
to say words like walking as [wɔːkɪn] in more casual speaking contexts
such as an informal interview or conversation. In more formal speaking
tasks such as when reading a word passage or a list of words, however,
they were more likely to use the standard, [wɔːkɪŋ]. To explain this
pattern, scholars concluded that stylistic variation could be measured
in relation to the degree of ‘attention paid to speech’. That is to say that
as the formality of the speech context increased, it was expected that
individuals would pay more attention to their speech, and so would use
more of the standard or prestige variant.
However, whilst individuals clearly adapt their linguistic behaviour
in response to the perceived formality of the interactional context,
there are some contexts where style-​shifting cannot be understood
in relation to the formality of the speech context. Research which
followed demonstrated that other extralinguistic factors, like the inter-
locutor or audience, were also factors that influenced style-​shifting.
In the 1980s, sociolinguist Allan Bell proposed a radical model of
stylistic variation which he called ‘Audience Design’. The framework
was heavily influenced by trends in social psychology at the time, spe-
cifically Giles’ (1973) framework of Communication Accommodation
Theory (CAT). This framework argued that people make changes to
46 Researching Language and Digital Communication

their own behaviour either to align or to disalign from those they are
interacting with. Extending this to linguistic behaviour, Bell argued
that individuals “design their style primarily for and in response to
their audience” (Bell, 1984: 143).
Bell’s arguments were primarily based on an analysis of the pronun-
ciation of different radio newsreaders in New Zealand. In that work,
he found stylistic variation in the speech of two newscasters across the
different radio stations they presented on. Bell argued that this pattern
could not be interpreted in relation to attention paid to speech because
the speaking task and formality were consistent: Both were formal
news reports. He instead argued that the newscasters were style-​
shifting in response to the audiences of each show. In other words,
Bell argued that the speakers designed their linguistic behaviour to
match the norms and expectations of the two different audiences who
tuned into the shows.
A radical element of Bell’s model was the introduction of ‘referee
design’. Unlike audience design which is responsive in nature –​i.e.,
individuals adopt a linguistic style in response to the expectations and
norms of the audience –​referee design was conceptualised as ‘initia-
tive’. In these contexts, Bell argued that individuals diverge from the
typical expectations of the interactional context, instead using a lan-
guage style associated with an absent third-​party.

Key Term: Audience Design

Audience Design is a concept developed by Allan Bell (1984) which
argues that stylistic variation occurs because people change how
they speak or interact in relation to who they are interacting with
(i.e., their audience). People design their speech in response to the
expectations and norms of the audience.

3.3.2 The Imagined Audience

Though the concept of Audience Design was developed to account
for patterns in spoken language, it is clearly relevant to our discus-
sion of digital communication. As we discussed above, people often
design the content of their posts in relation to their audience. Across
different platforms, we might upload different posts in anticipation of
who might see that post. The language choices we make, therefore, are
potentially influenced by concerns of the audience.
However, and arguably, the notion of audience is a little more com-
plex in digital communication. In most DMC contexts, we have no
clear understanding of who our audience actually is or who might see
the post. Take, for instance, Twitter. Though you might initially write
a tweet in the hope that it will be seen by your followers, if the post
 Affordances, Audiences, and Contexts 47

is retweeted or hashtags are used, it’s very likely going to be seen by

people beyond the original audience.
Of course, this dilemma is not specific to digital communication –​it is
comparable to other types of asynchronous, one-​to-​many types of com-
munication, such as radio and television. Bell’s (1984) radio presenters
had some idea about the type of audience who would listen to their
shows but they had no real way of knowing who was really listening.
This is also an issue that writers contend with. In fact, it’s something I’m
thinking about as I write this book. Although I have some predictions
about who will read this book, and whilst it’s true that I am writing this
book in a particular style for the intended audience, in reality, I have
no real way of knowing who will read this book and whether the style
that I’ve adopted is truly that successful. Like the radio presenters in
Bell’s study, I am making linguistic choices based on my assumptions
or expectations about who the audience might be and what they might
use this book for. To use Bell’s terminology, we could say that I am
designing my writing for the student and/​or teacher who I expect will
use this book.
In social media and digital communication, these issues are arguably
heightened. This is because high level affordances like spreadability
and searchability mean that our messages, posts, and other content
might be seen by people way beyond those we had ever thought would
see it. If we go back to our earlier example of posting an image of
our beach holiday on Instagram, when uploading this image, I would
very likely assume that the audience of my post will be my friends and
family. Many of my friends and family follow me, so it is logical to
assume that this post will appear in their newsfeed. So, I will make
several design choices with this audience in mind. But, as I discussed
earlier, if I tag this post with hashtags, add a location tag, and make my
profile public, it’s possible –​if not inevitable –​that people beyond my
immediate social circle will see this post. So, who are we posting for?
The answer is the imagined audience. In these contexts, and “in the
absence of certain knowledge about audience, participants take cues
from the social media environment to imagine the community” (boyd,
2007: 131). In this way, when we write a tweet or put together an
Instagram post, we construct it in a way that we think is going to be
familiar and interpretable by those who we expect to see that post –​
people who we imagine to be our audience (Litt & Hargittai, 2016).

Points for reflection

• Who do you post for? Who is your imagined audience?

• Do you post for different audiences on different platforms? How do
you design your messages?
• Have you ever experienced a situation where someone (e.g., family)
saw a post that you had not intended for them to see?
48 Researching Language and Digital Communication

The type of audience that we imagine is based on a number of different

factors including, the social network of the user, the platform which they
post on, the affordances of that platform, and our past interactions. In
a now seminal study of audience design on Twitter, Marwick and boyd
(2011) asked participants a series of questions about their imagined
audience. In response to the questions ‘Who do you imagine reading
your tweets?’ and ‘Who do you tweet to?’, users generally responded
that they designed their tweets for their friends, followers, or them-
selves. Some users also noted that the audience that they imagined
was dependent on the content of the tweet. Others viewed the audi-
ence as the ‘ideal’ person –​an imaginary interested party that shares
their interests and preferences. The concept of the imagined audience
is extremely relevant to studying digital communication. We’ll discuss
later the relevance of the imagined audience and ethics in Chapter 5
but, for now, we’ll focus on the influence of the imagined audience in
shaping how we communicate online.

Key Term: Imagined Audience

On social and digital media, unable to ascertain who might see a post,
users design their messages and content for an expected or assumed
audience. This audience is imagined to be a particular type of person,
such as friends, family, and people who are similar to the poster.

Since we design our messages for an imagined audience, the choice

of language we write in, the types of emoji we use, the spellings that
we employ, or even the words we decide to use are all likely to be
a design choice based on who we expect to see the post. Research
has shown that multilingual posters will often decide which lan-
guage to use on the basis of an imagined audience. For instance,
in Androutosopoulos’ (2014) analysis of language alternation on
Facebook, he demonstrates that, in multilingual conversations, the
code choice is influenced by the expectations and linguistic profi-
ciency of the expected audience. The choice of language, he argues,
is fundamentally motivated by the need to make the post as max-
imally interpretable and accessible to as many users as possible. By
analysing four individuals’ Facebook posts, he shows that the users
adopt three strategies for maximising the audience. They either: (i)
use a lingua franca; (ii) replicate the content of a message in multiple
languages; and (iii) avoid using linguistic resources altogether. In this
way, the users adapt the content of their message to respond to the
expectations of the imagined audience.
Similar practices are observed by Liu (2021). In that study, Liu shows
that Chinese multilingual users of the social media platform WeChat
 Affordances, Audiences, and Contexts 49

use highly complex design strategies to target different audiences. For

instance, one individual, Amy, was seen to switch between English
and Chinese in different posts that she uploaded. As an international
student in Melbourne, her choice of language was highly variable.
Some posts were in English, others in Chinese. However, when she
took a summer vacation, her posts were almost entirely in Chinese. In
interviews when Liu asked about these posts, Amy revealed that the
posts she uploaded during her vacation were designed solely for her
schoolmates and teachers in China. She commented that her choice
to use Chinese was directly motivated by recommendations of her
teachers back in China. They had suggested that she uploaded posts
for those who did not have the opportunity to study abroad or for
those considering applying for foreign universities. Here we see that
the language that Amy posted in was directly influenced by the expect-
ation of who might see the post, i.e., the imagined audience.

3.4 Contexts
Some of the tensions we’ve discussed so far in terms of audience design
are related to the fact that social media brings people from different
contexts together. In offline face-​to-​face situations, these contexts are
quite easy to disentangle. From home to school to work to the cinema,
we participate in different social circles depending on the context in
which we find ourselves. At school, we might spend time with our
friends and occasionally interact with our teachers, whilst at work, we
spend time interacting with our colleagues and, potentially, customers
or clients. The ways that we speak, dress, and interact are all dependent
on the norms and expectations of a given context. How we interact
with our peers and co-​workers at school or at university is likely to be
very different to how we communicate with our family or superiors
(e.g., bosses, teachers, lecturers).
The above point describes a basic fact about social life: We present
different versions of ourselves in different contexts. This observation
was first theorised by sociologist Erving Goffman (1967) in his discus­
sion of ‘face’. Here, face refers to the individual’s public self-​image; it
is how we present ourselves to the world. Because there are different
norms and expectations in different contexts, we often change our
public self-​image. This is what Goffman refers to as face-​work. We can
think of face as a type of mask that we put on (or take off) depending
on the audience and the context of social interaction. Goffman argues
that a person can be seen to be in face when the image they claim for
themselves is one that is “internally consistent, that is supported by
judgments and evidence conveyed by other participants, and that is
confirmed by evidence conveyed through impersonal agencies in the
situation” (1967: 6).
50 Researching Language and Digital Communication

In life, we often participate in this type of face-​work as we move

between contexts like work or home. There are often types of
interactions or topics of conversation that are deemed appropriate
for some social contexts and inappropriate for others. For instance,
at work, where we are often expected to act ‘professionally’, we spend
most of our time conversing with colleagues and, potentially, customers
or clients. At work, sharing intimate details about your love life, for
instance, is unlikely to be a socially appropriate topic for this context.
Discussions about the current tax year or the budget for stationery may
be more appropriate (depending on your job, of course). Evidently,
topics deemed suitable for work are not the same as those you might
engage in with your friends. Here, we see that in different contexts, we
engage in different types of interactions depending on the norms and
expectations of different communicative contexts. Generally, people
have a good awareness of what is expected for a given social context.
We know when to do our ‘work-​self’ or ‘friend-​self’ and when to switch
that side of us off. It would be weird to go home and speak and act the
same as we do when we’re at work or at school!

3.4.1 Context Collapse

Generally speaking, the contexts that we find ourselves in are rela-
tively distinct in space and time. Work, school, and home are domains
that we can often separate from the rest of our lives. For instance, the
‘work’ domain is often specified by your contractual obligations of
attending work at a designated time and place. Many people in white
collar (i.e., office) jobs commute to a workplace and will work ‘office
hours’, such as from nine to five. ‘Professional life’ and the roles that
we engage in as a ‘receptionist’, ‘banker’, or any other such job are
only roles that we fulfil when we’re in the office during work hours.
We can manage the boundaries of this context relatively easily. We
might discuss the end of the tax year in a 9.30 am meeting with our
colleagues but when we get home at 7 pm, outside office hours, we
switch to the domain of ‘home’ and discuss social topics with family
members. The two contexts seldom overlap: They are distinct and
bounded.
However, sometimes the boundaries between different contexts
(e.g., ‘work’, ‘family’, ‘friends’) may not be as easy to separate as the
example above. In some situations, they may be blurred or in others,
they may disappear entirely –​they can be said to collapse. Context
collapse occurs when there is a flattening of distinct contexts. This
happens when the boundaries between the different domains that the
individual participates in become blurred or even indistinguishable
such that the individual’s private, personal, or familiar networks might
converge.
 Affordances, Audiences, and Contexts 51

As we will see, context collapse in social media is a phenomenon

that has been discussed at length. However, it is important to recog-
nise that context collapse isn’t specific to social media –​it happens
elsewhere. A classic case is the example of a family wedding where it
is very typical for guests to be invited from various different social and
professional circles: Family, friends, colleagues, and so on. Until the
day of the wedding, those circles are likely to have been relatively sep-
arate –​colleagues at work, family at home, friends in social settings.
However, when all of those guests are bought together at the wedding,
the boundaries that used to separate those groups of people disappear.
Contexts collapse as colleagues talk to family, family talk to friends,
and so on.

Key Term: Context Collapse

Context collapse refers to the flattening of distinct communicative
contexts. In social media, context collapse occurs when users from
various different social networks (e.g., work, family, school) are bought
together. Users must contend with context collapse when designing
the content of their posts.

Context collapse is relevant to the notion of ‘face’ because it can

lead to individuals being in the ‘wrong face’ or ‘losing face’ in the
situation that they find themselves in. For instance, in the example of
a family wedding in the UK, it is common for the wedding celebra-
tion to feature a speech by the ‘best man’. Typically, this will include
humorous stories about the groom. Some of these stories include
personal or embarrassing narratives. It is possible that the groom
has not disclosed these details to colleagues or acquaintances. In
these contexts, the public self-​image that the groom has constructed
(i.e., his face) may be contradicted or undermined due to the collapse
of these different contexts. This is what researchers describe as
‘losing face’.
The wedding example above shows us that context collapse isn’t
specific to social media. However, arguably, context collapse is
heightened in digital and social media. This is because people often
use social media to make connections with people from a variety of
different social and professional circles. Social media brings these
people together in much the same way as a family wedding.
A good example of context collapse on social media is the organ-
isation of Facebook friends. Whilst writing this chapter, I navigated to
my Facebook friends and checked who I’d accepted friend requests.
I seem to have connections with people from just about every social
and professional circle I’ve ever participated in. I have connections
52 Researching Language and Digital Communication

with users I went to primary school with, family from Australia and
the UK, colleagues from a former workplace, current colleagues,
old secondary school teachers, and others. Given that these individ-
uals are all associated with specific social or professional contexts
(‘school’, ‘work’, etc.), these connections have been kept separate. But
on Facebook, they are now bought together. Now, if I were to think
about uploading a post, I’d have to consider that this post is likely
to be seen by all these different users from different social and pro-
fessional circles. The design of this post is therefore very likely to be
influenced by an awareness of the imagined audience and a concern
for the context collapse that Facebook enables. In this way, context
collapse influences not just the types of posts we share but also how
we share them.

Points for reflection

• Have you ever experienced context collapse in social media?

• Do you use any strategies (e.g., privacy and security settings) to
manage context collapse?

We can think of context collapse in social media as occurring in two

distinct ways. The first, context collusion occurs when users “inten-
tionally collapse, blur, and flatten contexts,” while context collision
occurs when “different social environments unintentionally and
unexpectedly come crashing into each other” (Davis & Jurgenson,
2014: 480). Ultimately, the difference between collusion and collision
is in the level of intentionality. For instance, updating a relationship
status on Facebook is likely to lead to context collusion, with this
information intentionally shared among members of different social
networks (work, family, friends). Context collision, on the other hand,
often occurs “without any effort on the part of the actor, and some-
times, unbeknownst to the actor with potentially chaotic results”
(Davis and Jurgenson, 2014: 481). For instance, a user may be tagged
in photos of a night out which then may be viewed by users from
different social networks.

3.4.2 Managing Contexts

Given the potential for social media to collapse contexts, users will
often employ strategies to manage the potential for content to be seen
by multiple audiences. According to Marwick and boyd (2011), an
awareness of context collapse and the imagined audience often leads
users to develop an online presence that is maximally inoffensive to all
possible imagined audiences. This type of ‘self-​censorship’ often leads
to a style of self-​presentation that can be viewed as a “lowest-​common
 Affordances, Audiences, and Contexts 53

denominator effect” (2011: 9). In other words, users may intentionally

avoid posting about sensitive topics or uploading content that may be
misinterpreted by different users.
An additional strategy that Marwick and boyd observe is that users
often tend to balance authentic and public styles of self-​presentation.
They suggest that this allows users to “maintain equilibrium between
a contextual social norm of personal authenticity that encourages
information-​sharing and phatic communication […] with the need to
keep information private, or at least concealed from certain audiences”
(2011: 11). This may be done within a single post or across different
combinations of posts.
Users might also change the privacy and security affordances of
platforms to manage context collapse. For instance, lots of research
has shown that users exploit the privacy settings of a platform to
make posts more or less visible to their different social networks
(e.g., boyd, 2014). Other work has shown that users use the ‘block’
and ‘hide’ affordances to prevent users from accessing their con-
tent (e.g., Stutzman & Hartzog, 2013; Vitak & Kim, 2014). More
recently, the introduction of the ‘close friends’ function on platforms
like Instagram has given users more control over who sees and can
respond to the post.
A more radical type of social media boundary management is seen
in the use of different accounts or platforms for different audiences.
Simply put, some people might not use certain platforms because
they do not want certain people to see what they upload to that plat-
form. In my ethnography of young people’s digital practices in East
London (Ilbury, 2022), I found that young people did not actively post
on Facebook because they were conscious that family members had
accounts on the platform. If they uploaded something to Facebook,
they were worried that their parents or extended family would see
it and, possibly, misinterpret it. Instead, many of the young people
resorted to using just one platform: Snapchat –​an app which none of
their parents used. By shifting entirely to Snapchat, they avoided the
potential for context collapse to occur by using an app that was almost
exclusively used by their peers and people their age.
Finally, users might create additional profiles to manage con-
text collapse. For instance, many users have a ‘work’ profile that is
shared with colleagues and a ‘personal’ profile shared with friends and
family. Multiple or alternative (‘alt’) accounts have been documented
on various different platforms, including Instagram (Kang & Wei,
2020) and Reddit (Triggs et al., 2021). There are several reasons
why users might create ‘alt’ accounts. This includes the finding that
users often create multiple accounts to manage professional and
personal personas that are oriented to different audiences (Stutzman
& Hartzog, 2013). In other contexts, using multiple accounts may be
54 Researching Language and Digital Communication

considered standard practice. For instance, in Costa’s (2018) ethno­

graphic account of digital practices in Mardin, Turkey, she finds that
it is common for users to have multiple Facebook profiles. Often, these
accounts are used with different networks of users and are generally
listed under fake names and pseudonyms. The content and style of
posts uploaded to a platform are likely to vary substantially across the
different accounts.
Multiple accounts might also be used to avoid the disclosure of sen-
sitive personal information, such as an individual’s sexual or gender
identity. For instance, in a study of queer communities on Reddit, Triggs
and colleagues (2021) observe that these users avoid context collapse
through a number of differentiation strategies, including maintaining
a ‘main’ and ‘alt’ account. Across the two accounts, LGBTQ+​users
report uploading and engaging with different types of content in line
with the expectations of their imagined audience. On the ‘alt’ account,
users were able to obscure their offline identities, therefore removing
the possibility that their engagements could be linked back to their
main account. This is especially necessary for users who may not be
‘out’ to friends and/​or family.

3.4.3 Do Contexts Collapse?

Though context collapse has been useful in theorising the ‘networked
public’ (boyd, 2010), recent work has questioned the universality of
this concept. Costa (2018), for instance, argues that context collapse
only really describes the ways in which people engage with social
media in the West. She argues that context collapse is not an inherent
property of social media, nor the effect of ‘social media logic’. Rather,
she argues for a greater focus on how specific communities of users
adapt their practices to mitigate the potential for context collapse
to occur.
Other critiques have focussed on the stability of contexts. Tagg and
Seargeant (2021), for instance, argue that context collapse infers that
contexts are fixed, predetermined sets of situational factors when, in
fact, contexts are co-​created discursively in and through interaction.
Similarly, Szabla and Blommaert (2018) argue that users rarely address
audiences but rather specific addressees, and so design their messages
not for audiences but rather for individuals.
In response, Tagg and Seargeant propose a move away from con-
text collapse to context design. Drawing inspiration from Bell’s (1984)
audience design framework, context design suggests that, in creating
a message, users actively contribute to the construction of the context,
rather than simply responding to some pre-​existing norm. In other
words, users actively design the content and style of their messages in
response to a set of contextual variables.
 Affordances, Audiences, and Contexts 55

3.5 Summary
This chapter has introduced and discussed some key media theories
and concepts in studying language and digital communication. We
have argued that digital content is often shaped by the affordances of
a given platform. What users post and how they post it is influenced
by what a platform allows them to do. We have also seen that users
often have to contend with the fact that they can never be sure who
will see their post. Subsequently users will often design posts, content,
and other messages in anticipation of an imagined audience. Finally,
we have discussed the potential for context collapse to occur in social
media. As users from various different social networks are bought
together, users may develop strategies to negotiate which communities
and friends can access content.

3.6 Activities
1. Compare your user profiles (or that of a celebrity) across at least
two social media sites that you use for different purposes and/​or
different audiences (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram). What
differences in the style and content of your posts can you identify?
Are any of these linked to the expectations of the imagined audi-
ence or context collapse?
2. Choose a social media platform. Now write down the platform
affordances which could be used to manage the imagined audience
and context collapse (e.g., security and privacy settings). In what
ways would these affordances affect the style, content, and audi-
ence of the post?

3.7 Further Reading

Brandtzaeg, Petter Bae & Marika Lüders (2018). Time collapse in
social media: Extending the context collapse. Social Media +​Society,
4(1): 1–​10.
Bucher, Taina & Anne Helmond (2018). The affordances of social media
platforms. In Jean Burgess, Alice E. Marwick & Thomas Poell (eds.),
The SAGE Handbook of Social Media, pp. 233–​ 253. London: Sage
Publications.
Burgess, Jean, Alice Marwick & Thomas Poell (eds.) (2018). The Sage
Handbook of Social Media. London: Sage Publications.
Fuchs, Christian (2021). Social Media: A Critical Introduction, 3rd edition.
London: Sage Publications.
Humphreys, Ashlee (2016). Social Media: Enduring Principles. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Van Dijck, José (2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of
Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
56 Researching Language and Digital Communication

3.8 References
Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2014). Networked multilingualism: Some language
practices on Facebook and their implications. International Journal of
Bilingualism, 19(2): 185–​205.
Bell, Allan (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society,
13(1): 145–​204.
boyd, danah (2014). It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
boyd, danah & Nicole Ellison (2007). Social network sites: Definition, his-
tory, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-​ Mediated Communication,
13(1): 210–​230.
Costa, Elisabetta (2018). Affordances-​ in-​
practice: An ethnographic cri-
tique of social media logic and context collapse. New Media & Society,
20(10): 3641–​3656.
Davis, Jenny L. & Nathan Jurgenson (2014). Context collapse: Theorizing
context collusions and collisions. Information, Communication & Society,
17(4): 476–​485.
boyd, danah (2010). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances,
dynamics, and implications. In Zizi Papacharissi (ed.), Networked
Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, pp. 39–​
58. New York: Routledge.
Giles, Howard (1973). Accent mobility. Anthropological Linguistics,
15(2): 87–​105.
Goffman, Erving (1967). Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-​ to-​
Face
Interaction. London: Aldine.
Hartzog, Woodrow & Frederic Stutzman (2013). The case for online obscurity.
California Law Review, 101(1): 1–​50.
Ilbury, Christian (2022). Discourses of social media amongst youth: An ethno-
graphic perspective. Discourse, Context, and Media, 48: 1–​9.
Kang, Jin & Lewen Wei (2020). Let me be at my funniest: Instagram users’
motivations for using Finsta (a.k.a., fake Instagram). The Social Science
Journal, 57(1): 58–​71.
Labov, William (1966). The Social Stratification of English in New York City.
Washington, DC: Centre for Applied Linguistics.
Litt, Eden & Eszther Hargittai (2016). The imagined audience on social net-
work sites, Social Media +​Society, 2(1): 1–​12.
Liu, Kaiwen (2021). Language choices as audience design strategies in
Chinese multilingual speakers’ Wechat posts. Global Media and China,
6(4): 391–​415.
Marwick, Alice E. & danah boyd (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passion-
ately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New
Media & Society, 13(1): 114–​133.
Meta (2018). All of your Facebook memories are now in one place. https://​
about.fb.com/​news/​2018/​06/​all-​of-​your-​faceb​ook-​memor​ies-​are-​now-​in-​
one-​place/​ (accessed 24 April 2024).
Nagy, Peter & Gina Neff. 2015. Imagined affordance: Reconstructing a key-
word for communication theory. Social Media +​Society, 1(2): 1–​9.
 Affordances, Audiences, and Contexts 57

Szabla, Malgorzata & Jan Blommaert (2018). Does context really collapse in
social media interaction? Applied Linguistics Review, 11(2): 1–​29.
Tagg, Caroline & Philip Seargeant (2021). Context design and critical lan-
guage/​media awareness: Implications for a social digital literacies educa-
tion. Linguistics and Education, 62: 100776.
Triggs, Anthony Henry, Kristian Kristian Møller & Christina Neumayer
(2021). Context collapse and anonymity among queer Reddit users. New
Media & Society, 23(1): 5–​21.
Trudgill, Peter (1974). The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vitak, Jessica & Jinyoung Kim (2014). ‘You can’t block people off-
line’: Examining how Facebook’s affordances shape the disclosure process.
In CSCW ‘14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer
Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, pp. 461–​474.
4 Identity and Online
Communities

4.1 Introduction
In this chapter we cover the following topics:

• Sociolinguistic approaches to identity

• Theories of online identity
• Online communities
• Participatory culture
• Internet memes.

If you have a social media account on a platform like Facebook, Twitter,

Instagram, or LinkedIn, take five minutes of your time and navigate to
your profile page. Once there, take a few moments to think about the
content of that page. It’s highly probable that your profile will contain
various bits of information about you. This is likely to include things
like your name, where you work or study, your interests, and where
you live. You may have even uploaded a profile photo of yourself.
What you see in front of you is a digital representation of your life: It
is your digital identity.
Very many of us use social media platforms to create and maintain
digital representations of ourselves. Often, users will spend quite a
lot of time designing an online presence that is interpretable by an
imagined audience of their peers. This is because most people use
social media to interact with people they know and have met in other
contexts like work or school. For many people, the profile they create
will need to be interpretable to their friends and family. For public
figures, on the other hand, their profiles need to be recognised by the
public. For instance, let’s consider the Twitter profile for the current
President of the Republic of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa. His pro-
file includes various bits of information which tell us things about his
identity (see Figure 4.1). This includes his:

• Name and username: Cyril Ramaphosa, @CyrilRamaphosa

🇿
• Nationality: 🇦 (A South African flag emoji)
• Verified status

DOI: 10.4324/9781003391838-4
 Identity and Online Communities 59

Figure 4.1 Cyril Ramaphosa’s Twitter profile page (screenshot from August 2024)

• Professional roles and duties: President of the African National

Congress, President of the Republic of South Africa, and Chair of
the African Union 2020
• Location: South Africa
• Birthday: November 17, 1952
• Image: A profile image which comprises a professional headshot
and a banner which includes the oath of office.

The above example shows us that user profiles are central to our
online identities. By using the affordances of different platforms (e.g.,
bios, photos, emoji, and so on), we can create a digital representation
of our professional and social identities.
As was discussed in Chapter 2, sociolinguistic research has long
been interested in the relationship between language and identity in
digital communication. This is because the style, content, and char-
acter of digital interactions are potentially influenced by authors’
social backgrounds and the identities they wish to claim for them-
selves. For instance, it is possible that people use non-​ standard
spellings (e.g., <wot>, <4>, <u>, for what, for, you) and other features
(e.g., emoji, memes, and acronyms) to index some identity. When an
individual uses a particular spelling, emoji, acronym or meme, they
may be attempting to signal to others what type of person they want
to be interpreted as. Lots of research, for instance, has examined
how particular words, spellings, or phrases become associated with
60 Researching Language and Digital Communication

specific types of users or online communities. This includes the lan-

guage used by members of social categories like ‘women’ and ‘men’,
but also smaller groups like friendship networks and internet com-
munities, such as fandom and meme cultures. The 2023 word of the
year rizz (‘charm, charisma’), for instance, was originally associated
with a particular type of internet community –​Twitch –​where it
appeared to be associated with the streamer, Kai Cenat. It then
went on to become popular outside of this community, particularly
amongst ‘Gen Z’. If someone were to use this word, it may be an
attempt to signal their engagement with Twitch or ‘young person
identity’.
Sociolinguistic analyses of language and identity in digital commu-
nication ask questions like: Do younger texters use more non-​standard
spellings than older texters? Are there differences between men,
women, and non-​binary people in emoji use? Do British and American
teens use <lol> in different ways? All of these questions focus on the
relationship between social identities (e.g., age, gender, region) and
language use.
This chapter introduces some main theories of identity in
sociolinguistics. It then goes onto discuss some popular theories of
‘digital identity’. The chapter then considers a range of different
identity-​related practices in the context of a ‘participatory culture’.
Our focus here is on how users participate in the formation, negoti-
ation and maintenance of digital communities, influencer cultures, and
internet meme cultures.

4.2 Identity in Sociolinguistics

Identity is notoriously a difficult concept to define. The most straight-
forward definition of identity is simply who you are. Your identity
is what makes you an individual. If someone asks, ‘who are you?’,
it’s highly likely that you will initially reply with your name. Your
name is clearly one aspect of your identity but it’s very likely that the
person asking the question will want to know other things about your
identity. This might include your age, ethnicity, gender identity, or
social class.
As noted in the introduction, we rarely ask these questions outright,
particularly if they are socially taboo. However, we can often infer
information about someone’s social identity from how they speak
or interact. A case in point is that we can often determine where a
speaker is from on the basis of their accent or dialect. Here we see how
language and identity are closely related.
 Identity and Online Communities 61

Points for reflection

• If someone asked you to describe your identity, what would you say?
• What elements of your identity are important to you (e.g., social
class, gender identity, race)? Do you think these elements influence
how you speak or interact?

A common approach to studying language and identity in sociolinguistics

has been to identify and define the linguistic varieties that are used by
different social groups. A great deal of work in the field has described
varieties used by members of different ethnic groups. Examples include
‘African American English’ (AAE) and ‘Chicano English’. The two var-
ieties, AAE and Chicano English, are generally spoken by members of
two ethnic groups: African Americans and Mexican Americans. If a
speaker uses one of these varieties, they are able to index their member-
ship of the ethnic group that the variety is associated with. In this way,
language can become a marker of in-​group identity. Use (or non-​use)
of a variety can signal membership of the community (or possibly lack
of membership in the case of non-​use).
To explore the relationship between social identities and language
varieties, sociolinguists have typically attempted to identify correlations
between linguistic features (e.g., the pronunciation of my as [mäː]) and
social categories (e.g., African Americans). If the researcher observes
significant differences in the use or rate of a feature from one group to
the next, they can conclude that there is some social differentiation in
the use of that feature. This difference is likely to be influenced by a
social factor, like age, ethnicity, gender, and social-​class.
To illustrate this approach, we will use a hypothetical example.
Let’s say we are interested in the variation in the use of the word flat
vs. apartment. Both of these words essentially mean the same thing –​
something like ‘a self-​contained housing unit that occupies part of a
building’. However, imagine that you have, anecdotally, heard younger
family members and friends using the term apartment more often than
your older family members/​friends. This leads you to suspect that the
use of this feature might be related to age. To test this hypothesis,
we could go out, record some older and younger people speaking in
casual conversation. For the sake of this example, let’s say we recorded
exactly the same number of tokens and speakers and we can easily
separate them into the two age-​groups (younger –​18–​30 vs. older –​
50–​70). Once we had finished our recordings, we would go back to
the lab and calculate the number of times the speakers said flat and
apartment. We would then see if the use of flat or apartment correlates
with a particular age group. Imagine you find that younger speakers
62 Researching Language and Digital Communication

use the word flat 30 times and the word apartment 70 times, whereas
older people used the word flat 90 times and apartment 10 times.
Here, we have identified a basic correlation between a lexical feature
and a social group: Younger speakers use the word apartment more
frequently than older speakers. This correlation would allow us to
conclude that the choice of the lexical variant (i.e., flat vs. apartment)
is influenced by the speakers’ age.
What I have been describing so far is a common approach to analysing
language and identity in a branch of sociolinguistics that has become
known as ‘first-​wave variationist sociolinguistics’. In this work, the goal
has often been to identify significant correlations between linguistic
features and social groups. This approach suggests that an individual’s
identity is determined by their membership of a social group. Identity is
therefore considered to be an almost static property of the individual: It
is something that they have –​‘they are female’, ‘they are working class’,
‘they are younger’ –​and this identity determines their linguistic prac-
tice –​‘they use apartment more often than flat because they are younger/​
working-​class/​female’. The argument is that people speak or commu-
nicate the way they do because of the prevailing linguistic norms of
the social groups that they belong to. We acquire these norms and go
through life producing the norms of our community.
More contemporary research, however, has explored how people
use language to construct and perform their identities, rather than
simply deterministically producing the patterns of the social groups
they belong to. From this perspective, identity is not a fixed or pre-​
given state. Rather, identities are constructed in and through language
and interaction. In this way, we do not have one single identity that is
fixed from childhood. Rather each of us can be seen to perform a rep-
ertoire of identities dependent on the context and type of interaction
and the social goals of that conversation.
For instance, on paper, I am a queer male academic. This identity,
however, is not a given. Rather, over the course of interaction, I may
use language to either highlight or subvert this identity. And across
different contexts –​like home and work –​I perform different iden-
tities. I am one type of person at work –​a lecturer, a colleague, a
mentor –​and I am a different type of person outside of work –​a
friend, a family member, a stranger. In these contexts, I might per-
form different ‘versions’ of myself. I use language to construct my
identity as a lecturer or as a friend. The versions of myself that I pre-
sent will depend on who I am speaking to, the context in which I find
myself in, and the kind of identity I wish to claim for myself. In some
contexts, I will reveal or perform more of my queer identity, whereas
in others I may construct a more reserved persona. Crucially, there is
nothing inauthentic or unusual about this. We do this type of shifting
all the time.
 Identity and Online Communities 63

The shift towards more performative understandings of language

and identity suggests that people have more control or agency in how
they communicate. We make linguistic choices –​whether they be con-
scious choices or otherwise –​to signal what type of person we want to
be perceived as. To take a very current example, concluding that a film
was the ‘ultimate slay’ has different connotations to evaluating it as
‘very good!’. The former is an evaluative phrase often associated with
Gen Z (and the queer community) and so may tell us that the speaker
is signalling their ‘young person’ (or queer) identity. Whereas if we
were to evaluate the film as ‘an artistic masterpiece’ we may be trying
to signal a more ‘formal’ or ‘adult’ identity.
In Section 3.3.1 we defined this type of variation as style or
intraspeaker variation. In that section, we suggested that people change
their ways of speaking and interacting depending on various factors,
such as the formality of the context and who we are interacting with.
In contemporary sociolinguistic research, style is considered central
to language and identity. The idea is that we stylistically use linguistic
features to construct our identities as we interact.
However, language is just one part of our identity. We will very likely
use linguistic styles in combination with other resources and choices –​
things like clothing, hairstyles, and personalities –​to communicate to
others the type of person we want to be perceived as. We can think of
this as a type of bricolage where people combine different resources to
perform a recognisable type of identity. For instance, if I wanted to be
a hippie (a countercultural movement that originated in the US in the
1960s and 1970s), I might start to adopt the fashions (e.g., grown my
hair, wear tie-​dye), beliefs (e.g., emphasise love and peace, adopt a lib-
eral attitude towards drugs), and language (e.g., phrases like ‘far out’,
‘out of sight’, and the evaluation ‘groovy’) associated with the hippie
movement. By combining different stylistic resources –​fashion, beliefs,
and language –​I articulate to the world my identity as a hippie.

4.3 Online Identity

Our above discussion is relevant to digital communication because
people will often spend great amounts of time and effort cultivating
an online persona or digital identity. It is therefore perhaps unsur-
prising that, like in sociolinguistics, online identity has long been a
topic of interest in media studies and digital sociology. As technologies
and digital practices have changed, however, so too have theories and
approaches to digital identity.
In the earliest work on internet practices, researchers tended to
make a distinction between users’ identities in digital and non-​digital
contexts. In this work, the ‘offline’ and the ‘online’ were viewed as sep-
arate ‘worlds’ or realities. Online spaces were defined as those services
64 Researching Language and Digital Communication

and platforms which were connected to the internet (e.g., instant mes-
saging, social media) while the offline was defined as those spaces
which were disconnected from the internet (e.g., the supermarket, the
park). At this point, given that access to the internet was confined to
the desktop computer, it was relatively straightforward to distinguish
between the online and offline dimensions of social life. To get online,
the user would simply log on to the internet. When they were finished,
they would log off and so would be completely disconnected from the
network. What they did online was very much separate from what
they did offline.
Observing these practices, many researchers viewed the online as a
distinct world –​a ‘cyberspace’ –​that was conceptually separate from
the offline or ‘reality’. In this space, users were seen to participate
in various types of CMC. Researchers suggested that users created
new identities and built relationships with others who were not part
of their offline social networks. This led some scholars to argue
that there was a theoretical binary between first (physical world)
and second (digital or virtual) selves. Users’ online identities were
often considered to be more contrived, constructed, or performed
whilst users’ offline identities were thought to be more authentic and
permanent.
The perspective towards online identity in earlier research was largely
influenced by the observation that the internet appeared to expand the
range of anonymous styles of self-​presentation and communication. In
digital communication, messages could be sent and received by individ-
uals without either party revealing their ‘true’ identity. They could, it
was argued, be whoever they wanted to be. Research on early internet
adopters, for instance, found that users often experimented with new
and unpredictable identities that were not necessarily related to their
offline selves. In her book on digital identity and ‘Life on the Screen’,
psychologist and digital scholar Sherry Turkle studied the practices of
young people engaged in the computer cultures of MUDs (Multi-​User
Domains) or multiple-​player virtual game worlds. She argued that
“MUDs provide worlds for anonymous social interactions in which
one can play a role as close to or as far away from one’s ‘real self’ as
one chooses” (1995: 12). Internet technologies, Turkle argued, led to
a new sense of identity –​one which was decentred and multiple where
“you are who you pretend to be” (1995: 26). The widespread belief
that the internet offered new anonymous and alternative styles of iden-
tity was famously depicted in a cartoon and internet meme, ‘on the
Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’, published in the New Yorker
in 1993.
At the time, the potential for the internet to offer new forms of
anonymous interaction was hailed as transformational. Some
researchers predicted that the internet would become a utopian space
 Identity and Online Communities 65

where people were liberated from prejudices experienced in the ‘real

world’ (e.g., sexism, racism, homophobia, and so on). The internet
was claimed to have initiated a new era of social interaction which was
more democratic, equal, and decentralised.
In sociolinguistics, this perspective was adopted in work on identity
and CMC. For instance, in her research on gender and language online,
Danet (1998) argued that, in the emancipatory and anonymous spaces
of the internet, users adopted textual resources that contradicted or
obscured their offline identities –​what she describes as ‘text as mask’.
Danet argued that users employed textual resources to subvert their
expected offline gender identities. She observed that “[m]‌ales [were]
masquerading as females, and females [were] masquerading as males”
(1998: 129). Thus, users were seen to textually appropriate gender
identities that had “no necessary physical reality behind them”
(1998: 130).

Points for reflection

• Thinking about your own digital identity, do you think it is still

accurate to claim that users appropriate online identities that are
different from their offline selves?
• What consequences (if any) do you think the introduction of multi-​
modal and ‘image-​first’ apps like TikTok/​Douyin and Instagram
have had on digital identities?

The perspective that the offline-​online are discrete spheres of inter-

action has since been heavily critiqued and has been viewed as a type
of digital dualism (Jurgenson, 2012). For many readers of this book,
this perspective may seem outdated when we think about how we now
use social and digital media. A cursory glance at more recent research
shows that even terms like ‘cyberspace’ and ‘cyborgs’ common in
earlier internet research have fallen out of use. Today, it is far more
common to see researchers talk about how users move between
different offline-​online environments, rather than attempt to separate
what users do online and what they do offline.
However, it is important to recognise that the types of digital com-
munication technologies that we are discussing now are quite different
to those when Turkle, Danet, and their contemporaries were writing.
In earlier digital research, the internet was still a relatively novel tech-
nology. The aim, as in earlier types of CMC research, was to under-
stand how new technologies were being integrated into society and
whether they were changing our relationships with each other and the
social world. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that people initially
hailed the internet as transformational. Now, some years on and with
66 Researching Language and Digital Communication

digital technologies now deeply embedded in society, we can appre-

ciate just how different the world is today.
Nevertheless, earlier research on digital identities still had its
limitations. Notably because the earliest research predated the wide-
spread use of the internet, researchers would often focus on the
practices of early adopters. Unsurprisingly, many of these people were
part of specialist communities or niche internet cultures. For instance,
in the 1990s, much of the research on digital identities was based on
the practices of people who engaged in role-​playing or MUD games.
In these games, users enter virtual worlds where they are encouraged
to create avatars and alternate forms of self-​presentation. These online
identities were interpreted by some to be representative of different
personalities of the user. For example, in Turkle’s (1995) work on
the use of MUDs by college students in the US, she argued that these
different forms of presentation are experienced as different lives.
According to Turkle, for these students MUDs allowed them to escape
the real world and become part of another reality that was detached
from everyday life.
However, the extent to which these practices could be generalised
to those of society at large was unclear. Critics argued that the focus
on MUDs and other role-​playing games was problematic for several
reasons. Notably, as virtual worlds, these types of platforms encourage
users to adopt alternate identities that are distinct and completely sep-
arate to who they are offline. And although lots of research focussed
on these contexts, these forms of online interaction comprised only
a small proportion of internet based digital communication. In fact,
many of these practices appeared to be typical of only a limited group
of internet users: Teenagers. As Castells (2002: 118) acknowledges, this
life stage often involves a great deal of self-​discovery and experimen-
tation with different forms of self-​presentation. That we see teenagers
adopting alternate identities in MUDs and other role-​playing games
is, perhaps, unsurprising given that we see similar practices elsewhere
(e.g., at school).

4.3.1 Digital Identity and Social Networking Sites

One of the most important developments in developing a digital
identity was the emergence of ‘Social Networking Sites’ (SNS). Early
forms of social interaction on the internet were mainly facilitated
through chat rooms and other types of instant messaging platforms.
Some of these platforms enabled users to create webpages where they
could share personal information and ideas. In the late 1990s, user
profiles became a central feature of a group of new platforms which
have been called ‘Social Networking Sites’ (SNS). The primary pur-
pose of SNS were to facilitate the creation of social networks and
 Identity and Online Communities 67

relationships between users. Platforms like Six Degrees, Friendster,

and Myspace were organised around profile pages which contained
information about the user, such as their name, their location, and
personal photographs. Users could make connections with others by
compiling a friends list and searching for others with similar interests.
In their overview of these platforms, boyd and Ellison (2007: 211)
characterise SNS as internet-​based services which permit users to ‘(1)
construct a public or semi-​public profile within a bounded system,
(2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection,
and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by
others within the system’.

Key Term: Social Networking Sites (SNS)

An online social media platform which is organised around a profile
page. SNS allow users to connect and communicate with others who
share similar interests.

Importantly, given the central role of social networking, user profiles

were (and continue to be!) designed to be maximally intelligible to an
imagined audience. The information that users upload to their profiles
tends to reference things about who they are in the offline, such as
their current location, their profession, and their full name. Generally,
individuals use these sites to connect with people they already know
from ‘offline’ contexts like school or work (e.g., Ellison, Steinfield, and
Lampe, 2007). In this way, most people do not create radically different
identities to those they have offline. Rather, they use these platforms as
an extension of their everyday or offline identities and networks.
Of course, whilst it is true that people use a variety of platforms
to create different versions of themselves, it is important to recognise
that these are not distinct identities. Rather, research has argued that
users design their profiles according to the norms, expectations, and
affordances of the platform. For instance, in her ethnographic work on
US teens digital practices, boyd argues that:

when a teen chooses to identify as “Jessica Smith” on Facebook

and “littlemonster” on Twitter, she’s not creating multiple identities
in the psychological sense. She’s choosing to represent herself in
different ways on different sites with the expectation of different
audiences and different norms.
(boyd 2014: 38)

Because we present ourselves in different ways on different platforms,

we often see that there are differences in how someone presents
68 Researching Language and Digital Communication

from one platform to the next. Consider, for instance, the differences
between Instagram and LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a social media platform
that is designed for business and employment purposes. The platform
enables users to upload CVs, apply for advertised jobs, and network
with recruiters and businesses. Instagram, on the other hand, is used
mainly by people as a photo and video sharing app. If we compare the
same user’s LinkedIn and Instagram profiles, it is very likely that these
will use different styles of self-​presentation. All of these choices are
linked to the expectation of the imagined audience as well as the norms
and conventions of the platforms, in this case LinkedIn and Instagram.
This type of identity construction has been humorously depicted in
a viral internet meme by the country music icon, Dolly Parton. The
meme is a comical take on the various functions of four platforms and
the different styles of self-​presentation we engage in on four different
platforms: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Tinder. The LinkedIn
image depicts Dolly dressed in formal attire in front of a chalkboard;
the Facebook photo references the festive period with Dolly dressed in a
‘Holly Dolly Christmas’ sweater; the Instagram snap is a black and white
vintage shot of Dolly leaning against a doorframe with a guitar, and the
Tinder image is Dolly dressed in a bunny costume that references the
men’s lifestyle and entertainment magazine, Playboy (see Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2 Dolly Parton and the ‘LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Tinder’ meme
 Identity and Online Communities 69

Acknowledging that platforms extend the possibilities for ‘offline’

identities and social networks, means we need to consider how these
dynamics inform and constrain digital communication. Contemporary
research has responded to this shift in perspective by analysing digital
cultures and communities based on ‘offline’ social dynamics and
identities like race, social-​class, and nationality. This includes work
on ‘Black Twitter’ –​an internet community that mainly comprises
members of the Black diaspora on Twitter. The fact that DMC
operates across geographical borders means that users from different
places can form online communities based on a common identity. In
his seminal work on ‘Distributed Blackness’, Brock (2020) argues that
digital media have enabled an aggregation of Black users from across
the globe, leading to new forms and expressions of Black identity.
A similar argument is made by Sobande (2020: 102) in her work on
the ‘Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain’, where she argues that,
amongst other things, Black users across the globe employ digital tech-
nologies to connect with other members of the Black diaspora to share
‘cues, references, and in-​jokes that relate to the intricacies of their
racial, ethnic, and cultural identities’. Evidently then, digital identities
are not only shaped by social dynamics typically thought as ‘offline’
(e.g., race, sexuality), but they also shape those dynamics too. In later
sections, we will see how users’ social identities influence the content
and style of their digital interactions.

Points for reflection

• Think about the social media platform you use most. Is your self-​
presentation (i.e., identity) on that app/​ platform similar to or
different from your ‘offline’ self?
• Think about who you interact with on social media. Are these
people you know from offline contexts (e.g., school, university,
work)? Or are they people you met online?
• Is your online identity (e.g., user profile) consistent across the
different platforms you use? If there are differences, why?

4.3.2 Anonymity and Identity

Although most users will maintain online profiles that are consistent
with how they present offline, there are some situations where users
will instead adopt deceptive or anonymous digital identities. Some of
these motivations are positive. For instance, for minoritised and at-​
risk communities, the anonymity afforded by digital communication
is potentially transformational. In countries where being LGBTQ+​is
illegal or socially taboo, anonymity can afford users a way of engaging
with other members of the community without the risk of being ‘outed’
70 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Figure 4.3 An example of an anonymous Grindr profile

or prosecuted. Users may adopt anonymous styles of presentation

to obscure or hide their name, profession, or location (Triggs et al.,
2020). This is a very common practice on the gay dating app, Grindr.
In countries where being open about your sexuality is socially taboo
or illegal, Grindr is either outright banned (e.g., United Arab Emirates)
or is accessible, but users will often take steps to obscure their true
identities (e.g., Morocco). Even in countries which are more LGBTQ+​
friendly, individuals may use anonymous identities if they are not out.
Figure 4.3 is an example of an anonymous profile on Grindr from the
UK. The only indication of the person’s identity is their age (which may
or may not be accurate) and the emoji, which is presumably linked to
the individual in some way. There is no personal bio nor any photos.
The profile can in no way be linked to the individual’s offline identity
(unless, of course, we speak to that person and get that information
directly and even then, we’d need to verify its accuracy).
Although the above examples discuss some benevolent potentials
of anonymity, evidently these are not the only reasons why people
use anonymous profiles. In recent years, research has focussed on
the adoption of anonymous or bogus digital identities for deviant or
malicious purposes. This includes flaming and internet trolling. These
terms refer to the now (unfortunately) common social media trend for
users to deliberately make aggressive, degrading, and/​or derogatory
comments in an attempt to cause offense. In some instances, these types
 Identity and Online Communities 71

of comments may constitute libel and trolls have been prosecuted for
sending racist, homophobic, and other distressing messages. Given the
potential repercussions for sending these types of messages (e.g., some
people have lost their jobs), people will often use anonymous accounts
in an attempt to hide their real name or profession.

Key Term: Trolling

The use of social and digital media for deviant and malicious purposes.
Trolls often use anonymous accounts to send discriminatory and/​or
hurtful messages intended to cause offense and upset.

It should be noted, however, that although the internet has facilitated

new types of anonymity and deception, this is not something new nor
is it specific to digital communication. Authors have long concealed
their identities to express unpopular opinions or dissent. This includes
‘confession’ sections in newspapers and articles penned by anonymous
authors. Nevertheless, trolling is arguably more prevalent in social
media because people can easily and directly send messages to
individual(s) they would otherwise not have access to.

4.4 Online Communities

As discussed briefly above in relation to ‘Black Twitter’, one of the
most important and transformative features of digital and social
media is that it enables users to connect with others from across the
globe. Users do not have to be in the same geographical location –​they
can send and receive messages with others who share similar interests,
purposes, or identities. When multiple users come together around
some shared goal or activity, online communities emerge.

Key Term: Online Communities

Groups of people who use digital technologies to connect with others
who share similar interests and goals. Often, online communities will
develop their own in-​group norms and conventions. This includes
things like: language, memes, and post topics.

In earlier work, online communities were considered types of ‘virtual

communities’. Rheingold (1993: xx) suggested that “virtual commu­
nities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough
people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient
human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace”.
However, as this definition suggests, much of the work on virtual
72 Researching Language and Digital Communication

communities has framed these aggregations of people and identities as

some way specific to online sites and platforms.
More recent work, however, has emphasised the interaction between
different contexts of use, concentrating on how social and digital
media might extend the possibilities for mutual engagement and com-
munity formation. In her overview of this term, Herring (2004: 355)
defines six main criteria for defining the online community:

1. Active, self-​sustained participation; a core of regular participants

2. Shared history, purpose, culture, norms, and values
3. Solidarity, support, reciprocity
4. Criticism, conflict, means of conflict resolution
5. Self-​awareness of group as an entity distinct from other groups
6. Emergence of roles, hierarchy, governance, rituals.

A good example of this criteria in action is the platform Twitch: A

video-​based live streaming service that is best known for its video game
streaming services and esports competitions. Through the affordances
of live content and group chat, the platform facilitates the creation and
building of communities organised around titles of games or streams.
Communities are created as users engage with one another. Twitch allows
users to participate in streams that take place simultaneously across mul-
tiple locations. In a way comparable to watching television shows with
friends, users of Twitch come together to watch their favourite streamer
play video games, play music, cook, or other activities that they find
interesting. In essence, the digital platform Twitch becomes a social
forum in which users can ‘hang out’ and engage with others from various
different locations who share similar interests (see Figure 4.4).

Figure 4.4 A
 n example of a Twitch stream (from https://​help.twi​tch.tv/​s/​arti​cle/​str​
eam-​disp​lay-​ads?langu​age=​en_​US)
 Identity and Online Communities 73

4.4.1 Communities of Practice

As social and digital media enable users from across the world to
connect with others who share similar interests, when these users
come together, they will often form a community of people who
develop a shared in-​group identity. This group will often create a
set of norms and practices which become markers of the in-​group
identity. This includes language. Certain words, for instance, might
become associated with particular types of internet communities, such
as ‘gamers’ or ‘streamers’. This has been discussed in the context of
Twitch (see Figure 4.4).
In many ways, the communities and subcultures that emerge in
digital contexts and platforms are similar to those elsewhere. To be a
part of an internet community, we need to acquire and effectively use
the in-​group norms and conventions. This is similar to what people do
when they participate in subcultures that we typically associate with
‘offline’ contexts, such as certain musical and political groups. If you
wanted to be a ‘hippie’, ‘punk’, ‘goth’, ‘skinhead’, ‘jock’, or ‘gopnik’,
for instance, you’d need to acquire the style and the norms of that cul-
ture. This would likely include mastering the language, the clothing,
and the social practices associated with the in-​group.
In sociolinguistics, collective groups of people who develop in-​
group norms have been called Communities of Practice (CoP). Initially
developed by Lave and Wenger (1991), a CoP refers to a group of
people who regularly come together and participate in a shared
activity. This includes groups of people who are part of a football
team, those who play an instrument as part of a band, people who
participate in a musical subculture such as goths, or those who attend
after school clubs (i.e., ‘youth groups’). The idea that is within these
CoP’s, members develop a set of shared in-​group practices such as dis-
tinctive ways of talking, beliefs, and social values.
There is now a lot of sociolinguistic research which has analysed
how language is used within different CoPs. One particularly pro-
ductive area of research has been to study the formation of CoPs in
schools. This is because schools are often very rich sites where people
organise themselves into different groups, each with their own dis-
tinctive identity. When I was at school, it was common for people
to distinguish between CoPs like the ‘geeks’ who were considered
studious and conscientious and the ‘popular kids’ who were fashion-
able and anti-​establishment. Each of these CoPs had certain beliefs,
values, and ways of speaking that were considered characteristic of
the broader in-​group identity that just about everyone in the school
knew and recognised. Someone could signal their alignment with the
‘popular kids’ by dressing in the right way or using the language of
the in-​group.
74 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Points for reflection

• Are you part of any CoPs? If so, what norms, values, beliefs, or lan-
guage styles are associated with this CoP?
• Does this CoP have an online presence? If so, is it similar to or
different from how those people interact or present in an offline
setting?

We can see similar types of CoPs emerge in digital settings. Sometimes,

offline CoPs like a football team will have an online presence too. It
is common, for instance, for football teams to maintain an Instagram
account where they upload photos of their latest fixtures and update
fans with important announcements. Although some digital CoPs
might not be directly related to any offline social network or group.
When a CoP exists only in a digital environment it can be described
as a ‘Virtual Community of Practice’ (VCoP) (Dubé, Bourhis & Jacob
2005). These types of CoPs are found in digital forums like Reddit,
Tumblr, and Mumsnet. Often users who participate in these forums
probably do not know each other outside of this context. Nevertheless,
they can be considered a CoP insofar that they establish community
norms, values and practices that become symbolic of the in-​group. The
only difference is that these are maintained exclusively in and through
digital communication technologies.
One of the key requirements of CoP membership is that the indi-
vidual must align with the in-​ group values and identity. On the
internet forum, Mumsnet, for instance, it is reasonable to assume
that the majority of users are parents of children and teenagers (most
often mums), given that this forum is intended to be a space where
users can share tips and discuss issues around parenting and raising
children. ‘Having children’ and ‘being a parent’ are therefore likely
requirements of becoming a member of a CoP on Mumsnet.
In virtual CoPs, it is common for users to explicitly authenticate
their membership of the CoP by introducing or affirming their iden-
tity. For instance, on Mumsnet, users will often introduce themselves
as a parent before offering their own perspective. By referencing their
own experiences of being a parent and raising children, they authenti-
cate themselves as a member of the group. An example of this type of
authentication is found in Extract (1) below. The message is in response
to a post which asked, ‘what buggy would you get in my shoes?!’.
In the extract, we see that those who respond to the post draw on
their own personal experience of being a parent when offering advice.
Notice that Poster 2 uses the personal pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’, which
presumably refers to themselves and their partner, to introduce their
comment. This allows users to authenticate themselves as a parent who
 Identity and Online Communities 75

has similar experiences of raising children. In this instance, someone

who has experience of using a particular brand of buggy/​pushchair.

(1) Poster 1: We had a baby jogger city mini double from birth
with our twins as could swap in our 2 year old
when needed, or use sling (back carry for 2 year
old) or front for baby twin. Never needed bassinet
as it lies flat so seats can be used from birth.
Poster 2: I second the double OutNAbout, we don’t use
ours at the moment, but when we do DC love it.

4.4.2 Language in Online Communities

As noted above, members will often develop norms and values (e.g.,
language, practices, clothing styles) which become associated with a
particular CoP. In digital settings, users might start to use distinctive
words, spellings, or phrases to signal their in-​group identity. If you
are not part of this community, it might be hard to know what people
mean or are talking about. For instance, in the above example taken
from Mumsnet (Extract (1)), we see the use of the term <DC>. Readers
who have not been on Mumsnet before are unlikely to know what this
acronym means. However, community members are likely familiar
with this acronym and its specific reference (‘darling child’). Other
platforms and communities develop other styles of interaction. This
includes Twitch where the following terminology and phrases are
common:

• <F>: A way of a user paying their respects or offering condolences

following some announcement or news.
• ‘Jebaited’: A Twitch emoticon featuring Alex Jebailey, the owner of
CEO Gaming, which refers to the act of baiting (i.e., to manipulate
or trick) an opponent in a video game (see Figure 4.5).

Figure 4.5 T
 wo examples of popular Twitch emotes: ‘jebaited’ (left) and ‘kreygasm’
(right)
76 Researching Language and Digital Communication

• <KEKW>: An emote for a Twitch extension called FrankerFaceZ.

Originally from a video of the Spanish comedian and actor, Juan
Joya Borja, this is now used as a way for the user to show they’re
laughing in the chat.
• ‘VODs’: Referring to ‘Video on Demand’ –​an archive of content
previously streamed live on Twitch.
• ‘Kreygasm’: A Twitch emote used to show a sign of happiness,
pleasure, and satisfaction. The emote is an image of the streamer,
KreyG, with a satisfied facial expression (see Figure 4.6).

Many of these examples are specific to the platform, Twitch. For

instance, the term ‘jebaited’ is a Twitch emoticon which features
the founder of CEO gaming, Alex Jebailey. This is unlikely to make
much sense on other platforms or to users outside of this commu-
nity. This means that, potentially, on different platforms, users will
develop other language styles, words, and spellings which become typ-
ical of that context. As sociolinguists, we might want to study the
various linguistic conventions and styles that are used on those sites
and what their functions are. Returning to the example of Mumsnet,
Mackenzie’s (2019: 24–​25) work has identified a number of interesting
typographical forms and creative spellings which are commonly used
on the platform. Many of these are used to achieve particular stylistic
or rhetorical effects. This includes:

• Strikethrough text, e.g., ‘little cow darling’; ‘don’t fight it or

are you shallow’: Text which is potentially offensive or taboo is
struck out
• Asterisks, e.g., *voice; explana*tory*: Asterisks are used for a var-
iety of reasons including emphasis and corrections
• Non-​standard punctuation and spelling, e.g., ‘these threads are....
...... ..... boooooooooooring’; ‘you clean your loo brush in the dish-
washer?!?!?!?!?!’: Used to indicate a range of meanings such as
timing, emphasis, or surprise
• Acronyms, e.g., ‘PITA’ (Pain In The Arse), ‘DC’ (Darling Child),
‘PFB’ (Precious First Born’, and ‘AIBU’ (Am I Being Unreasonable?).

Readers will likely recognise some of these features whilst others

may be more obscure. This is because some of these conventions and
spellings are used across other platforms (e.g., asterisks for emphasis
and corrections). However, the meaning of others might not be as
transparent, unless, of course, you are familiar with Mumsnet. For
instance, the use of acronyms like PITA and DC are not used widely
outside of Mumsnet or the ‘mommyblogging’ community more gen-
erally. An example of these conventions in use is found in Extract (2).
 Identity and Online Communities 77

This extract is from a discussion of ‘how to balance being firm vs.

enjoying your kids. The acronym <DS> ‘darling son’ is used twice:

(2) Poster 1: Pick your battles so is what he is doing an

annoyance if so distract so he doesn’t see it as a
punishment or a way to push your buttons. Is it
dangerous if so be firm but along the lines of DS
don’t do that’s we don’t want you getting hurt or
X breaking.
DS is nearly 10 and other than a bit of attitude
that gets the luck he’s no bother. I can’t remote
the last time I actually told him off so it does get
better.

What we have seen here is that, quite often, different CoPs will use
different styles of digital communication. By using features of the in-​
group language, individual users can align or index their participa-
tion in this community. For instance, if I use <DS> and <PITA> in
my messages, I might be signalling my alignment with a particular
community of users, such as those who use Mumsnet. Whereas if I use
‘jebaited’ and <F>, you might conclude that I want to align with the
community of users on Twitch.

Points for reflection

• Are you part of any online communities that use distinctive lan-
guage styles?
• If so, are there any words or phrases that you know or use that you
think would be difficult for people outside of those communities to
understand?

As discussed above, users will collectively negotiate which linguistic

features become adopted by the community. This process is on-​going.
Those who participate in the community will develop new conventions
which have the potential to become adopted by others. Sometimes
these conventions will become recognised by other people as markers
of that group identity. This is what sociolinguists call enregisterment –​
that is, the process through which language comes to be associated
with particular identities and social groups (Agha, 2005).

Key Term: Enregisterment

The process by which language varieties, styles, and features become
associated with social practices, persons, and communities.
78 Researching Language and Digital Communication

4.5 Participatory Culture

As we have seen in the previous examples, a community is formed
through user engagements. As users upload content, interact with one
another, and establish in-​group norms and activities, they develop
and maintain online communities. These types of engagements are
facilitated by the affordances of social media which encourage people
to create and circulate user-​generated content. This is because social
media relies on a participatory culture where users do not just con-
sume content but they actively produce it too.
Social and digital media encourage a participatory culture through
the promotion and circulation of user-​ generated content such as
family photos, personal messages, and streams of gaming sessions.
This type of content is not very often professionally produced. Rather,
it is often created and distributed by everyday people like me and you
(see Figure 4.6).

Key Term: Participatory Culture

A culture in which everyday people (i.e., the public) do not just act as
consumers but also participate actively as producers. Social media,
which relies on user-​generated content such as personal messages,
live streaming, and direct messages, are a type of participatory
culture.

According to Jenkins and colleagues (2009: xi), a participatory cul-

ture refers to “a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expres-
sion and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing
creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby experienced

Figure 4.6 M
 odels of producer-​consumer relationships in broadcast and
digital media
 Identity and Online Communities 79

participants pass along knowledge to novices”. This type of culture is

found on the internet in four main ways:

• Affiliations: Digital technologies permit us to forge connections

with other members and build online communities. Examples
include Facebook groups, entertainment channels on Instagram,
and Tumblr communities.
• Expressions: Users will engage in new creative practices. This includes
digital sampling, video making, fan fiction, and internet memes.
• Collaborative problem-​solving: People use social and digital media
platforms to work as a team to complete certain tasks and activities.
For instance, users write and edit articles on Wikipedia –​the online
encyclopaedia.
• Circulation: Users shape the flow and style of information. This
includes user generated podcasts and weblogs.

All of these possibilities are enabled by the affordances of the internet

and social/​digital media where user-​generated content is often cen-
tral to social engagement and interaction. Two obvious examples are
the video-​sharing platforms YouTube and TikTok. These platforms
encourage participation in three main ways: (i) through the creation
of content uploaded to the platform, (ii) through the videos that users
decide to watch and engage with, and (iii) through the distribution of
videos and other content.
This type of consumption is quite different to how we consume trad-
itional forms of media, like television and film. In ‘broadcast’ media,
there is an established hierarchy of producer and consumer. Media
is produced by a team of professionals and consumed by the public.
Take, for instance, a television programme. Professionals such as
script-​writers, actors, and videographers produce the programme. It is
then distributed via television networks and consumed by an audience,
i.e., members of the public who watch it. In this way, the creation
and distribution of information is highly controlled –​access to broad-
cast media is restricted to a few select individuals (i.e., professionals).
However, in digital and social media, this hierarchy is flipped. Many
people who create and share online content are members of the public
with no professional training. This, arguably, leads to a more demo-
cratic form of information sharing. Bruns (2008) has labelled this type
of sharing produsage referring to the fact that content can be created
and consumed by the same people –​the producers are the consumers
and vice versa (see Figure 4.6).
Today, the accessibility of camera-​ enabled smartphones, mobile
internet, and other digital devices means that very many people can
create and distribute content in ways unlike before. On TikTok,
for instance, whilst some videos are professionally produced (e.g.,
80 Researching Language and Digital Communication

remediated clips of television shows, professional interviews) the vast

majority of videos uploaded to the platform are created by those with
little to no professional training. Very often platforms which centre
on user-​generated content will include video editing tools and other
affordances which encourage users to create and distribute user-​
generated content.
One type of information which has been dramatically altered by
digital technologies is the news. As noted briefly above, news about
current events has traditionally been disseminated through broad-
cast media such as newspapers, television, and radio. This type of
media is often influenced or run by the state. It therefore operates
as a constrained source of information: It is distributed by indi-
viduals who have a professional responsibility to report the news.
A restricted number of individuals, typically newsreaders and/​ or
celebrities, are elevated to these positions. In this model, the news
is created and disseminated by a single authority (e.g., a news-
paper) and it is consumed by an audience: The general public. The
internet has revolutionised how we consume and engage with the
news. Services like weblogs and Twitter have given rise to so-​called
‘citizen journalism’ –​a type of journalism where non-​professionals
actively participate in the reporting, ‘analysis’, and circulation of
news and information. Many users who participate in citizen jour-
nalism have utilised the affordances of digital technologies to capture
videos and images of newsworthy events, circulate stories to large
audiences, and analyse unfolding events. Journalism has been dra-
matically altered by the proliferation of user-​generated content and
rise of citizen journalism in recent decades. It is now common for
broadcast news to integrate user-​generated content and information
in their own reports. For instance, the BBC will often include ama-
teur videos and photos (typically taken from Twitter) when reporting
on a news event. Sometimes, these forms of journalism report events
before broadcast media. The death of American singer and actress,
Whitney Houston, for example, was reported on Twitter roughly 45
minutes before it was announced in mainstream media.
The participatory affordances of social and digital media and the
rise of citizen journalism have played an important role in reporting
breaking news events in recent years. This includes coverage of the
COVID-​19 pandemic, natural disasters such as the Türkiye-​Syria
earthquakes in 2023, and international political uprisings such as the
Arab Spring in 2011. However, sometimes the role of social media
has been overstated. In the context of the Arab Spring, for instance,
social media was often credited as the cause of the uprisings to the
extent that they were often dubbed the ‘Facebook revolutions’ or
‘Twitter revolutions’. The 2011 uprisings followed protests in Tunisia
in response to government corruption and economic stagnation.
 Identity and Online Communities 81

Various anti-​government and pro-​democracy protests erupted across

the Middle East and North Africa, leading to the eventual removal
of several leaders, including Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and
Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. In the wake of the protests, many social
commentators focussed on the role of social media in the uprisings. It
was argued that social media and digital technologies allowed users
to not only share information and participate in activism, but also
to circumvent state-​run broadcast media channels. This led some to
claim that social media was a causal mechanism in the uprisings.
Academic research on the Arab Spring, however, argues that social
media played a more indirect role in the protests. Rather than being
a cause of the protests, social media was used to mobilise people,
circulate information about the cause, and raise awareness about
the protests, both locally and globally. It is precisely because of the
participatory nature of social media that users could organise them-
selves in this way.

4.6 Memes
A prime example of the types of participatory culture that social
and digital media facilitate is the creation, remixing, and circu-
lation of internet memes. Originally coined by the evolutionary
biologist, Richard Dawkins, the term meme was used to refer to “a
unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (1976: 207).
Dawkins developed this label to refer to cultural phenomena such
as songs, catchphrases, idioms, and other ideas that are passed from
one individual to another through imitation and other non-​genetic
means. Most readers, however, will be more familiar with the
modern day use of this term to refer to internet memes. These are
digital images, GIFs, videos, or textual artefacts that are (intended
to be) humorous and which are often adapted, remixed, and edited
by others as they are shared from one individual to the next. This
includes viral memes such as ‘the Harlem Shake’ –​a video-​based
meme which saw people dancing to the opening of the song of the
same name. At the height of its popularity in 2013, thousands of
‘Harlem Shake’ YouTube videos were uploaded daily. Figure 4.7
depicts one example.
As users are involved in their creation, remixing, and distribution,
internet memes are now a classic example of the participatory nature
of social and digital media. When users edit memes and contribute
to their circulation, they expand the use and meaning of that meme.
What emerges as one meme in one context may take on very different
meanings as it is circulated and remixed by different users. A quite dra-
matic example of this is the Pepe the Frog meme (or ‘sad frog meme’)
which depicts a humanoid cartoon frog (see Figure 4.8). As an internet
82 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Figure 4.7 A
 n example of the Harlem Shake meme -​‘Harlem Shake (on a
Plane)’: www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​vRuH​RsoA​OZc

Figure 4.8 Pepe the Frog meme

meme, it gained popularity on Myspace, Gaia Online, and 4chan from

around 2008. By 2015, it was one of the most popular memes on
Tumblr. Versions of this meme were also popular on Chinese social
media, such as Baidu Tieba, where it is known more commonly as
 Identity and Online Communities 83

‘shangxin qingwa’ (傷心青蛙). Although this meme was originally

used as a humorous reaction or to convey how the author felt about
something, Pepe the Frog became appropriated by white supremacists,
especially during the 2016 US presidential election. Following this,
and in Autumn 2016, the original creator of the character, Matt Furie,
teamed up with the Anti-​Defamation League to start a #SavePepe
campaign to reclaim the meme.
As in the case of Pepe, an internet meme is only successful if people
can recognise the cultural references of the meme and its social
meanings (Sobande, 2019; Shifman, 2014; Wiggins, 2019). Often,
internet memes reference culturally niche events, jokes, or topics that
are familiar only to a subset of users. You may not understand or ‘get’
the reference if you are not part of the target community. For instance,
the image in Figure 4.9 is a popular internet meme in China. The
image includes the catchphrase ‘芭比Q了’ (bā bǐ Q le) which when
pronounced sounds like the English word, ‘barbeque’. The catch-
phrase appears to have emerged from a video game blogger on the
Chinese social media platform, Douyin, but has become used more
widely as an internet meme. The meaning of the phrase is something
similar to ‘I’m finished’ and/​or ‘mentally and physically exhausted’. To
readers outside of China, this meme alone is unlikely to make much
sense. But at least to the Chinese students in my class, this is a very
well-​known and popular meme.
Another example is found in Figure 4.10. This meme is only really
likely to be meaningful to individuals who are familiar with the

Figure 4.9 芭比Q了 (bā bǐ Q le) – ​barbie Q meme

84 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Figure 4.10 ‘Feel old yet?’ Drag Race meme

television programme, RuPaul’s Drag Race. This meme depicts two

Drag Race competitors: Laganja Estranja and Eureka, side by side.
The text references a broader meme genre, ‘feel old yet?’. Typically,
memes in this genre include a photograph of a celebrity when they are
younger and in their prime, alongside a recent image of the same indi-
vidual. The purpose of the ‘feel old yet?’ meme genre is to evoke feelings
of nostalgia. The meme in Figure 4.10 is a tongue in cheek interpret­
ation of this genre. It suggests that the two images are of the same
person at two different timepoints of their life. However, anyone who
is familiar with RuPaul’s Drag Race will know that these photographs
are of two different queens: Laganja Estranja and Eureka. Evidently,
to understand that these two images are not the same person, and this
is a humorous play on the ‘feel old yet?’ meme genre, we’d need to be
familiar with the television series, RuPaul’s Drag Race, as well as have
some understanding of drag culture.
As in the example of ‘feel old yet?’ individual memes tend to refer-
ence some broader meme genre or subtype. Popular meme subtypes
like ‘dank’, ‘emotional damage’, ‘the Harlem Shake’ exhibit com-
monalities in structure, language, and design. We recognise different
Harlem Shake videos as belonging to this broader meme genre because
they have very similar characteristics and follow a similar chronology,
namely:

• The video starts.

• The song ‘Harlem Shake’ by American DJ and producer, Baauer,
starts. It has a 15-​second intro.
• During the intro, one person (typically masked or wearing a helmet)
is filmed dancing to the song. Other individuals in the frame do not
pay attention.
 Identity and Online Communities 85

• After the 15-second intro, there is a bass drop. As the beat hits, all
individuals in the video are then filmed dancing.

Although a variety of different users contribute to this meme genre

and record the Harlem Shake in various different contexts –​such as
at a business meeting, on a plane (as the example above), in a lecture
theatre, and so on –​the basic structure of the video outlined above is
consistent across videos and authors. The shared characteristics of the
videos enable us to recognise different interpretations as belonging to
one meme genre –​in this instance, the ‘Harlem Shake’.
Because memes encourage engagement and sharing, some platforms
have built affordances of participatory culture into their design. For
instance, on the short-​video platform TikTok, imitation and replica-
tion of memes are encouraged through various platform affordances.
Zulli and Zulli (2020) identify three main ways that TikTok encourages
sharing and imitation:

1. Through the user sign-​up process and default page: When users
sign-​up to the platform, they are asked to indicate their interests.
Videos presented on the FYP page are algorithmically tailored to
the individuals’ interests.
2. Through its icons and video-​ editing features: TikTok offers
numerous ways to share videos both within the app and across
different platforms. Additionally, ‘sounds’ which include clips
from TV programmes, films, and other media, can be added to
videos. Users can click on these sounds to find other videos which
use the same clip.
3. Through user and video creation norms: Most users create TikTok
videos to gain visibility and popularity. By using similar concepts
and ideas from others, the video puts that author in conversation
with others in the meme genre.

It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that meme videos such as lip-​

syncs, dance routines, and parodies, have become defining features
of the app. This includes viral TikTok memes (or trends) such as
‘Jungle –​‘Back on 74’ dance routine’, ‘#Okboomer’, ‘Although enjoy-
ment’ duet, ‘Face warp challenge’ (see Figure 4.11, for example).

Points for reflection

• What is your favourite meme? Are there any features (e.g., language
style, songs, activities) of this meme that you would consider to be
characteristic of the meme genre?
• Have you ever participated in a meme trend, such as the choreog-
raphy for ‘Back on 74’ by the band Jungle? If so, what were your
86 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Figure 4.11 T
 wo examples of popular TikTok memes. On the left, the dance
choreography for ‘Back on 74’ by Jungle, and on the right, the
popstar Billie Eilish participating in the #TimeWarpScan or ‘face warp
challenge’ trend

motivations for participating in the trend? Did you use hashtags

and other affordances to increase the visibility of your post?

4.6.1 Language in Memes

As we have seen above, different aesthetics, trends, music clips, and
other semiotic features often become characteristic of meme genres.
This includes language. It is common for particular types of words,
spellings, and grammar to become enregistered with different meme
genres. Two now classic examples are ‘doge’ and ‘LOLcat’ –​two
meme genres that are associated with two very different linguistic
styles. Typically, both memes include an image of an animal (For doge,
a dog, more specifically a Shiba Inu; for LOLcat a cat) along with
some text. The text is written in a style that contains various ortho-
graphic and stylistic choices that many will recognise as the language
of ‘doge’ or ‘LOLcat’.
 Identity and Online Communities 87

Figure 4.12 An example of a doge meme (Guardian, 2014)

The first example, doge, is an internet meme genre which remixes

images of a Shiba Inu. The standard doge format is an image of the dog
surrounded by comments in non-​standard English written in comic
sans font. The comments, which are intended to be interpreted as the
dog’s internal dialogue, exhibit several distinctive linguistic features
(see Figure 4.12). To most readers, these sentences will appear ungram­
matical because they contradict the grammatical rules of Standardised
English. Features typical of the doge meme include:

• Phrases which typically start with a modifier: ‘so’, ‘many’, ‘much’,

‘very’, ‘such’
• Phrases which are typically two words or less
• Short forms such as ‘excite’ and ‘amaze’.

These features are often considered characteristic of doge memes

and of a ‘doge style’ more generally. As users engage in doge
memes, by creating and remixing new images, they develop rules
about what does and doesn’t constitute the language style of doge.
The features outlined above (e.g., short forms such as ‘excite’ and
‘amaze’) have now become symbolic elements of a language var-
iety –​doge. This means that if we were to create a doge meme using
the image of the Shiba but with Standardised English sentences
such as ‘so many donations’ not ‘much donation’, it is likely that
it would be rejected by the community of users as it wouldn’t be a
true doge meme.
88 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Figure 4.13 An example of a LOLCat meme

A similar example is LOLCat. Where the doge style is primarily

based on its divergence from Standardised English grammar, LOLCat
memes employ a more diverse range of non-​standard features. The
LOLCat format typically includes an image of a cat accompanied
with some text that is written in a style called LOLspeak (Gawne
& Vaughan, 2012). Many LOLcat memes feature cats involved
in typically human activities, such as using a computer keyboard
(see Figure 4.13). The linguistic variety or style of LOLspeak is
characterised by:

• Non-​standard spellings, e.g., <haz> for have, <cheezburger> for

cheeseburger, <teh> for the
• Non-​standard grammar, e.g., the over/​under-​application of plurals
and over regularisation of verb paradigms (stuffs for stuff; eated
for ate)
• Non-​standard punctuation, e.g., the intentional use of <1> in a
series of exclamation marks <!!!1>
• Specific lexis, e.g., ‘Ceiling cat’ (God), ‘Basement Cat’ (Satan),
‘Happy cat’ (Jesus).

Like doge, these features are considered part of the grammar of

the LOLcat meme. Failure to use the LOLcat style appropriately
negates the effectiveness of the meme. For instance, in her analysis of
LOLspeak, Miltner (2011) finds that because these types of memes
adhere to a specific set of rules (or norms), users can distinguish
between successful and unsuccessful attempts to master the variety. In
 Identity and Online Communities 89

her study, one participant suggests that you can spot a newbie by the
“wrong font, wrong syntax” (Miltner, 2011: 27). Thus, whilst memes
may initially appear to use an idiosyncratic or haphazard language
style, in reality, many memes appear to adhere to a set of grammatical
rules. As sociolinguists, a common goal is therefore to explain and
describe the grammar of a meme genre, such as doge or LOLCat.

Points for reflection

• Do you recognise the Doge and LOLCat examples? Have you seen
these memes being used on social media?

4.7 Summary
In this chapter, we have explored the relationship between language
and identity. The focus here has been on how users perform their iden-
tities in and through social and digital media. We have seen that many
platforms offer users a range of different ways to construct their iden-
tities online (e.g., profile photos, bios, status updates). This includes
offering users a way of connecting with likeminded individuals which
may lead to the formation of distinct online communities organised
around shared interests and themes. Within the participatory spaces
of social media, we have seen that users develop shared norms, values,
and forms of creative expression. This includes internet memes which
are created, remixed, and circulated by users. The chapter concludes
by considering the distinct linguistic varieties that become associated
with particular types of meme genres.

4.8 Activities
1. Choose three different platforms (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter,
Instagram). Select a public figure of your choice who has accounts
on each of the three platforms. Now collect a sample of 20 posts
from each of their profiles of the three platforms. Compare and
contrast their identities across the different platforms:
• Are there differences in the type of content uploaded to the three
platforms?
• Are there differences in the language used by the individual
across the three platforms?
• If the answer is ‘yes’ to either of the above questions, try to
explain why you observe differences (hint: Think about the
imagined audience!)
2. Reflect on your own engagement with online communities. Are
there any communities that you engage with that use distinctive
styles of language? If so, collect 50 posts from that community
90 Researching Language and Digital Communication

and identify the words, spellings, and phrases associated with that
community.
3. Doge and LOLCat are now relatively dated examples of internet
memes. Are you familiar with any other meme genres that have
distinctive language styles associated with them? If so, collect 10
examples of that category of memes. Try to explain the grammar
of that meme genre:
• What features (e.g., image, colour, sound) are typical of the
meme genre?
• What cultural reference(s) does the meme genre make?
• What are the linguistic features of that meme genre?
• What makes a meme in this category successful or unsuccessful?

4.9 Further Reading

Brock, André (2020). Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures.
New York: New York University Press.
Jenkins, Henry, Mizuko Ito & danah boyd (2016). Participatory Culture in a
Networked Era. Cambridge: Polity.
Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford & Joshua Green (2013). Spreadable Media: Creating
Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York
University Press.
Kannen, Victoria & Aaron Langille (eds.) (2023). Virtual Identities and
Digital Culture. Abingdon: Routledge.
Milner, Ryan M. (2016). The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and
Participatory Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Nakamura, Lisa (2002). Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the
Internet. Abingdon: Routledge.
Papacharissi, Zizi (2010). A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and
Culture on Social Network Sites. Abingdon: Routledge.
Shifman, Limor (2014). Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press.
Wiggins, Bradley E. (2019). The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital
Culture: Ideology, Semiotics, and Intertextuality. Abingdon: Routledge.
Yus, Francisco (2019). Multimodality in memes: A cyberpragmatic approach.
In Patricia Bou-​Franch & Pilar Garcés-​Conejos Blitvich (eds.), Analysing
Digital Discourse, pp. 105–​131. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

4.10 References
Agha, Asif (2005). Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic
Anthropology, 15(1): 38–​59.
boyd, danah (2014). It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens.
London: Yale University Press.
boyd, danah & Nicole Ellison (2007). Social network sites: Definition, his-
tory, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-​ Mediated Communication,
13(1): 210–​230.
 Identity and Online Communities 91

Brock, André (2020). Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures.

New York: New York University Press.
Bruns, Axel (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From
Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang.
Castells, Manuel (2002). The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet,
Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Danet, Brenda (1998). Text as mask: Gender, play, and performance on the
Internet. In S. G. Jones (ed.), New Media Cultures, Vol. 2. Cybersociety
2.0: Revisiting Computer-​ Mediated Communication and Community,
pp. 129–​158. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Dawkins, Richard (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Dubé, Line, Anne Bourhis & Réal Jacob (2005). The impact of structuring
characteristics on the launching of virtual communities of practice. Journal
of Organizational Change Management, 18(2): 145–​166.
Ellison, Nicole B., Charles W. Steinfield & Cliff Lampe (2007). The benefits
of Facebook ‘friends’: Social capital and college students’ use of online
social network sites. Journal of Computer-​ Mediated Communication,
12(4): 1143–​1168.
Gawne, Lauren & Jill Vaughan (2012). I can haz language play: The construc-
tion of language and identity in LOLspeak. In Maia Ponsonnet, Loan Dao,
& Margit Bowler (eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Australian Linguistic
Society Conference—​2011, pp. 97–​122. Canberra: Australian National
University.
Herring, Susan C. (2004). Computer-​ mediated discourse analysis: An
approach to researching online behaviour. In Sasha A. Barab, Rob
Kling, & James H. Gray (eds.), Designing for Virtual Communities
in the Service of Learning, pp. 338–​ 376. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Jenkins, Henry, Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton,
Alice J. Robison (2009). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory
Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press.
Jurgenson, Nathan (2012). When atoms meet bits: Social media, the mobile
web and augmented revolution. Future Internet, 4: 83–​91.
Lave, Jean & Etienne Wenger (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral
Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Miltner, Kate (2011). Srsly phenomenal: An investigation into the appeal
of LOLcats. Unpublished manuscript, London School of Economics and
Political Science.
Rheingold, Howard (1993). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the
Electronic Frontier. New York: Harper Collins.
Shifman, Limor (2014). Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press.
Sobande, Francesca (2019). Memes, digital remix culture and (re)mediating
British politics and public life. Progressive Review, 26(2): 151–​160.
Sobande, Francesca (2020). The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain.
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
92 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Triggs, Anthony Henry, Kristian Kristian Møller & Christina Neumayer

(2021). Context collapse and anonymity among queer Reddit users. New
Media & Society, 23(1): 5–​21.
Turkle, Sherry (1995). Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet.
New York: Simon & Schuster.
Wiggins, Bradley E. (2019). The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital
Culture: Ideology, Semiotics, and Intertextuality. Abingdon: Routledge.
Zulli, Diana & David James Zulli (2020). Extending the Internet
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TikTok platform. New Media & Society, 24(8): 1872–​1890.
5 Methods

5.1 Introduction
In this chapter we cover the following topics:

• Developing a research project

• Research ethics
• Ethics in digital communication research
• Some common sociolinguistic approaches to studying digital
communication:
• Variationist approaches
• Corpus approaches
• Digital ethnographic approaches
• Blended offline-​online approaches.

Ok! So, you’re now five chapters into this book. And some of you
will have some exciting ideas in your head. Maybe you’re now at the
stage where you’re thinking of designing your own project. But how
do you even begin? There are so many platforms that you could study,
so many practices you’ve observed, how do you even begin to identify
a feasible research project? How do you get started doing a research
project on digital communication?
The first stage of designing a research project –​and potentially the
most challenging –​is finding a research topic. For research on digital
communication, we often develop a research project in response to
some anecdotal observation. For instance, perhaps you’ve seen that
some people use <xoxo> at the end of their WhatsApp messages whilst
others opt for <xxx>. Or maybe you’ve seen that some users on Twitter
use alternating caps such as ‘HoW LOnG iS ThIS GoNna TaKE?’. You
might have even noticed that some people use non-​standard spellings
on Tumblr, like spelling you as <u>. Alternatively, you might want to
know whether emoji or stickers are more commonly used in Weibo
posts than in Twitter. All of these observations have the potential to be
developed into a full-​scale sociolinguistic research project. From here,
we can formulate a research question such as ‘are there age differences

DOI: 10.4324/9781003391838-5
94 Researching Language and Digital Communication

in the use of <xxx> and <xoxo> in WhatsApp messages?’. A research

question is central to the project design and helps us focus our project.
Once we identify a project idea and research question, we will need
some data. For the above project (‘are there age differences in the use
of <xxx> and <xoxo> in WhatsApp messages?’), we’d need to collect
some data from the WhatsApp conversations of older and younger
users. However, we can’t simply go extract a load of WhatsApp
messages. We have to consider the ethical implications of extracting
and analysing that data. We might even need ethical clearance from
our institution. Then, once we’ve got past this hurdle, we’ll need to use
some framework to interpret our data. If we’re interested in knowing
why some people spell you as <u> on Tumblr, for instance, we’ll need
to use some type of framework to make sense of the data we have.
The purpose of this chapter is to provide readers with an over-
view of the various stages involved in designing and operationalising
a study on DMC. We first focus on identifying a project idea and
developing a research question. From here, we delve into the ethics of
using digital data before turning to the nuts and bolts of research by
considering different analytical approaches that are commonly used in
sociolinguistics.

5.2 Developing a Research Project

All research projects start with a seed of an idea. Typically, we can
identify a potential research topic because we have noticed someone
or some people using a feature in a way that stands out or appears
novel. This is how I developed the ideas for nearly all of my published
articles. For instance, my paper on variation in <?> in WhatsApp
conversations (Ilbury, 2024) was based on my own observations of
how my friends used this feature on WhatsApp. In our group chats,
I noticed that whilst <?> was often used in its conventionalised sense,
that is to signal a question as in ‘Why do you think he has left?’, some-
times my friends would use it in the context of a statement such as in
the following Extract 0 marked in bold:

(1) 1 Sam I might meet my friend John for a drink, y’all

welcome
2 Tilly Whose [sic] John????
3 Sam He’s the guy from University? He lives like
opposite us?

I then realised this was much more widespread than my group of

friends. It was common in emails and was discussed online. This
simple observation –​that <?> was being used in statements –​led me to
develop a research project that focussed on the variation in the use of
 Methods 95

<?> in WhatsApp chats. In this project, I was interested in examining

the extent to which <?> in statements could be considered a textual
trace of a feature of spoken language –​what sociolinguists have called
‘High Rising Terminals’ (HRTs). Also called uptalk, HRTs refer to the
use of a high rising intonation on a declarative sentence. Although this
is a feature of spoken language, the use of <?> in declarative phrases
like ‘he lives like opposite us?’ looked to me to be a textual represen-
tation of this feature. To understand this variation, I developed a
research question: ‘does declarative <?> function in similar ways to
HRTs in speech?’.
When developing a project on digital communication, it is often
worth spending some time on a platform to simply observe how people
communicate. Platforms like Twitter and Reddit which are publicly
accessible are great for this type of exploratory research. We can
quickly determine whether our initial idea is worth developing into
a full-​scale project. Good questions to ask are: Is the feature frequent
enough to study? Does the feature vary? Does it look like different
people are using the feature in different ways?

Points for reflection

• Having got this far in the book, have you thought of any ideas for a
potential research project?
• Are there things you’ve noticed people doing online that you’d be
interested in exploring?

Another way to think about developing a research project is by

adapting an existing study. For instance, if you’ve read a paper
which finds gendered differences in the use of emoji on Twitter,
you might want to see if these gendered differences in emoji use are
found in another platform, such as Weibo. Alternatively, if research
has found that American teens prefer <haha> to <lol> in WhatsApp
conversations, you may want to see if this pattern holds in the
WhatsApp messages of Australian teens. Both of these research
projects replicate an existing study. In your own work, you may
want to simply adapt the research questions, methodology, and
background of an existing study to enable comparisons between
those findings and your own.
Once we’ve settled on an idea, we ideally want to develop a research
proposal. This is a concise and coherent summary of the project. The
proposal should do three main things:

1. Establish the research background of the proposed project. What

other research has been done on the topic that relates to the pro-
ject? Why is this project original or interesting?
96 Researching Language and Digital Communication

2. Discuss the aims and objectives of the research project. In research

on digital communications, we typically start out with research
questions. Though depending on the type of study you’re designing,
developing some hypotheses may be more appropriate.
3. Detail the methodology and analytical framework(s) that will be
used to obtain data and analyse it.

The purpose of the proposal is to help keep the research project

focussed. It provides a clear outline of what the project is and how you
are going to do it. However, nothing is set in stone. We often adapt
and change elements of our research design as the project develops.
Perhaps a particular methodology didn’t work or data that you
thought was available in fact was inaccessible. Adapting the project
design is very common when doing digital communications research
and shouldn’t be seen as a failure!
When we develop the research proposal, we need to make several
decisions. These decisions include what literature to include, which
methodology to use, what data we’re going to get, and how we’re
going to do the analysis. One of the things we need to think about in
some detail is the data. There are lots of interesting questions about
language and digital communication but some are difficult to answer
because we cannot access the data needed to answer those questions.
Dating platforms, for instance, are very difficult to study because the
types of conversations people engage in are often filled with emo-
tionally sensitive topics. Getting consent from users to analyse these
conversations is quite complex. When writing your proposal, you
should have a good idea of what your data will look like, how it will
be obtained, and which platforms you intend to get the data from.
Your choice of platform will necessarily have an impact on the types
of approaches you use. Projects on Zoom, for instance, will likely need
to use recordings of actual conversations between users. We would
therefore need to identify the relevant methodological approaches and
software that will enable us to capture and analyse audio-​visual data.
The format of the data will also shape how we analyse it. For some
approaches, such as analyses of Twitter data, we might only focus on
the text-​based content of tweets. However, for other platforms like
Zoom which use text, video, and sound, we’ll likely need to employ a
multimodal analysis. These types of approaches allow us to consider
the interaction between different semiotic systems (i.e., text, video,
and sound; not just one or the other).

5.3 Research Ethics

For all these types of analyses, we will need to first consider the eth-
ical issues involved in collecting, storing, and analysing digital data.
 Methods 97

Because our focus in this book is on digital communication, most of

the research that we are interested in analyses messages, posts, videos,
and other forms of digital content produced by actual people. This
data often includes lots of sensitive information like personal names,
addresses, and images. Extracting, analysing, and storing this data
presents a number of ethical challenges and issues.
Put simply, research ethics is a universally agreed set of principles
that govern the standards of academic research. The purpose of eth-
ical guidelines and protocols is to ensure that our research does not
do any harm or bring people into disrepute. Generally, guidelines
are published by institutional or governmental committees who
have responsibility to ensure that the research is both legal and
ethical.

Key Term: Research Ethics

A set of principles which ensure that research is conducted in an
appropriate and responsible manner. Research ethics include things
like ensuring you have informed consent from participants, making
sure you have stored the data securely, and guaranteeing participant
anonymity (if this is agreed).

Although, the exact guidance will vary depending on the institution

and the country in which the research project is carried out there are
some common principles of research ethics. These include:

• Respect for autonomy: People must be free to decide whether they

want to participate in the study of not. They are free to withdraw
at any time.
• Minimise risk: Participants should not be harmed by the research.
• Benefits outweigh any possible risks: The research should be worth-
while and should yield some meaningful outcome and be of scien-
tific/​scholarly interest.
• Justice: The research should treat people equally and participants
should not be exploited.
• Confidentiality: The participants’ personal details and data should
be kept safe and confidential. Any data should only be shared with
the research team (unless otherwise agreed).
• Integrity: All research should be conducted to the highest academic
standards. Unacceptable practices include: Falsification of results,
plagiarism of ideas, and fabrication of data.
• Conflict of interests: Researchers must be upfront as to whether
there is personal or economic gain for conducting the research.
98 Researching Language and Digital Communication

As discussed briefly above, research institutions like universities

will often have committees which publish specific ethical guidelines.
Most universities will have a Research Ethics Committee (REC) or
Institutional review board (IRB). These are committees which ensure
that research involving human subjects is conducted in an eth-
ical manner and in accordance with national and international law.
Alongside issuing ethics guidance, ethics committees will often assess
applications and give researchers ethics clearance to conduct their
study. Because research projects involving human participants cannot
commence until ethical clearance is granted, the ethics application
should form part of the overall study design. Researchers will often
build ethical protocols (e.g., the right to withdraw) into their research
projects from the very beginning. When completing an ethics applica-
tion, you will often be asked to provide information on various aspects
of the research design of the project. This includes questions about
how you will (i) get consent from participants; (ii) collect, store, and
analyse the data; and (iii) ensure the confidentiality and anonymity of
participants.

5.4 Research Ethics and Digital Communication

Given that ethical decisions need to be made in all types of research
projects, many of the issues we discuss here are relevant to other
types of research projects, not just those on digital communication.
However, there are a number of unique ethical issues that arise when
doing research on DMC. A main issue is that there are rapid changes
in digital technologies; new platforms and services emerge very
quickly. Platforms will often be released (and sometimes disappear!)
before ethics committees have had the chance to develop guidelines for
extracting, analysing, and storing that data. Currently, there is little to
no institutional guidance on doing research on newer multimodal apps
like TikTok/​Douyin. Even when there are ethical guidelines, these can
sometimes be contradictory or dated. Unfortunately, and often frus-
tratingly for students and ethics committees alike, there isn’t really a
one size fits all model for doing ethical research on digital communica-
tion. Students and researchers will often want to do research projects
where there’s no established protocol for extracting or analysing the
data that the researcher has in mind. This means that researchers will
often have to make decisions based on their own intuitions or follow
similar approaches.
In addition to institutional guidelines, there may also be academic
communities, groups, and organisations which publish ethical advice
which is more tailored to digital communication. For the kinds of
projects we are interested in, guidelines published by the Association
of Internet Researchers (AoIR; www.aoir.org/​eth​ics/​) and the British
 Methods 99

Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL; www.baal.org.uk/​who-​

we-​are/​resour​ces/​) are particularly useful.
One of the big questions in analysing digital data is the issue
of consent. Generally speaking, ethics committees will require the
researcher to obtain ethical approval for their study and obtain
‘informed consent’ if the data is collected from ‘human subjects’.
Informed consent means that we must give participants sufficient
information about the study, how the data will be analysed, and so
on, as well as the option to participate or not. Usually, participants
receive an information sheet which details the study aims and
purposes and are then asked to give consent typically by signing a
consent form (either in physical or digital format). Sometimes this
involves the individual responding to various different requests on
how the data will be used.
For most projects that involve human subjects, the question as to
whether we need consent or not is relatively straightforward. Say
we wanted to do a project on perceptions of climate change, and we
wanted to record people discussing this topic in interviews, we would
need to get consent from individuals before we interviewed them.
Similarly, imagine you are doing a study on the digital practices of a
group of five individuals who are known to you. Your study involves
you interviewing these individuals and then extracting some of their
WhatsApp conversations. Since you are interviewing the participants
and obtaining some of their private conversations, you would need to
issue them with an information sheet and get their consent to extract
and analyse their data.
However, for other types of digital projects, the issue of consent is a
much more complex issue. First, it may be not possible to obtain con-
sent from participants. This could be because the user is anonymous
and so there is no way of contacting them to ask for consent or
because the dataset is very large. In Chapter 6, we introduce a set of
approaches that use ‘big data’ methods and tools to analyse linguistic
patterns in datasets made up of thousands if not millions of users.
Obtaining consent from all of these individuals is simply not feasible.
The question here then is do we always need consent?
Whether we need informed consent or not is a decision often based
on whether the data is ‘public’ or ‘private’. Generally speaking, ethics
committees do not require researchers to obtain ethical clearance or
consent when the data is in the ‘public domain’. Data in the public
domain tends to come from public facing publications like newspapers,
magazines, and television programmes. If we wanted to undertake a
project on the use of different pronouns in a tabloid newspaper, for
instance, we wouldn’t need to apply for ethics approval for that pro-
ject. This is because newspaper articles are in the public domain and
they are intended to be read by the public.
100 Researching Language and Digital Communication

This is the argument made for some types of social media data.
Take, for instance, Twitter. When a user tweets, their tweet appears in
their timeline where it is visible unless it is deleted. By default, profiles
are set to public. This means just about anyone can go and read that
tweet. If we assume that consent only needs to be obtained for private
data, we will conclude that, as Twitter data is in the public domain,
it is comparable articles in newspapers or magazines. We therefore
do not need ethical approval or consent to collect and analyse public
tweets. In reality, however, the public/​private debate and the question
of consent in digital communications research is much more complex
than this.

Points for reflection

• Consider the following platforms –​Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat,

TikTok. Is content on these apps public or private? Do you think we
would need consent to analyse the various different posts on these
apps? If so, why? If not, why not?
• In the above discussion, we said that researchers do not typically get
consent to analyse tweets because they are in the public domain. Do
you agree with this approach? In other words, would you be happy
if a researcher analysed your tweets or used them in a research
project?

5.4.1 Private Content

As briefly noted above, a general rule of thumb is that ethics
committees will require the researcher to obtain informed consent if
the data is considered private. For instance, if you wanted to do a
project on spelling variation (e.g., <bbz> for <babes>, <walkin> for
<walking>) in WhatsApp messages sent by a group of young adults,
you’d need first need to get ethics clearance from the relevant insti-
tutional body. After this, you’d need to get informed consent from
all of the contributors to that group. This will likely involve sending
everyone an information sheet which outlines the aims of the study
and explains how their data will be stored and analysed, and also a
consent form. Only once you obtained consent from each and every
one of the users in a given group chat could you go ahead and start
extracting and analysing their messages. This is because WhatsApp
is a private or closed platform. In other words, messages on the app
cannot be viewed by individuals who are not members of a conversa-
tion or group (unless, of course, those messages are shared elsewhere).
Evidently, WhatsApp conversations are very different to public domain
sources, like newspapers or magazines, which are intended to be read
by anyone.
 Methods 101

In an ideal world, if you were conducting this project, every member

of the group would happily consent to participating in the study.
However, even if you do obtain ethical approval and get consent from
all of the users involved, we still need to be mindful of several ethical
issues throughout the research process. Ethics committees will often
ask us to explain how we will store the data. Sometimes, the country
that the researcher is working in will have legal requirements for data
storage. For instance, in the UK and the EU, researchers must adhere
to the principles set out by the General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR). This dictates things like where the data is stored, who has
access to the data, and how the long the data can be retained. We must
adhere to these guidelines to ensure that we are storing personal and
sensitive data appropriately.
Researchers also have a duty of care to participants to use their
data in responsible ways. What this means is that we should not bring
people into disrepute or cause harm to them. Participants have often
generously donated their data and so we have to be careful not to
misrepresent or misconstrue that data. This is a particular concern
of research that considers interactional data, such as conversations
from DMC. If you use WhatsApp (or any other private messaging ser-
vice), think about the content of your messages and/​or who you send
those messages to. Many of our conversations on WhatsApp are very
similar to those that we participate in in private contexts like at home
or at work. These are conversations that we have with our friends,
colleagues, or family –​essentially, groups of people that we are close
with. Due to this level of intimacy, WhatsApp conversations often
include messages about private and personal topics. Users may have
sent their friends their address or bank details, conversations might
cover taboo topics, and identifiable multimedia content like selfies
may be shared in the group. All of these conversations were sent on
the assumption that they would remain private and would only ever be
viewed by members of the group or message. Even if we do get ethical
approval and consent to use this data, we have to be mindful that we
now have access to conversations that were never intended to be shared
or read by non-​members of the group or message. In other words,
people sent these messages long before they were ever aware that they
could be analysed as part of a study on digital communication.
In some ways, we could think of this as an advantage, not a dis-
advantage, of digital data. Because we are extracting data from the
private conversations of users, we will often get very naturalistic
conversations. And, given that participants sent the messages at a
time when they weren’t part of a study, we’re not going to see any
observer effects in our data (i.e., the tendency for people to change
their behaviours when they become aware that they are being studied).
These types of data are often very casual, between friends and family,
102 Researching Language and Digital Communication

and on relatively informal topics. In very many ways, this is exactly

the kind of data that sociolinguistics aims to collect.
Still, we should be mindful of the assumptions that users had when
sending these types of messages. If the dataset contains personal details
like phone numbers or addresses, this is identifiable information that
must be deleted or anonymised in the dataset. For personal names, we
can usually assign someone a pseudonym (i.e., use a fake name) but
for other personal information like bank details, we probably want to
avoid extracting this entirely or at the very least delete this informa-
tion from our dataset.
The second issue relates to the topics of conversation. As discussed
above, people often engage in very intimate topics in WhatsApp pre-
cisely because these are often private conversations between friends
and family. When we get consent to analyse and extract those
conversations, we need to be mindful of how we present and use this
data. For instance, if your corpus of WhatsApp messages contained
discussions of substance use or intimate details of someone’s love life,
it wouldn’t be a good idea to use these examples in a paper.
Of course, not every paper on DMC will need to present stretches
of the conversation verbatim. One very common approach that is
used in sociolinguistic analyses of DMC is to analyse the quantita-
tive (i.e., numerical) distribution of a feature. For instance, we may
want to know how many times the different variants of laughter are
used in the WhatsApp messages we have extracted. To answer this, we
could count how many times the different variants (<lol>, <haha>, and
<hehe>) occur. And, if we have different groups of people, we could
look at whether one group (e.g., users aged 40 and over) use more or
less of one variant over another when compared with another group
(e.g., users aged under 40). Since we are simply counting how much
a given variant is used, we don’t necessarily need to present excerpts
of WhatsApp conversations in the paper. Our interest here is solely
on the aggregate patterns of the variation in the dataset. It may not
really matter what people were talking about when they used <lol>,
<haha>, or <hehe> since we’re not going to use excerpts of the actual
conversation.
However, if we do want to analyse how <lol>, <haha>, or <hehe>
are used in actual conversation, what do we do then? In this type of
project, you might want to show that the different laughter variants are
used in different conversational contexts, e.g., when joking vs. when
being sarcastic. Unlike the quantitative approach above, this study
will likely involve close analysis of conversations to explore why and
how a given variant is used. We now need to present actual extracts
of the conversations –​words and sentences –​that were produced by
actual people. This could potentially be problematic for a number of
reasons. First, when we use extracts of conversations, we are almost
 Methods 103

always presenting data that is decontextualised. We need to be aware

that an utterance is often interpreted differently when it is presented
alone, separate from the rest of the interaction. Presenting an excerpt
in isolation risks misrepresenting what someone really meant when
they sent the original message. For instance, calling someone an ‘idiot’
might be playful or serious depending on the intention of the message.
To understand the meaning of this single message, we’d need to know
the relationship between the users and the preceding and following
conversation. We therefore need to provide enough context so that
the example is not misinterpreted. Second, we should be aware that
we have a duty to minimise risk to our participants. As noted above,
it’s possible that taboo or offensive labels or topics will be discussed
in DMC. If we are presenting stretches of the discourse in our analysis
of <lol>, <haha>, and <hehe>, we would want to avoid presenting
excerpts that contain potentially inflammatory or sensitive content.
A simple way of doing this would be to use excerpts and examples that
are mundane or innocuous. Whilst we anonymise all data, we don’t
want to run the risk of misrepresenting or harming our participants
who have very generously donated their conversations to us!

Points for reflection

• Which ‘private’ social media platforms do you use? Can you think
of any strategies or approaches to reduce the ethical challenges of
using this data?

5.4.2 Public Content and Consent

Other types of digital data are in the ‘public domain’. Data is considered
‘public’ if that message, video, or other content is accessible or visible
on a platform without registering for an account. Often, the terms
and conditions of the platform will determine whether the content is
public or private. Most accounts on Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and
TikTok are set to public by default. When users register for an account
on these platforms, they would have agreed to some type of condition
that specifies that their data will be public. For instance, when a user
registers for an account on Twitter, tweets are set to public by default.
It is often possible to view a public timeline without personally having
an account. If an account owner wishes, they can make their tweets
and profiles private by selecting the ‘Protect your Tweets’ option in
the privacy settings. When selected, only users who follow the account
can view the users’ tweets and profile information. New followers
then have to be approved by the user. The terms and conditions (at
least in 2024) even state that ‘[Twitter/​]X is a public platform’. Indeed,
few users elect to protect their tweets. In a 2021 study of the Twitter
104 Researching Language and Digital Communication

practices of over 2,500 adults in the US, only 11% of respondents

reported that they had protected their tweets (McClain, Widjaya,
Rivero & Smith, 2021).
As discussed above, most of the time researchers do not need eth-
ical clearance to extract and analyse data that is in the public domain.
Public social media data –​like tweets, Reddit posts, and so on –​are
often compared to newspapers, magazines, and television programmes.
As such, many have argued that since data on these platforms is pub-
licly accessible, it is not necessary to obtain consent from individual
users. In most circumstances, this negates the need to apply for ethical
clearance.
Because a lot of social media data is in the public domain, it is
extremely accessible to researchers. The sheer quantity and style of
social media posts is potentially a goldmine for the kinds of research
questions and projects we’re interested in. Researchers have been able
to gather very large datasets comprising conversations from public
social and digital media sites. The types of data we can collect from
these sites are diverse. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram provide
us with access to multimodal (e.g., textual, visual, and oral) content.
Now, with the increasing availability of computational tools, we can
download and analyse this content far more easily than previously.
This means that we can study linguistic phenomena in datasets com-
prising millions of messages. For instance, in work on lexical vari-
ation in Twitter, Grieve and colleagues examine geographical patterns
of dialect lexis in a 1.8-billion-​word corpus consisting of 180 million
tweets posted by 1.9 million unique accounts. This is a huge amount
of data! Importantly, collecting a dataset of this size and power is
only made possible because the tweets in the dataset are in the public
domain.
The increasing use of social media and digital data in sociolinguistics
has, in part, been promoted through greater academic access to this
data. In fact, some platforms have actively encouraged research on
user data. Twitter and Reddit offer a dedicated API for academic
research and in 2023, TikTok announced that it would be opening up
its API to academic researchers.
Nevertheless, even if this data is in the public domain and the
platforms may encourage its use for academic purposes, we still need
to be mindful of the implications and ethical issues of using this data.
Although ethics committees or institutions may not require us to
apply for ethical clearance or obtain consent, we still have a duty of
care to those whose data we use. This is particularly true for apps
and platforms where data is ‘public by default’ (e.g., Twitter, Reddit,
TikTok, Instagram, and most internet blogs, like Tumblr). Whilst the
majority of data on these apps is set to be publicly visible, not all data
is public. It is common, as we saw in Chapter 3, for users to exploit
 Methods 105

the privacy and security functions of platforms to hide their data. For
instance, on Instagram users will often elect to make their profiles pri-
vate so that only followers who are accepted can view their timelines
and, on Tumblr, users can choose the audience of particular posts,
making them private if they so wish. Even if posts are publicly access-
ible, many of these platforms have affordances that are private. This
includes the direct messaging functions on TikTok and Instagram.
A related issue that we need to consider here is whether people are
truly aware of the status of their data and how that might be used.
Although Twitter is often used in academic research because it is pub-
licly accessible, many users appear to be unaware that their tweets are
public. In the same 2021 Pew research survey discussed earlier, 53%
of the respondents claimed to have set their profile to public. However,
after crosschecking these claims, Pew research found that in reality,
89% of the participants’ profiles were set to public. This suggests that
people aren’t truly aware that Twitter is a ‘public by default’ site and
that they may be unintentionally posting content that is seen by an
audience much larger than they had imagined.

Points for reflection

• If you use Twitter, would you be happy for a researcher to use your
tweets in their paper?
• Would the following factors affect your response?
• If you were asked permission to use your tweets
• If your tweets were quoted in full
• If your tweets were anonymised
• If your tweets were analysed with millions of other tweets
• If your tweets were analysed automatically by a computer.
• What concerns do you have about academics using social media
data in their research?

The mismatch between users’ expectations and how the data might be
used is a major issue for researchers. If people aren’t aware that their
content is public, they probably don’t realise that that content could
be used in an academic study. This is an issue addressed by Fiesler
and Proferes (2018) in a study on ‘participant’ perceptions of Twitter
research ethics. In that work, the authors show that the majority of
Twitter users felt that research should not use tweets without express
consent. In fact, 48.5% of the 268 participants expressed the view that
they were uncomfortable with the idea of their entire Twitter history/​
timeline being used in research. Only 33.2% of the participants felt
comfortable with their tweets being used in this way. 67.4% of users
indicated that they would change their view on a tweet of theirs being
used in a study if express consent was obtained first. Clearly then,
106 Researching Language and Digital Communication

whilst the data might be technically public, people are not always
aware that it is accessible and could be used for research purposes.
One very interesting finding of the Fiesler and Proferes (2018)
paper is that people responded differently depending on how the
data were used. One of the main differences people distinguished
between was research which analysed aggregate patterns versus those
which explored aspects of their conversations in detail. Fiesler and
Proferes (2018) found that participants felt more comfortable with
their tweets being analysed along with millions of other tweets from
other users (53.2% were comfortable), than in isolation. Only 38.6%
of respondents indicated that they would be happy with their tweets
being used verbatim in a research paper.
The findings of this type of work can be interpreted with reference to
a concept we introduced in Chapter 3: The imagined audience. Recall
that we introduced work on Twitter that showed that users generally
imagine an audience that comprises their friends, family, or people
similar to them. Users often design their tweets with this imagined
audience in mind. Fiesler and Proferes’ (2018) findings are likely indi­
cative of a mismatch between users’ expectations of the imagined
audience and the actual potential audience (i.e., academics who may
use this data in their research). Very evidently, the users in the study
did not anticipate that the audience of their tweets could, one day, be
a researcher or even, if the tweet is published in a book or a journal,
an entire academic community!
Another related finding was that Fiesler and Proferes (2018) found
that users were more comfortable for researchers using their data to
examine some topics than others. In fact, for many of the respondents,
whether or not their tweets could be used in academic research was
heavily dependent on the topic of the study. This leads the authors to
conclude that quoting tweets might be less appropriate for research
on sensitive topics such as medical conditions or drug use than, for
instance, in a study on television habits.
What digital content we quote and how we quote it is a major
dilemma for sociolinguistic analyses of DMC. Although we generally
think of sociolinguistic questions as fairly innocuous (e.g., do men and
women use <lol> in different ways? Are there generational differences
in emoji use?), there are some sociolinguistic questions which engage
with much more sensitive or risky topics and issues. For instance,
there is now quite a lot of work on the so-​called ‘manopshere’ –​that
is, websites and other digital content that promote toxic masculinity
and misogyny. Much of this work analyses social media and digital
content in the public domain. This includes work such as Krendel’s
(2020) analysis of the linguistic construction of gender identities in
an anti-​feminist forum on the popular discussion website, Reddit.
Many of the posts analysed in this work contain highly offensive and
 Methods 107

discriminatory remarks. Messages are often reproduced in verbatim

and so could, potentially, be traced back to the individual user. We will
discuss how to balance these issues in Section 5.4.4 when we introduce
a ‘reflexive approach to research ethics’.

5.4.3 Data from Public Figures

One possible work around for dealing with questions of whether the
data is public or private is to use content from celebrities, politicians,
and other public facing figures. Many of the issues we’ve discussed
so far apply to everyday users because, as Fiesler & Proferes show,
there’s little or no expectation that their content will be scrutinised or
analysed by anyone but their friends and family. Public figures, on the
other hand, cultivate an online presence and profile that is intention-
ally designed to encourage public engagement.
Nevertheless, whilst using data from public figures might address
some of the ethical quandaries we’ve discussed so far, it equally raises
some other issues which may or may not be problematic depending on
the scope of the study. Perhaps most obviously, celebrities and other
public figures are not representative of a community as a whole nor
are they typical of the everyday user. If we are using data from public
figures, it is very likely that they are cultivating an online persona
that is highly monitored and polished. The topics of posts will also
likely be restricted. Many celebrities will only post about topics dir-
ectly related to their profession and/​or role. Consider, for instance, the
following tweets from a politician (the current Indian Prime Minister,
Narendra Modi) and a music artist (the American singer-​song writer,
Lady Gaga):

(2) @narendramodi: His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed

bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and I had very productive
talks. We reviewed our trade ties and are confident that the
commercial linkages between our nations will grow even
further in the times to come. The scope for cooperation in grid
connectivity, renewable energy, food security, semiconductors
and supply chains is immense.
(3) @ladygaga: Lady Gaga Jazz & Piano returns to Las Vegas for
12 shows between August 31 and October 5 🎺🎼
Sign up now for the Little Monsters pre-​sale on http://​vegas.
ladyg​aga.com for early ticket access tomorrow!
Tickets go on sale to the public this Friday, August 4 at 10 am
PT ✨

This type of data would be suitable for a project that examines the lin-
guistic strategies that public figures use to engage with their audiences.
108 Researching Language and Digital Communication

However, the data would be less useful in projects that examine topics
like non-​standard spellings or creative typographic strategies, given
how standardised these tweets are.
The second issue, and perhaps the more problematic issue for the
types of research we’re interested in, is that the public figure might not
be responsible for creating the content that is posted to their profiles.
Often, celebrity accounts are maintained by a third-​party, usually a
social media manager. If the tweets aren’t actually written by the user,
we can’t argue that the language used in those tweets is representa-
tive of that public figure. Especially problematic is we seem to have
no way of distinguishing tweets written by the public figure them-
selves and a marketing assistant. The two examples above seem very
unlikely to have been written by the public figures themselves given
how formulaic and standardised they are but we really have no way
of verifying this.
A third and final issue with using data from these types of accounts
is ascertaining whether the individual is actually a public figure.
Influencer accounts pose a problem here. Whilst influencers with
millions of followers are virtually indistinguishable from actors, tele-
vision hosts, and other celebrities, it is debatable as to whether so-​
called ‘nano-​ influencers’ (1–​ 10K followers) and ‘micro-​ influencers’
(10–​100K followers) can really be considered public figures. A counter
point to this is that it could be argued that influencers, like other public
figures, cultivate an online presence that is intended to be engaging
and public facing.

5.4.4 Making Ethical Decisions

In some ways, the previous sections raise more questions than pro-
vide answers. At times, working on digital communication feels like
an ethical minefield. As discussed above, it’s not always clear whether
the data is public or private, we may not know if we need to obtain
consent, and sometimes there aren’t specific institutional guidelines to
follow. Given these issues, how do we go about actually designing an
ethically responsible project on digital communication?
The first thing to do is check whether there is institutional
guidance that is relevant to your project. Given that more and more
researchers are working with this type of data, ethics committees
will now have more guidance on researching digital platforms and
practices. If your institution does not offer any guidance, it is worth
having a look at the information produced by BAAL and AoIR
(links in Section 5.4).
However, a more radical approach would be to overhaul our
thinking of ‘research ethics’. So far, we’ve been discussing ethics
as a fairly procedural process that we need to abide by: We read
 Methods 109

institutional guidance, fill in an application form, get clearance

from our institution, and off we go and do the study. But this is a
fairly generic process that doesn’t account for the fact that research
projects often develop in ways we didn’t initially foresee. Sometimes,
the data we want to collect will be very different to what we first set
out to study. Equally, as we build relationships with participants,
they might have different expectations about how their data is used
or feel more comfortable in disclosing sensitive information to the
researcher.
To tackle these issues, Tagg and colleagues (2017) have argued that
we should reframe digital research ethics away from a set of obligations
that the researcher ‘ticks off’ and instead we should view ethics as a
series of decisions that are made in response to changes in the pro-
ject design as it evolves. In some studies, this might mean changing
aspects of the research project as the dynamics between participants
and researchers shift. For instance, in longitudinal studies where
participants’ digital practices are tracked over time, there is a possi-
bility that participants may reveal more intimate data as they become
more familiar with the researcher. It may not always be appropriate
for researchers to collect this data even if they have permission from
the participants to do so.
The approach that Tagg and colleagues advocate for is a reflexive
approach to ethics. Reflexivity involves making conscious efforts to
reflect on our own thoughts, feelings, and emotions when making
decisions in the research process. As a process of continuous self-​
questioning, reflexivity forces us to consider the whys of doing
research to ensure that we are making ethically responsible decisions
and choices. To many students, reflexivity might seem quite an abstract
and academic concept. But in reality, we do this kind of thinking
all the time. One of the recommendations I often make to students
working on digital communication is to put yourself in the shoes of the
community or the user you’re studying. Imagine you are the individual
who originally uploaded the video, image, or message. Ask yourself,
if that were my post, would I be happy for an academic researcher to
extract it and analyse it in a paper? If the answer is no, then I’d suggest
reconsidering whether the project is feasible or whether different types
of data can be analysed.

Points for reflection

• If you are currently working on a research project, take a moment

to think about your data. If that were your message, image, or
video, would you be happy for a researcher to analyse it? What
steps would you want the researcher to take to make sure they
using your data in a responsible way?
110 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Key Term: Reflexivity

In research ethics, reflexivity should guide the decision process.
Reflexivity means thinking about your own beliefs, judgments and
practices as you carry out a research project. Some decisions can
be made by thinking about your own practices, e.g., if that were your
own post or video, would you be happy with an academic analysing
it?

The types of issues around data and consent are heightened when
studying the digital practices of minoritised communities. These are
individuals who belong to groups that are minorities in the population.
This includes people who have minoritised racial, ethnic, sexual, and
gender identities. We need to consider this issue carefully because there
is a higher likelihood of harm given that research has historically often
misrepresented and mischaracterised minoritised communities. When
working with minoritised communities or on topics related to these
communities, we should pay extra attention to how we gather, store,
and analyse the data. It may be appropriate, for instance, to obtain con-
sent from users of minority groups even if that data is publicly available.
We also need to critically reflect on how our world views and
assumptions shape our understanding of the data. This is what
researchers refer to as positionality. Considering our positionality
means critically reflecting on how our race, gender, class, and other
social identities inform and shape our understanding of and relation-
ship to the data. Very often, researchers working with minoritised
communities are part of those communities themselves. The research
is therefore heavily shaped by the individual’s participation in and
membership of the community under study.

Key Term: Positionality

Positionality refers to the fact that the identity of an individual
influences their research. How we interpret patterns and social behav-
iour are all influenced by our own social background and experience
of the world.

It’s clear then that research ethics aren’t just a set of boxes that we must
tick off to get clearance for the project. But we should see ethics as an
ongoing process of making decisions based on the research objectives.
These decisions should be made in relation to participant expectations
and the evolving research project, as well as our own experiences and
positionality in the field.
 Methods 111

5.5 Common DMC Approaches in Sociolinguistics

In the remainder of this chapter, we step away from research ethics to
briefly introduce four main approaches that are used in sociolinguistics
of DMC. These sections are intended to provide an outline of the
approach, with key readings introduced as a way of reading beyond
the summaries.

5.5.1 Variationist Approaches

Variationist sociolinguistics explains the social and stylistic factors
that constrain language variation and change. To use a common
example: You’ve probably noticed that whilst many people who speak
English pronounce the word butter as [bʌtə], some people will pro-
nounce this word with a glottal stop [ʔ] in place of /​t/​as in [bʌʔə].
What we’ve identified here is a basic pattern of variation in the English
language. Variationist sociolinguists will identify the rate of this vari-
ation, and also isolate the linguistic and social factors that influence
that variation.
A key argument in variationist sociolinguistics is that variation isn’t
random. Rather, variationists demonstrate that variation is structured
and predictable. This is because these studies have consistently shown
that variable patterns of language are influenced by social (or external)
and linguistic (or internal) constraints. Social factors include socio-​
demographic categories like social class, age, gender, and sexuality.
Linguistic factors include things like the preceding sound, the word
class, or the frequency of the lexical item. In the case of the above
example, the variable realisation of /​t/​as a glottal stop –​what is
often called ‘t-​glottalisation’ –​has been shown to be sensitive to both
social and internal factors. Higher rates of t-​glottalisation have been
observed in the speech of younger and working-​class speakers, and
in words where /​t/​appears in intervocalic position (i.e., between two
vowels) such as better and butter. A central concept in this field is the
‘sociolinguistic variable’. Initially conceptualised as ‘two or more ways
of saying the same thing’, a variable like (t) has (at least) two possible
alternations: [t]‌and [ʔ].
Though most research has focussed on variation in spoken language,
there is now a growing body of variationist approaches on DMC. A lot
of work has demonstrated the application of theories, concepts, and
methods that were initially developed to account for spoken language
phenomena to digital data. A common approach in variationist ana-
lyses of digital communication is to analyse the orthographic represen-
tation of some spoken language feature. In these studies, the goal is
to identify the social and linguistic factors that constrain the ortho-
graphic variable.
112 Researching Language and Digital Communication

A case in point is Iorio’s study (2009) on orthographic variation in

Massively Multiplayer Online Role-​Playing Games (MMORPG). In
that paper, Iorio examines the extent to which (ING) variation (i.e.,
<running> vs. <runnin>) is influenced by the audience. His analysis
identifies strong social effects on the realisation of (ING). Notably,
Iorio finds that individuals use more of the non-​ standard (i.e.,
<runnin>) in private messaging contexts versus public contexts where
the standard (i.e., <running>) is more common.
A similar type of approach is found in Tagliamonte and colleagues’
(2016) two-​ year study of the language used in digital interactions
by Canadian youth. In that study, the authors analyse variation in a
179,000–​word corpus of emails, instant messages, and SMS messages.
They focus on the use of three main phenomena associated with digital
interaction: (i) acronyms, short forms, and initialisms (e.g., <lol> as a
marker of laughter) (ii) intensifiers (e.g., it was really easy vs. it was
very easy); and (iii) future temporal reference (e.g., yo shall we go to see
that on friday?/​ wat will u be doing in the summer?). The authors find
that there are sizeable differences in the rate of the three features across
the different datasets. Notably, in the context of emails, they identify
lower rates of the non-​standard features, suggesting that users style-​
shift according to the perceived formality of the interactional context.
They propose that this finding could be explained by the fact that users
associated email with more formal registers that they engaged in with
interlocutors like their professors, teachers, and bosses. The authors
observe some gendered effects in the use of <lol>. Males were seen
to significantly favour this laughter variant over others (e.g., <haha>,
<hehe>).
Typically, a variationist sociolinguistic to DMC asks questions
like: What are the sociolinguistic factors that constrain the use of
<lol>, <haha>, <hehe>, and <lmao>? Do men use <lol> more than
the other variants as identified by Tagliamonte and colleagues (2016)?
And are there other social factors that constrain its use?
To start this type of study, you’ll need to get some conversational
data from a digital platform. This could be data from 30 friends (10
males, 10 females, 10 non-​binary individuals) who have very gener-
ously donated their WhatsApp conversations to you. You could then
go through the data identifying all the different types of laughter
variants and quantifying their rate. Once you’ve done this, you could
see whether males use one variant more than the other groups. If you
find that one group use a particular variant more than another, you
have evidence that the variation in laughter particles is constrained by
the user’s gender identity. This type of approach has been used widely
in studies of DMC and is useful in identifying broad level patterns in
the social distribution of a particular feature.
 Methods 113

5.5.2 Corpus Approaches

A corpus is a collection of texts (written, spoken or signed) in a digit-
ally readable format. Researchers build corpora (the plural of corpus)
of natural language to examine some linguistic phenomena in that
dataset. This includes questions like:

• What differences are there between spoken and written registers of

English?
• What types of words co-​occur most frequently?
• Do people use more swear-​words now than at some other point in
time?

In work on social media, researchers have often compiled large cor-

pora of DMC. This includes datasets of WhatsApp conversations and
Twitter posts. These types of studies have examined topics such as
the quantitative distribution of different spelling variants (e.g., <wot>
for what), the differences between tweets of 140 and 280 characters,
and the most common types of emoji in a Facebook corpus (see Tagg,
2016; Eberl, 2020; Collins, 2020).
Because these datasets are often so large, researchers use computer
software (often called concordancers) to analyse and explore patterns
in corpora. Well known programmes include AntConc, Sketch Engine,
and Wordsmith. Many of these tools are free to download and can
be used to analyse patterns in DMC. Often, corpora are tagged or
‘annotated’ for various different features, including the grammatical
category of tokens. Researchers will also add metadata to corpora.
This could include social information about the individuals whose
data make up the corpus.
In corpus-​based approaches, it is common to use computer soft-
ware to identify ‘concordances’ –​these are words or phrases that are
displayed one-​example-​per-​line. This allows researchers to identify the
common contexts in which that word or phrase is used. Additionally,
researchers will often explore ‘keywords’. These are words that appear
more frequently in the corpus when compared with others. Finally,
‘collocations’ may be identified to explore the co-​occurrence of words
with others.

5.5.3 Digital Ethnographic Approaches

A ‘digital ethnography’ is a subtype of ‘ethnography’. Although
ethnographic approaches are used in very many academic fields of
research, this method was originally developed in Anthropology.
Ethnographers are interested in systematically analysing the dis-
tinctive features of cultures and peoples. Researchers will ask
114 Researching Language and Digital Communication

questions like why people do [X]‌? or what does [X] mean for this
community of people? To answer these questions, ethnographers will
often spend a lot of time observing and documenting people in their
own environments to understand the norms, values, and systems
of that culture. The aim of this work is to provide a rich or ‘thick’
description of a community and their practices. Researchers have
done this by becoming a ‘participant-​observer’, engaging with the
community beyond the scope of their research questions. The focus
here is then to understand what is meaningful to a culture or com-
munity. In this way, studies which employ ethnographic principles
do not attempt to understand individuals’ practices in relation to
a set of existing social categories (e.g., age, gender, social class).
Rather, they attempt to understand what meaningful systems of dis-
tinction people participate in. Ethnographers will often spend quite
a lot of time in the ‘field’ to understand a community. The ‘field’
here refers to the site or context in which the study is conducted.
This could be a school or workplace, for instance.
One of the key methods in ethnography are fieldnotes. To make
sense of the context, the researcher will often document what they see,
hear, and feel, keeping notes about their experiences in the field site.
These notes may include photos or drawings of the field site as well as
leaflets, letters, and other information from the community.
With the increasing prevalence of digital technologies, researchers
have extended this approach to the online by undertaking digital eth-
nographies of communities and online subcultures. This approach
applies the principles and methodological approaches of traditional
ethnography (e.g., participant observation, thick descriptions, field
notes) to digital contexts and platforms. Ethnographic approaches
have a long history in digital media studies. For instance, Turkle’s now
seminal work on ‘The Second Self’ from the 1980s provided an earlier
ethnographic account of the digital identities of a group known as
‘hackers’. Today, these types of approaches are very common in work
on digital interaction. Researchers have used ethnographies to under-
stand a variety of different digital practices including ‘micro-​celebrity’
and influencer branding (e.g., Senft, 2013; Abidin, 2015; Glatt, 2022),
meme cultures (e.g., Haynes, 2019; Ilbury, 2022a), and teenagers’
digital practices (e.g., boyd, 2014; Stæhr, 2014; Lane, 2019; Ilbury,
2022b).
Digital ethnographies have also been employed to understand
patterns of DMC. Students are often excellent ethnographers because
they have already observed a practice used by an online culture or
community that few academic researchers are aware of. If you wanted
to develop an ethnographic study, you would need to engage with
a community over some period of time. For instance, let’s imagine
you’re interested in exploring the language used by influencers in
 Methods 115

developing a relationship with their followers. We could start out by

systematically observing the practices of some influencers over say, a
three-​month period. This might be following ten beauty influencers
who regularly upload posts to Instagram. Over the course of this
period, we would want to focus on the similarities and differences
between the influencers. We could record these observations as digital
fieldnotes. Over time, it might be that see the different influences use
different language strategies to engage their audience. We might see
that some influencers might encourage viewers to sign up to their
mailing list whilst others might avoid this recommendation entirely.
When we come to explaining these differences, we would want to
draw on our ethnographic knowledge that we’ve built up of the
influencers. Perhaps it’s that one of the influencers we are studying
is sponsored by a commercial brand and so does not need to rec-
ommend a mailing list or perhaps they don’t use email newsletters.
These insights are the kind of insights we’d want to get from a digital
ethnography.
As the study progresses, we might even want to engage directly with
some of the influencers to get their perspectives on their communica-
tion style. We might ask to observe an influencer in the process of cre-
ating a video or we might interview a few of the beauty influencers to
get their perspectives on the topic. The point of the ethnography is that
it helps us contextualise why people do what they do and it explains
differences in communication styles not in terms of general factors,
but rather things that are meaningful to individual communities, like
‘beauty influencers’.

5.5.4 Blended Approaches

So far, we’ve mainly been discussing approaches which focus squarely
on the digital practices of users and their online communicative
practices. We have discussed a variety of different studies, including
those which study digital topics such as: Variation in the use of <?>
in WhatsApp conversations and the alternation of <in> and <ing> in
role playing games. These studies can only really say something about
how people are communicating online. This is, after all, the focus of
the book: Digital communication.
However, as we discussed in Chapter 4, it is very difficult to dis­
entangle digital communication from other contexts and types of
social interaction. A very clear example are ‘selfies’. When we take a
selfie, we create a photograph of some offline context. If we upload
this to Instagram or WhatsApp, this offline context –​and the selfie –​
now becomes part of the ‘digital’. Similarly, when people interact on
platforms like Snapchat, they often move between speaking to someone
face-​to-​face and online. We’d ideally want to use a method that allows
116 Researching Language and Digital Communication

us to understand how people’s digital communications are embedded

in their offline practices.
Here’s where a blended approach to digital communication may be
useful. Instead of trying to distinguish between the offline and online,
blended approaches consider how both dimensions influence and affect
one another (Androutsopoulos, 2008). In these types of approaches,
we might want to look at how people’s digital interactions reflect their
offline identities or how people use digital technologies in everyday
conversation.
Designing a blended approach is difficult because it means looking
beyond ‘just’ the digital. Adopting this approach means that we can’t
just focus on patterns of digital communication in isolation but rather,
we have to start to think about how they reflect practices and iden-
tities that aren’t in the digital sphere. A blended approach to digital
communication, for instance, might collect two types of data: Digital
communications and spoken interactions. You could, for instance,
follow Sierra’s (2021) approach and look at how young people make
intertextual references to internet memes in conversation. This would
require you to record young people engaged in interactions, as well as
studying the types of memes that they engaged with in digital contexts.
Alternatively, you could compare the language used by people on a
platform like Snapchat, with that used in an ‘offline’ context like a
youth group (see Ilbury, 2022b). All of these studies view digital com­
munication as just one aspect of social interaction.

5.6 Digital Tools

There are now quite a lot of accessible and user-​friendly tools that
students can use to extract and analyse data from DMC. Some tools
require some coding experience whilst others are intended for those
with little to no knowledge of programming languages. Some of the
recommended resources are paid for, others can be used during a free
trial period, and the rest are freely available to use. These tools will be
useful for those looking to gather large amounts of data or if manual
data collection (e.g., screenshots) is not possible. The following tools
and programs are recommended:

• FireAnt: Social media and data analysis software that comes with
various data visualisation tools (www.laur​ence​anth​ony.net/​softw​
are/​fire​ant/​).
• 4CAT: A Python based tool that allows users to create dataset com-
prising posts from various platforms including Reddit, Telegram,
and 4Chan (https://​wiki.dig​ital​meth​ods.net/​Dmi/​ToolD​atab​ase).
• Zeeschuimer: A browser extension which can be used to scrape data
from various platforms including TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn
 Methods 117

(https://​git​hub.com/​digit​alme​thod​sini​tiat​ive/​zees​chui​mer). The .ndjson

file can be converted to .csv (which can be read in Excel) using
‘zeehaven’ (https://​public​data​lab.git​hub.io/​zeeha​ven/​).
• YouTube data tools: A range of tools that can be used to extract
YouTube comments and channel metadata (https://​ytdt.dig​ital​meth​
ods.net/​).
• Apify: A cloud platform for web scraping and data automation.
The website lists a variety of different ‘actors’ (most are paid for)
that can be used to extract social media data. This includes TikTok,
Instagram, and YouTube (https://​apify.com/​store).
• Chrome Plugins: Google Chrome has a few scrapers on their web
store that can be used to extract social media data. This includes
plugins that allow the user to download TikTok videos and
comments, as well as scrape data (comments and posts) from Weibo.
• Python: If students have some coding experience, there are a var-
iety of Python based packages that can be used to extract social
media data. This includes TikTokApi –​an unofficial API wrapper
for TikTok.com in Python (https://​pypi.org/​proj​ect/​TikTok​Api/​)
and Instaloader –​a Python wrapper that can be used to download
public and private profiles, hashtags, user stories, feeds and saved
media (https://​git​hub.com/​inst​aloa​der/​inst​aloa​der).

All of the above programs were available and accessible at the time of
writing. However, restrictions may be imposed by platforms that will
affect their use over time. This is the case for FireAnt which can no
longer be used to extract Twitter data after the restrictions introduced
on the Twitter API in February 2023. It should also be noted that some
of these apps collect data in a way that technically contravenes the
terms and conditions of some platforms. For instance, platforms like
Instagram actively prohibit scraping.
In some projects, we may not even need to use a specialist tool or
programme. Some platforms have affordances which can be used to
download data:

• WhatsApp: Chats can be exported via .txt. To do this, go to the

three dots in the right-​hand corner of a chat. Go to ‘More’ and
click ‘Export chat’. You will be given the option to export with
or without media. The .txt file can then be imported into word or
transformed into an excel document.
• TikTok: Most videos can be downloaded from the app to your local
storage. Long press a video and click ‘save video’ or go to ‘share’.
• Instagram, Snapchat, and others: Screenshots of content on most
can be taken on most contemporary smartphones.
• Zoom, Teams: Video conversations can be recorded using in-​app/​
platform functions.
118 Researching Language and Digital Communication

• Email: Most email services (e.g., Outlook) allow you to export emails
to a text file. This is typically done via the ‘print’ or ‘save as’ functions.

5.7 Digital Datasets

There are also a number of datasets that are publicly accessible. I’ve
suggested three relatively large datasets here but I am sure there are
very many more elsewhere:

• Twitter corpora of Brexit related tweets from pro and anti-​Brexit

accounts, January –​March 2022: Lynch, Gareth (2022). Twitter
datasets: Brexit related tweets from pro and anti-​Brexit accounts
January –​March 2022 (Brexit leaning based on their Twitter bios),
Harvard Dataverse, V1. https://​doi.org/​10.7910/​DVN/​FXE​FZT
• WhatsApp corpus of messages from Italian students aged 12–​13:
Sprugnoli, Rachele et al. (2018). Creating a WhatsApp dataset to
study pre-​teen Cyberbullying. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop
on Abusive Language Online (ALW2). https://​doi.org/​10.18653/​v1/​
W18-​5107 (https://​git​hub.com/​dhfbk/​Whats​App-​Data​set)
• Twitter corpora of COVID-​19 related tweets, January 2020–​
March 2023: Banda, Juan M. et al. (2021). A large-​ scale
COVID-​19 Twitter chatter dataset for open scientific research –​
an international collaboration. Epidemiologia, 2(3), 315–​324;
https://​doi.org/​10.3390/​epide​miol​ogia​2030​024 (https://​zen​odo.
org/​reco​rds/​7834​392)

5.8 Summary
This chapter has provided an overview of some common research
principles and methodologies in studying digital communication.
First, we discussed the initial procedure of designing a research pro-
ject. Then, we considered the ethical challenges and decisions involved
in collecting and analysing digital data. Unlike more established areas
of academic inquiry, often advice and guidelines on doing this type of
project are lacking. Researchers therefore must make conscious and
active decisions to ensure that they are undertaking ethical research.
Finally, we introduced some popular methodological sociolinguistic
approaches to studying DMC.

5.9 Activities
1. If you are developing a project of your own, write up a list of the
possible ethical challenges and concerns that you might encounter
in your project. Now, write down some strategies for addressing
these challenges.
 Methods 119

Table 5.1 Twitter ‘participant perceptions’ based on Fiesler & Proferes (2018)

Question Very Somewhat Neither Somewhat Very

uncomfortable uncomfortable uncomfortable comfortable comfortable
nor
comfortable
How do you
feel about
the idea of
tweets being
used in
research?
How would
you feel if
a tweet of
yours was
used in one
of these
research
studies?
How would
you feel if
your entire
Twitter
history was
used in one
of these
research
studies?

2. Informally replicate the Fiesler and Proferes (2018) study by

asking your friends the questions in Table 5.1 (note: Twitter can be
substituted for TikTok or another public platform).
3. Choose an approach from those listed in this chapter (e.g., corpus,
blended, variationist, etc.). Now do a literature search for socio-
linguistic analyses that take this approach. Answer the following
questions:
a. What similarities and differences are there in the methodological
design of the papers?
b. Do any of the papers explicitly discuss the ethical challenges of
the approach?
c. What types of research questions do the papers attempt to
answer?
d. Are there any future directions in the paper?

5.10 Further Reading

Androutsopoulos, Jannis & Andreas Stæhr (2018). Moving methods
online: Researching digital language practices. In Angela Creese &
Adrian Blackledge (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and
Superdiversity, pp. 118–​132. Abingdon: Routledge.
120 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Rogers, Richard (2024). Doing Digital Methods, 2nd edition. London: Sage
Publications.
Snee, Helene, Christine Hine, Yvette Morey, Steven Roberts & Hayley Watson
(2016). Digital Methods for Social Science: An Interdisciplinary Guide to
Research Innovation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Variationist Approaches
Squires, Lauren (2016). English in Computer-​Mediated Communication:
Variation, Representation, and Change. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Derek Denis (2008). Linguistic ruin? LOL! Instant
messaging and teen language. American Speech, 83(1): 3–​34.

Corpus Approaches
Di Cristofaro, Matteo (2024). Corpus Approaches to Language in Social
Media. Abingdon: Routledge.
Rüdiger, Daria & Daria Dayter (2020). Corpus Approaches to Social Media.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Digital Ethnographic Approaches

Heyd, Theresa (2023). Complicating the field: World Englishes and digital eth-
nography. In Guyanne Wilson & Michael Westphal (eds.), New Englishes,
New Methods, pp. 243–​262. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Pink, Sarah, Heather Horst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis & Jo
Tacchi (2016). Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice. London: Sage
Publications.
Varis, Piia (2016). Digital ethnography. In Alexandra Georgakopoulou
& Tereza Spilioti. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital
Communication, pp. 55–​68. Oxford: Routledge.

Blended Approaches
Blommaert, Jan (2019). From groups to actions and back in online–​offline
sociolinguistics. Multilingua, 38: 485–​493.
Dovchin, Sender, Alastair Pennycook & Shaila Sultana (2018). Popular
Culture, Voice and Linguistic Diversity: Young Adults On-​and Offline.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

5.11 References
Abidin, Crystal (2015). Micromicrocelebrity: Branding babies on the Internet.
Media and Culture Journal, 18(5).
Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2008). Potentials and limitations of discourse-​
centred online ethnography. Language@Internet, 5(8).
boyd, danah (2014). It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
 Methods 121

Collins, Luke C. (2020). Working with images and emoji in the 🦆 Dukki
Facebook Corpus. In Sofia Rüdiger & Daria Dayter (eds.), Corpus
Approaches to Social Media, pp. 175–​196. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Eberl, Martin (2020). Are 280–​character tweets comparable to 140–​character
tweets? In Sofia Rüdiger & Daria Dayter (eds.), Corpus Approaches to
Social Media, pp. 131–​146. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Fiesler, Casey & Nicholas Proferes (2018). ‘Participant’ perceptions of Twitter
research ethics, Social Media +​Society, 4(1): 1–​14.
Glatt, Zoë (2022). Precarity, discrimination and (in)visibility: An ethnog-
raphy of ‘The Algorithm’ in the influencer industry. In Elisabetta Costa,
Patricia G. Lange, Nell Haynes, & Jolynna Sinanan (eds.), The Routledge
Companion to Media Anthropology, pp. 546–​559. Abingdon: Routledge.
Haynes, Nell (2019). Writing on the Walls: Discourses on Bolivian immigrants
in Chilean meme humour. International Journal of Communication,
13: 3122–​3142.
Ilbury, Christian (2022a). U Ok Hun?: The digital commodification of white
woman style. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 26(4): 483–​504.
Ilbury, Christian (2022b). Discourses of social media amongst youth: An
ethnographic perspective. Discourse, Context, and Media, 48: 1–​9.
Iorio, Josh (2009). Effects of audience on orthographic variation. Studies in
the Linguistic Sciences: Illinois Working Papers, 127–​140.
Krendel, Alexandra (2020). The men and women, guys and girls of the
‘manosphere’: A corpus-​assisted discourse approach. Discourse & Society,
31(6): 607–​630.
Lane, Jeffrey (2019). The Digital Street. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McClain, Colleen, Regina Widjaya, Gonzalo Rivero & Aaron Smith (2021).
The behaviours’ and attitudes of U.S. adults on Twitter. Pew Research
Centre Report. www.pewr​esea​rch.org/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​sites/​20/​2021/​
11/​PDL​_​11.15.21_​Twi​tter​_​use​rs_​f​i nal​_​rep​ort.pdf (accessed May 2025).
Senft, Theresa M. (2013). Microcelebrity and the branded self. In John
Hartley, Jean Burgess, & Axel Bruns (eds.), A Companion to New Media
Dynamics, pp. 346–​354. Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell.
Sierra, Sylvia A. (2021). Millennials Talking Media: Creating Intertextual
Identities in Everyday Conversation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stæhr, Andreas (2014). Social media and everyday language use among
Copenhagen youth. Unpublished PhD thesis, Københavns Universitet.
Tagg, Caroline (2016). Heteroglossia in text-messaging: Performing identity
and negotiating relationships in a digital space. Journal of Sociolinguistics,
20: 59–​85.
Tagg, Caroline, Agnieszka Lyons, Rachel Hu & Frances Rock (2017). The
ethics of digital ethnography in a team project. Applied Linguistics Review,
8(2–​3): 271–​292.
Tagliamonte, Sali A., in collaboration with Dylan Uscher, Lawrence Kwok,
and students from HUM199Y 2009 and 2010 (2016). So sick or so cool?
The language of youth on the Internet. Language in Society, 45: 1–​32.
6 Big Data Approaches

6.1 Introduction
In this chapter we cover the following topics:

• ‘Big data’
• The emergence of Computational Sociolinguistics (CS)
• CS analyses of language variation and change
• Twitter dialectology
• Case study of MLE
• Some limitations of these approaches.

Earlier, in Chapter 2, we introduced and discussed some foundational

work which attempted to define the language variety that was used
on the internet. As we saw in this chapter, a lot of earlier research
focussed on analysing and describing variable patterns of language
and communication in CMC. One of the main aims of this work was
to understand the form, distribution, and function of non-​standard
spellings (e.g., <bbz> babes, <u> you, and <fink> think) that were
often considered characteristic of CMC. However, as discussed, one
major limitation of this early work, was that the conclusions made by
scholars were often based on introspective observations and/​or small
datasets. This was most often because, at this time, digital data was
quite hard to access and analyse. And even if the data was freely avail-
able, researchers did not always have the tools to extract and analyse
vast quantities of data.
As the field has developed, so too have the methods and approaches
used to collect and analyse digital datasets. Researchers now have
access to a variety of computational tools that can be used to auto-
matically extract and analyse digital data. Today, we now face an
altogether different dilemma to those working in the early days of
CMC –​what people have referred to as an “avalanche of big data”
(Barnes, 2013: 297).
Our lives are now defined by digital data. From tweets to Instagram
posts, blood pressure readings from Fitbit to digitised books, digital
data is everywhere. As researchers, we have far greater access to this

DOI: 10.4324/9781003391838-6
 Big Data Approaches 123

data than ever before. We also have the means to analyse it. We no
longer need to use specialist tools and computers to download and
analyse this data. We can now extract this type of data using software
that is often freely available and, importantly, many of these tools
require little to no knowledge of coding.
In this chapter, we introduce ‘big data’ approaches to studying
digital communication. The chapter focusses on research that
employs computational tools and methods to understand large-​
scale patterns of language variation in social media texts. From
here, I introduce and describe a new area of sociolinguistic research,
what has been called ‘Computational Sociolinguistics’ (CS), before
discussing some case studies which have used these methods.
Finally, we critically reflect on the potentials of computational
tools in shaping and informing our understanding of sociolinguistic
phenomena.

6.2 The ‘Big Data’ Turn

Across the social sciences, there has been a shift toward ‘big data’
approaches –​what some have termed the ‘data revolution’ (Kitchin,
2014). From sociology to geography, history to media studies, scholars
are increasingly using computational methods to explore social phe-
nomena in very large and complex datasets. This includes:

• The prevention and control of infectious diseases such as in the

COVID-​19 global pandemic
• Predicting and understanding consumer habits
• Understanding population movement and migratory patterns.

As we will see in this chapter, these developments have not bypassed

sociolinguistics. Researchers have increasingly used big data
approaches to analyse a diverse range of sociolinguistic phenomena
including mapping the geographical distribution of different linguistic
features across entire nations, tracking the emergence of new lexis
(i.e., words), and analysing the representation of spoken dialects in
social media texts.

Key Term: Big Data

The use of computational tools to extract and analyse large and com-
plex datasets. These types of datasets have been used to explore
human behaviours across multiple communities and users. These
approaches are increasingly being used in the social sciences –​what
some have called the ‘big data turn’ or ‘data revolution’.
124 Researching Language and Digital Communication

The big data turn is indicative of the increasing availability of computa-

tional tools and digital data. In research prior to the digital revolution,
data was seen as a scarce commodity. Today, however, digital technolo-
gies have turned this situation on its head. Data is now widely accessible
and is numerous in volume. Think, for instance, how much digital data
you’ve already produced today. Perhaps you’ve already posted a tweet
about your favourite TV show or uploaded a new post of your morning
coffee to your Instagram story. Now imagine that every other user of
that platform is also doing the same. That is a lot of data! All of these
posts and messages could be extracted and analysed by a researcher
who is interested in understanding some social issue or trend.
Historically, ‘big data’ has often been used in the sciences to refer
to datasets that could only be read and analysed by supercomputers.
However, the software that we need to be able to extract, read, and
analyse big data is becoming more accessible. In fact, most big datasets
can be analysed using non-​specialist software that can be installed on
a standard desktop computer.
Before we discuss this development further though, a word of caution
is needed in how we interpret the qualifier ‘big’ in ‘big data’. More
often than not, people assume that ‘big data’ =​‘massive datasets’. But
as many have pointed out, the qualifier ‘big’ is a somewhat misleading.
Big data approaches do not necessarily analyse phenomena in datasets
that are ‘big’ in size. Rather, this approach is more about the com-
plexity of the dataset. As boyd & Crawford conclude, the big data
movement is “less about data that is big than it is about a capacity to
search, aggregate, and cross-​reference large data sets” (2012: 663).

Points for reflection

• Before we introduce this discussion, briefly think about some poten-

tial advantages of using a big data approach in sociolinguistics.
What benefits do you think a big data approach would have?

6.3 ‘Big Data’ and Sociolinguistics

As noted earlier, these approaches have been used in a variety of different
disciplines. This includes sociolinguistics. Researchers using big data
approaches have emphasised the value of big data in understanding
patterns of social interaction. Nevertheless, the types of methods and
datasets that big data focusses on are quite different from those typic-
ally used in sociolinguistics. Traditionally speaking, sociolinguists have
typically done research on social interaction by going out into different
communities and recording people engaged in conversations. Most of
these studies analyse language in audio and/​or video recordings. This is
the approach typical in variationist sociolinguistics, where researchers
 Big Data Approaches 125

have often collected data through a well-​established methodological

strategy: The sociolinguistic interview. This approach has been used
in a wide-​range of settings and contexts and has been shown to be an
effective methodological approach in collecting naturalistic recordings
of spoken language interaction.
However, gathering data in this way is extremely resource intensive.
Researchers often spend a lot of time recruiting participants and even
longer interviewing them. Sometimes, people will change their behav-
iour during the interview because they become aware they’re being
studied –​what Labov (1972) famously described as the ‘observer’s
paradox’. After they’ve managed to record people, the researcher then
has to spend a great deal of time transcribing and coding the data for
various features of interest.
When we consider how laborious and time-​consuming collecting
and analysing this data is, big data approaches look very attractive.
Many of the issues we discussed about collecting, coding, and ana-
lysing spoken language corpora are resolved when we use social media
data. First, big datasets typically comprise posts and messages from
text based social media sites. Because interactions on many digital
platforms are text based, we don’t have to spend hours on end tran-
scribing the conversations –​users do this for us! Second, given that
people largely use social media to communicate with their friends and
family, most interactions on social media are casual and conversational.
This is exactly the type of data that sociolinguists are interested in. We
don’t have to design some experiment or study to elicit conversations
(cf. the sociolinguistic interview), since people are already interacting
with each other online. And because they are not participating in an
experiment or interview, we don’t have to contend with the issue of
the observer’s paradox. As we have previously discussed, most users
imagine an audience of their friends or people like them (Marwick and
boyd, 2011); they don’t expect their messages or content to ever be
analysed for the purposes of research. Finally, given the scale of social
media, we can very likely extract a range of conversations from a var-
iety of different people –​many of whom we would not have been able
to reach through participant recruitment. Overall, then, it seems that
big data approaches are potentially very promising in sociolinguistic
research because the data generally comprise naturalistic and informal
social media conversations. These conversations can be gathered from
a diverse population of users and can be downloaded in a text-​based
format ready for analysis, addressing quite a few issues involved in the
collection and processing of spoken language data.
To illustrate the analytical potentials of a big data approach, let’s
use a hypothetical example of a study which explores the geograph-
ical distribution of lexis in the US. For the purposes of this example,
we will focus on the lexical alternation of pop-​soda-​coke. One way of
126 Researching Language and Digital Communication

analysing this type of variation would be to physically go out to sev-

eral towns, cities, and neighbourhoods, stop people on the street and
ask them: ‘What do you call a can of generic carbonated, sweetened
beverage?’. We could then scribble down their answer and, once we
got back to the lab, we’d count how many people say each word in
each area. From here, we could use these responses to plot where
across the country people use ‘pop’, ‘coke’ or ‘soda’. The quantitative
picture that we build would allow us to identify whether there’s any
regional variation in the use of pop-​soda-​coke.
The kind of approach I’m describing here is one that has been trad-
itionally used in dialectology –​a branch of linguistics that explores
variation in dialect, such as the lexical alternation of pop-​soda-​coke.
The random survey study of pop-​soda-​coke is comparable to work in
early dialectology. In this type of research, teams of fieldworkers went
out into different communities and asked people similar questions to
the one we’re asking here. After recording what each speaker said,
researchers would quantify how many times a particular feature occurs
within a given area. If different areas use pop-​soda-​coke at different
rates, the researcher could conclude that there was dialectal variation
in this lexical alternation. This is the approach used in the Survey of
English Dialects (SED; e.g., Orton & Barry, 1969), for instance.

Points for reflection

• Think of some limitations and issues with the traditional dialect-

ological approach described above.
• Do you think a big data approach to pop-​soda-​coke might account
for some of these limitations?
• Are there other issues and/​or limitations that we might we encounter
if we did this analysis on social media data?

Clearly, there are some major limitations of this method. The

main issue is that this approach is it is extremely resource inten-
sive. Collecting this type of data will take a lot of time, energy, and
money. In our study of soda-​pop-​coke, even if we surveyed only ten
people from ten different areas (a total of 100 participants), we would
spend a great deal of time and money travelling between different
neighbourhoods and cities. It would only really be feasible if we had a
team of researchers who were based in the different areas we wanted
to study, as was common in dialectological surveys such as the SED.
Even then, it would be extremely time consuming. The SED took over
ten years to complete.
Realistically, then, this approach is not suited to the type of research
project we’re designing. Even if we could dedicate a substantial chunk
of time and money to this project, we then couldn’t guarantee that the
 Big Data Approaches 127

people that we stopped in a given area would be willing to participate

in the survey. And even if they did, since we are only collecting data
from a limited number of participants per area (N =​ 10), we would be
making inferences based on a small number of responses from a few
people who may or may not be representative of their neighbourhood
or city.
This is where a ‘big data’ approach is promising. Imagine if we
could collect data on the geographical distribution of soda-​pop-​coke
from individuals across the US without travelling all the way to their
neighbourhoods and asking them what word they’d use. Imagine
if that data already exists. Imagine if we could collect hundreds,
thousands, or even millions of tokens of pop-​soda-​coke. Well, this
is exactly where big data is revolutionary. For the purposes of this
research project, let’s consider data from Twitter. Below are a series of
real tweets 1.–​3. that contain a token of soda-​pop-​coke extracted from
the platform through the search function.

1. haha I love cocacola, it’s my fav soda, FAVOURITE!!!

2. Dear pepsi, Please send me a fountain pop machine please and any
amount of regular Pepsi to fill it up with. That is all. Thank you
for your time 😂😎
3. Clearly you’re not Southern cause all fizzy drinks in the south
are Coke

These three examples demonstrate that the soda-​pop-​coke alter-

nation exists in Twitter as it does in speech. If we think about the
sheer number of tweets posted every minute (estimated to be roughly
350,000 tweets!), that’s potentially a lot of messages with the soda-​
pop-​coke alternation that could be analysed. One of the advantages
of this data is, as we discussed in Chapter 5, tweets are generally set
to ‘public’. This means that we can search and extract these tweets
without explicitly obtaining the users’ consent (though the issues we
discussed in Chapter 5 still apply!).
Now, let’s redesign our pop-​soda-​coke study using a big data
approach. This time we won’t go and collect this data from speakers
by asking them to respond to a questionnaire. Instead, we’re going
to log on to Twitter from and use some computational tools to auto-
matically download millions of tweets containing tokens of soda-​
pop-​coke. We can do this by accessing Twitter’s API (Application
Programme Interface) using a computer programme that is specially
designed to enable users to extract and analyse tweets. Prior to
2023, researchers could access the API for free. However, the plat-
form now charges for access to the API. There are other platforms
which do not charge access to their API and similar types of data
can be extracted.
128 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Key Term: Metadata

Data about the post/​message itself. This may include the time, date,
geolocation, likes received, and so on.

If we have access to the API, we could extract quite a lot of tweets

containing soda-​pop-​coke. Along with these messages, we could also
collect the tweet metadata (i.e., data about the tweet itself). Depending
on what we’re interested in, we could collect information about when
the tweet was posted, how many likes it received, or how many times
it was retweeted. For the purposes of our soda-​pop-​coke study, we
will want to use the geolocation metadata about where the tweet was
sent. We can then plot the distribution of soda-​pop-​coke tokens across
the USA.
If we don’t have access the API ourselves, we can use the app ‘Word
Mapper’ (https://​jwgri​eve.shinya​pps.io/​map​per/​; see Figure 6.1) to
visualise this distribution in a dataset collected by Jack Grieve and
colleagues. This app allows users to map the distribution of a word
in an 8.9-billion-​word corpus of 890 million geocoded Tweets sent
from the United States between 11 October 2013 and 22 November
2014 –​prior to when Twitter made changes to the API. Using this app
in our example study, we see that soda is largely concentrated to the
West coast and the Northeast of the United States. Pop, on the other
hand, is much more frequent on the East Coast, whilst coke is largely
concentrated to the South. Importantly, whilst these maps are based
on the geographical distribution of pop-​soda-​coke in Twitter data,

Figure 6.1 T
 he geographical distribution of ‘soda’ per million words from https://​
jwgri​eve.shinya​pps.io/​map​per/​
 Big Data Approaches 129

these patterns actually mirror the distribution of these words in data

collected in traditional dialect surveys.
What we’ve shown here is that, in a short-​space of time with very
little effort, we have been able to put together a map that would have
been almost impossible to recreate if we were to try and undertake an
in-​person survey of soda-​pop-​coke. Using a big data approach, we’ve
been able to explore the distribution of soda in a massive dataset from
a huge number of users across hundreds of different locales. This
means that we have a much more coherent picture of the geograph-
ical distribution of soda-​pop-​coke. And, perhaps most importantly,
we haven’t spent any money or even needed to leave the lab!

6.4 Computational Sociolinguistics

The type of approach that I have outlined in the above is now charac-
teristic of those used in a new field of research, what has been termed
‘Computational Sociolinguistics’ (henceforth CS; Nguyen, 2016). This
new area of study –​as suggested by its name –​combines the meth-
odological approaches of computational linguistics with theories and
concepts developed in sociolinguistics. CS researchers use computa-
tional tools like web-​scrapers and part-​of-​speech taggers, to extract,
analyse, and code digital datasets for sociolinguistic phenomena. The
development of CS is part of the big data turn. It is now common
for researchers to use computational tools to extract and understand
sociolinguistic patterns in very large and complex datasets.

Key Term: Computational Sociolinguistics

A new area of study which uses tools from computational linguistics
(e.g., web-​scraping, POS tagging, automatic classification) to extract,
code, and analyse sociolinguistic phenomena.

Quite a lot of CS research has attempted to understand the socio-​

demographic factors that influence linguistic variation in social media
texts. The example above, the geographical distribution of soda-​pop-​
coke, is one such example. Other work has analysed the social and lin-
guistic factors that influence the use of variable spellings. This includes
the alternation of <in> and <ing> as in <walkin> vs. <walking>, which
will be discussed in more detail below.
The emergence of CS can be seen as a development that is
motivated, in part, as a merging of two different research agendas. In
computational linguistics, there has been an interest in modelling the
social dimensions of language in order to increase the reliability and
accuracy of automated classification models. Researchers have long
130 Researching Language and Digital Communication

been interested in developing computer models that can automatic-

ally predict the authors’ social identity (e.g., age, gender) based on
differences in text. These classification models have useful applications
in fields like advertising and marketing, as they can be used to adver-
tise products to a particular demographic of users. As an example,
imagine we have just designed a new perfume aimed at women aged
18–​35. It would be very useful if we could advertise only to this demo-
graphic of user. You may be familiar with the term ‘targeted ads’ –​this
is where particular types of adverts are shown to different consumers
based on what the advertiser knows about the user. One way of infer-
ring information about the users’ social background would be to use
a computational model that predicts the gender and age of the user
based on linguistic patterns in their posts. This would mean that we
could target the marketing campaign only to those who matched our
consumer profile, i.e., women aged 18–​35. This type of marketing
strategy is popular because it increases the response rate to that adver-
tisement and the likelihood that the user will buy the product being
advertised.
Although the motivations for identifying social characteristics of
users based on variation in text may be different, they share a common
goal. Researchers in both computational linguistics and sociolinguistics
are interested in the relationship between language and social iden-
tities. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that, in recent years, there
has been an increasing move towards embracing computational
approaches in sociolinguistics. Those working in this area have been
quick to argue for the value of big data in potentially revolutionising
our understanding of language and social interaction.
To date, most CS analyses use data from two main platforms: Twitter
and Reddit. These platforms are frequently used in CS analyses for three
main reasons. First, content on both platforms is –​largely –​textual
(cf. TikTok). This is important because the computational approaches
used in CS have mainly been developed to model variation in text.
Second, unlike some other social media platforms such as Facebook
and Instagram, data is more accessible on Reddit and Twitter. A great
deal of CS studies have been done on Twitter because, up until 2023,
data on this platform could be easily and freely extracted via the API.
Third, and as discussed earlier, platforms like Twitter and Reddit
allow researchers to extract not just the post or message, but also its
metadata. This information is particularly valuable because it allows
us to infer things about the sociodemographic background of the
author. As we have already seen, the geolocation of a tweet can be
used to plot on a map where the tweet was sent from. Metadata has
also been used to infer other social information about the author, such
as their age, gender, location, and ethnicity (e.g., Bamman, Eisenstein
& Schnoebelen, 2014; Eisenstein, 2015; Grieve et al., 2017; 2018).
 Big Data Approaches 131

Today, CS researchers are working on a variety of different topics

related to language and society. Many of these questions are similar
to those typically asked in sociolinguistics. This includes the following
types of research questions:

• Are there gender differences in the use of emoji?

• Do younger people use internet acronyms (e.g., <lol>) more fre-
quently than older people?
• What is the geographical distribution of a linguistic feature (e.g.,
lexis, grammar, spelling, etc.)?

The main difference between a typical sociolinguistic approach to

digital communication and the CS approach is in the size and type of
data collected and how it is analysed. CS research typically investigates
the distribution of some linguistic feature in multimillion word cor-
pora of social media posts gathered from millions of users. Given the
scale and complexity of these datasets, most of the coding and analysis
is done automatically. Researchers will often use computational tools
like Part-​Of-​Speech (POS) taggers, tokenizers, and clustering to code
and analyse datasets. These types of approaches are quite different to
how sociolinguists have typically analysed patterns of digital commu-
nication, such as those discussed in Chapter 2 and later in Chapter 7.

6.5 Twitter Dialectology

One of the most productive areas of CS research has been ‘Twitter dia-
lectology’ or ‘Tweetolectology’. This research has used large datasets
of Twitter data to explore regional patterns of language variation. We
have actually already discussed one example: Our earlier illustration of
the lexical alternation of soda-​pop-​coke in the US. This case study was
inspired by a very similar analysis by Jack Grieve and colleagues (2019)
on lexical variation in UK Twitter data. In that paper, the authors
explore the regional distribution of 139 dialect words in a 1.8–​billion-​
word corpus of geolocated UK Twitter data. To understand whether
the regional patterns they observe in this corpus mirror those observed
in speech, they compare their social media maps with the dialect maps
from the BBC Voices survey. The BBC voices dataset includes 300
recorded conversations from a total of 1,201 people talking about
accents and dialects, the words they use, and their attitudes to lan-
guage. The analysis explores regional patterns of lexical alternation,
such as sofa-​couch-​settee across the two datasets. In the BBC Voices
survey, sofa was the dominant form in the south of England, whilst
settee is preferred in the north of England, and couch more common
in Scotland –​all refer to the same concept: ‘an upholstered seat with a
back and arms, for two or more people’. Interestingly, the authors find
132 Researching Language and Digital Communication

a broad alignment between the two corpora with the distribution of

lexis in Twitter largely comparable to the BBC dataset (see Figure 6.2).
This finding is important because it offers some evidence to suggest
that the factors that influence language variation in social media might
be similar to those in speech. This leads the authors to argue that
social media could be used either in place of or alongside traditional
dialectological surveys.
Big data approaches in sociolinguistics are not just valuable in
confirming existing knowledge about the relationship between lan-
guage and society, but also have the potential to revolutionise our
understanding of sociolinguistic phenomena. We can now ana-
lyse datasets much larger in size than previously possible and com-
pare data across various different time and location points. Many of
the questions we can now begin to answer would not be possible to
address using traditional sociolinguistic fieldwork methods. A case in
point is Jones’ (2015) analysis of the regional distribution of African
American Vernacular English (AAVE) lexis. Jones’ paper examines the
frequencies of non-​standard spellings like <sholl> ‘sure’ and <eem>
‘even’ in data from Black Twitter. Some of these features are lexical
but others are non-​standard spellings which represent AAVE phon-
ology. For instance, the use of <al> in <talmbout> ‘talking about’ is
intended to be an orthographic representation of [aː] or [ɔː] for /​ɑː/​ -​ a
pronunciation common in some varieties of African American English.
To examine the geographical distribution of these words, Jones used
the Twitter API to collect tweets containing AAVE words or phrases of
interest, along with the tweet ID and the latitude and longitude from
where it was sent. He then used the geolocation metadata to map the
location of the tweets, in a similar way to Grieve and colleagues’ (2019)
analysis of sofa-​settee-​couch discussed above. This allowed Jones to
explore the geographical distribution of different features, identifying
whether there is any regional variation in their use. Interestingly, Jones
found that AAVE features are not evenly distributed across the US as
a whole. Instead, he identified distinct dialect regions for the AAVE
features which do not correspond to those identified for White varieties
of American English. For instance, he observed that <yeen> ‘you ain’t’
is largely constrained to the South, with particularly high frequencies
in Atlanta, Georgia. These findings not only confirm earlier claims that
AAVE exhibits social and regional variation, but his analyses go fur-
ther to systematically describe and map those differences. Through this
analysis, Jones found that the linguistic patterns appeared to mirror
large-​scale patterns of population movement beginning in the 1910s.
Specifically, the dialect regions that Jones identified map on to the
movement patterns of the ‘Great Migrations’ – ​the movement of six
million African Americans of the rural Southern United States into the
Northeast, Midwest, and West regions of the US. The computational
 Big Data Approaches 133

Figure 6.2 G
 eographical distribution of sofa-​couch-​settee across the UK in data
from BBC Voices and Twitter
134 Researching Language and Digital Communication

approach employed here permitted Jones to describe both the distribu-

tion of the variation and, crucially, explain why those patterns exist.

Points for reflection

• Big data approaches often assume that if a linguistic feature is used

in a social media text, it is used by someone who habitually uses
that feature or the variety from which it is from in speech. For
instance, in Jones’ (2015) analysis, the use of <eem> and <sholl>
are assumed to be produced by speakers of AAVE. Can you think of
any limitations of this approach? In other words, can you think of
any examples where people use features of varieties that they might
not habitually use or speak in everyday life?

It is very difficult to think how we could replicate Jones’ analysis

without using a big data approach. Theoretically, we could under-
take a traditional dialect survey that replicates this type of analysis.
But, as with the soda-​pop-​coke example this would be extremely time
consuming and resource intensive to the point that the study prob-
ably wouldn’t be feasible. Thus, as Jones (2015) demonstrates, the
value of big data is not just in its size but more so in the ability to
explore aggregate patterns and cross-​reference these across multiple
communities and users. To demonstrate the analytical potentials of
this approach further, I now introduce a case study of Multicultural
London English.

6.5.1 Case Study: Multicultural London English

In a recent co-​authored paper (Ilbury, Grieve & Hall, 2024), we have
used a CS approach to understand and track the spread of a relatively
new dialect of British English, ‘Multicultural London English’ (MLE).
First documented as a spoken language variety in East London, ‘MLE’
was defined as a dialect or variety that was used by young, working-​
class, inner-​city Londoners (see Cheshire et al., 2008; 2011). Most of
the sociolinguistic work on this variety is based on recordings of MLE
speakers. In the first project on MLE, Cheshire and colleagues (2008;
2011) recorded 98 adolescents in two London boroughs (Hackney and
Havering). The young people were recorded in naturalistic interviews
with their friends and individually. In total, the researchers collected
110 hours of recordings, amassing a corpus of 1.4 million words. This
permitted the researchers to define a new variety of English that was
characterised by several interesting phonological, lexical, discourse-​
pragmatic, and syntactic features.
Lots of work has been done on MLE over the past 15 or so
years. This includes some work which has documented similarities
 Big Data Approaches 135

between MLE spoken in London and a variety used by speakers

from other English cities, such as Manchester and Birmingham.
Manchester is a city in North-​West England, some 163 miles away
from London whilst Birmingham, the second largest city in the UK
in the West Midlands region of England, is 100 miles away from
London. The similarities between MLE and varieties used elsewhere
has led some researchers to argue for a more general variety that
is largely based on MLE but incorporates features of the local ver-
nacular –​what has been labelled ‘Multicultural British English’
(MBE, Drummond, 2018).
Given that features have been documented outside of London, it
appears that MLE has spread beyond the city where it first emerged.
Sociolinguists call this diffusion –​i.e., the process by which linguistic
features spread from one social group or speech community to another.
Analysing how varieties diffuse and where they spread to has been
quite difficult to do. Generally speaking, research on diffusion focusses
on the spread of features or varieties in a handful of different speech
communities. In work on MLE, researchers have been very interested
in understanding where MLE spread to and the social mechanisms
that led to its spread. However, it would be very hard, if not impos-
sible, to examine the spread of MLE using traditional sociolinguistic
methods. This means that, apart from a few studies which focus on the
language used in Manchester and Birmingham and anecdotal accounts
of MLE being used elsewhere, we don’t really know where MLE is
being used in the UK.
This is where a big data approach becomes useful! To answer some
questions about its spread, we used a 1.8 billion corpus of geolocated
tweets to identify where MLE lexis was used most frequently. By
mapping words frequently used in MLE like paigon (‘enemy’), leng
(‘nice’), and fam (an address term), we could determine where MLE
was used and by who.
We first started out mapping the frequency of MLE words. Our
assumption is that areas where these words are used more frequently
are those where the words spread earlier. The map in Figure 6.3 shows
the regional distribution of the aggregated list of 47 MLE words.
Areas which are striped are those where there are high frequencies
of the word. This map shows very consistent pattern of MLE lexis.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the origins of this dialect, we see that
MLE words are used very frequently in the London post code regions.
MLE words like paigon and leng are particularly frequent in the north,
east, and south of the city. We also see that the 47 MLE words are
quite frequent in areas outside of London where MLE has previously
been reported, such as Birmingham.
This map, at first glance, confirms what we already know: MLE is
frequently used in London and appears to have spread, being used
136 Researching Language and Digital Communication

elsewhere in cities like Birmingham. However, if we look beyond this

general pattern, we see some interesting patterns not yet reported.
First, the words are not evenly distributed across the UK. In fact, we
see very low rates of MLE lexis outside out of England. Notably, MLE
lexis is very infrequent in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In fact, we
find that the five areas where MLE lexis is used least frequently are
all in Scotland. These areas are not only very far from London (e.g.,
the Outer Hebrides –​an island chain off the west coast of mainland
Scotland) but they are also much less ethnically diverse than London.
In the Outer Hebrides, the majority of the population (98%) identify
as ‘White British/​Scottish/​Irish’.
The big data approach we use in this paper also tell us things about
how MLE spread. If we scrutinise the map in Figure 6.3, it is pos­
sible to conclude that the areas that MLE lexis has spread to aren’t
just urban cities that are close to London. There are areas which are
urban and close to London, such as cities like Brighton on the south
coast and Reading to the west of the city, which show low rates of
MLE lexis. We therefore wanted to know: What predicts the spread of
MLE? If we look at the areas where we see high rates of MLE lexis and
compare this with data from the national census, we can determine
two things: (i) These areas are generally close to London, and (ii) they
are ethnically diverse. For instance, Luton, which shows the highest
rate of MLE lexis outside London, is home to sizeable numbers of
people identifying as British Asian (30% of the population) and Black
British (9.8% of the population). This finding seems to suggest that
MLE lexis has spread upwards from London into areas that are both
urban and culturally diverse. It is therefore reasonable to assume that
the diffusion was propelled through the social networks of non-​White
(mainly Black British) speakers.
This type of case study demonstrates the potential of big data
approaches in sociolinguistics. In this case, the big data approach
that we use allows us to understand the development and subsequent
spread of a new dialect of British English across the entire UK. In
doing so, we can systematically map the diffusion of this dialect to
identify the social mechanisms that propel its spread. An analysis of
this type seems impossible if we were to use traditional field methods.

6.5.2 Beyond Lexis

So far, we’ve focussed primarily on CS research which explores
the regional distribution of lexis. This work has demonstrated that
patterns of lexical variation in social media data very closely resemble
the patterns that have been documented in spoken language datasets.
Based on this finding, several researchers have proposed that social
media data could be used as a proxy for speech. However, to confirm
 Big Data Approaches 137

Figure 6.3 F
 requency of MLE words across the UK postcode regions (striped
sections indicate higher frequencies of MLE words)

this claim, we’d ideally need to study variables beyond lexis, such as
syntactic and discourse-​pragmatic features.
In other CS research, researchers have examined the orthographic
representation of spoken language phenomena. This includes the
variable representation of the -​ing segment in words like <walking>/​
<walkin>. Many scholars have argued that spelling ‘walking’ as
<walkin> is an orthographic representation of a variable found in
speech (ING). This is where people pronounce the -​ing segment /​ɪŋ/​ in
words like walking, talking, shooting as [ɪn], hence [hʌntɪn] hunting
and [wɔːkɪn] walking.
138 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Although (ING) variation is most frequently associated with spoken

language, the variation can be represented in text. Sometimes, people
write words that contain <ing> with <in>. This leads to spellings like
<huntin’> and <walkin> for hunting and walking. These types of
spellings are very common in informal written contexts and can be
observed in deregulated spaces like dialect literature, shop signage,
and advertisements. The American fast-​food restaurant, McDonald’s,
used this spelling in their now iconic slogan, ‘I’m lovin’ it’.

Points for reflection

• Have you seen people spell words with <ing> like hunting, loving,
and so on as <in> on social media?
• Can you think of some other spoken features that people represent
in written messages on social media? Hint: Think about the way
some people say the initial sound in the word think.

Variation in the representation of (ING) tends to be very common in

DMC. Take, for instance, the following excerpt (1) from a WhatsApp
group conversation of some young professionals living in London.
In the excerpt, there are three contexts (or words) in which contain
<ing>, craving, skipping, and coming. Here, we see that there is vari-
ation between the two forms: Craving and coming are represented as
<cravin> and <comin> (lines 1 and 6) and skipping is represented as
<skipping> (line 4).

(1) 1 Andrea: I’m cravin a bev soooo bad

2 Andrea: Bring it on
3 Lianne: Literally can’t wait to put beer to my lips
4 Lianne: I’m skipping work drinks
5 Florence: So am I
6 Lianne: Comin straight 2 u all
7 Florence: Don’t have my ID though so wouldn’t get me
very far he he

The conversation in Extract (1) is an example of an informal digital

communication between friends. It is precisely the type of casual con-
versation where we’d expect to see non-​standard spellings and other
types of creative strategies. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that
(ING) is variably represented too.
The question, here, then is whether the variable in social media texts
is influenced or constrained by similar social and linguistic factors to
the variable in speech. In speech, [ɪn] for /​ɪŋ/​doesn’t occur in monosyl-
labic words (i.e., words comprising one syllable) like thing or wrong.
Other factors which influence this variation is word-​class. We see
 Big Data Approaches 139

higher rates of [ɪn] for /​ɪŋ/​in verbs –​particularly progressives, such

as walking, running, and speaking –​and lower rates in nouns and
adjectives. The variation is also influenced by social factors, like the
social class and age of the speaker. If the written variable is similar to
that in spoken language, we would expect to see similar social and
linguistic constraints. It would be reasonable to hypothesise that we
would see higher rates of <n> for <ing> in verbs than in nouns and
adjectives.
These types of questions have been critically examined by Eisenstein
in his (2015) article on this variable in Twitter (he refers to this as
‘g-​
deletion’). The study analyses the orthographic representation of
(ING) and other features in a corpus of 114 million geotagged messages
from 2.77 million different user accounts. The focus here is whether
the orthographic variable patterns in similar ways to the variable in
speech. To understand the variation in this very large dataset, Eisenstein
first uses part-​of-​speech tagging to automatically classify –​ing words
as nouns, verbs, or adjectives. This automated procedure distinguishes
between words with multiple senses, e.g., a loving father (adjective) vs.
I am loving your hair (verb). He then analyses whether there are quantita-
tive differences between the orthographic representation of (ING) across
word classes. Remarkably, he finds that the orthographic representa-
tion of (ING) patterns in similar ways to the variable in speech: Verbs
show a higher rate of deletion than nouns or adjectives. This means
that words like hitting, getting, messing, and rolling are more frequently
represented as <hittin>, <gettin>, <messin>, and <rollin> than say,
wedding <weddin> (noun) and boring <borin> (adjective). In addition
to these linguistic factors, he also finds that the orthographic represen-
tation of (ING) is influenced by similar social factors to those identified
for the spoken variable. Notably, he finds that the variation is influenced
by the authors’ ethnic background. More specifically, Eisenstein finds
that the standard, <ing>, is more frequently used in areas where there
are large White populations whilst <in> is more commonly used in areas
where there are large numbers of African Americans. Like Grieve’s
work discussed earlier and the MLE case study I introduced above,
Eisenstein’s work provides additional evidence to support the idea that
social media can be used as a proxy for speech.
Before concluding this section, it is worth acknowledging that I’ve
only really summarised a small area of work in CS. This chapter has
focussed only on two types of variation: (i) lexis and (ii) the ortho-
graphic representation of phonological variation. And only one
language has been discussed: English. However, the field is much
more diverse than this. Researchers have explored a wide range of
features in a number of different languages. For instance, Wieling and
colleagues (2016) used Twitter data to examine variation in hesitation
markers (e.g., um, eh) across different Germanic languages (English,
140 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Dutch, German, Norwegian, Danish, Faroese) and dialects (American

English, British English). They found that um was increasing over time
relative to the use of uh and that this pattern of change was generally
led by women and more educated speakers. Similarly, van Halteren
and colleagues (2018) used Twitter data to map dialect features (e.g.,
niet→nie ‘not’; dat→da ‘that’) in the Dutch province of Limburg. Willis
(2020) explores Morphosyntactic variation in Welsh tweets, Scheffler
(2014) used Twitter data to identify German dialect regions, and
Grondalears and Marzo (2023) use a similar approach to that in the
MLE case study to understand the social motivations for the diffusion
of a new variety of Dutch, Citétaal.

6.6 Limitations
Although we’ve discussed some advantages of CS and big data in
sociolinguistics, these types of approaches are not without their
limitations. The first thing to consider is that most CS analyses can
only really tell us about ‘large-​scale’ patterns of language variation
and change. This is because the available metadata can only be used
to infer very general things about the author, identities like ‘man’,
‘woman’, ‘Black’, or ‘White’. To explain the variation, authors have
examined correlations between a feature and a broad-​social cat-
egory. For instance, Eisenstein’s (2015) analysis shows that the non-​
standard spelling of (ING) is more frequent in areas where there
are more people identifying as African American. The use of the
spelling <in> is therefore correlated with the broad social identity
of ‘African American’. As compelling as these approaches are, we
must be mindful of the fact that this runs the risk of over generalising
identities and linguistic practices. In the case of AAVE, the identity of
‘African American’ isn’t a monolith (as Jones, 2015 study shows) –​
there are multiple ways of being and sounding African American.
The CS approach therefore runs the risk of oversimplifying the vari-
ation within social categories.
The second issue is that author identities are typically operationalised
as binary categories. CS research has examined linguistic differences
related to gender, but researchers have generally coded gender as a
binary (men vs. women). This approach not only disregards those who
identify outside of the gender binary (i.e., non-​binary people), but it
also neglects the more performative approaches to language and iden-
tity that we outlined in Section 4.2. Some CS research does attempt
to address these issues, however. A case in point is Bamman and
colleagues’ (2014) analysis of gender identity and lexical variation in
Twitter. In that analysis, the authors use a dataset of 9,212,118 tweets
from 14,464 users to explore patterns of gendered variation. First,
they take a standard computational approach by identifying broad
correlations between linguistic features and the gender identities of
 Big Data Approaches 141

users (men vs. women). This approach allows them to determine that
pronouns, including non-​standard spellings of those pronouns, are
generally associated with female authors, e.g., <u>, <ur>, <yr>. In the
next stage of their analysis, they employ the computational technique
‘clustering’ to automatically group language styles (e.g., emoticons,
swearwords) and topical interests (e.g., sports, politics). They find that
these clusters largely have gendered associations. Nevertheless, there
are quite a few users who deviate from these population-​level gender
patterns. Focussing on users who deviate from population-​level gender
patterns, they find that these users tend to have social networks that
include significantly fewer same-​gender social connections. This leads
the authors to conclude that the gender-​sameness (or homophily) of an
individual’s social network, explains the use of same-​gender language
features. It therefore seems possible to use a CS approach to develop
a more nuanced account of language and identity beyond generalised
binary categories of author identity.
A final limitation of the CS approach relates to how author identities
are deduced in this work. Most research in CS has inferred author
characteristics from information that is available on user profiles. The
author’s age, for instance, can be inferred from their birthday (if they
have this information available in their profile). Location, on the other
hand, can be determined through the geo-​location metadata attached
to the tweet or post. However inferring author gender is much less
straightforward. Researchers have generally inferred the author’s
gender identity from their username or handle, classifying names into
‘male’ or ‘female’ categories on the basis of publicly available name
lists, such as baby names. However, this approach assumes that users
provide accurate and authentic information. Many users do not pro-
vide real or gendered names and some will use intentionally obscure
usernames. Bogus or intentionally misleading identities therefore may
skew our analyses.

6.7 Summary
In this chapter, we have provided an overview of ‘big data’ approaches in
sociolinguistic research on digital communication. With the emergence
of a new field of inquiry –​‘computational sociolinguistics’ –​researchers
are increasingly employing big data approaches to understand and
explain large-​scale patterns of language variation and change in DMC.
These types of approaches are very useful in sociolinguistics because
we can collect large datasets of naturalistic and casual conversations.
One of the most important findings of this research is that variation in
social media texts often patterns in similar ways to the corresponding
feature in spoken language. This has led some to argue that social media
texts can be used as a proxy for spoken language data –​a potentially
142 Researching Language and Digital Communication

revolutionary finding for fields such as dialectology and variationist

sociolinguistics. In this way, big data approaches have potential to not
only confirm our existing theories of language and society, but these
types of analyses could call into question longstanding concepts and
provide new sociolinguistic insights.

6.8 Activities
1. The studies we have discussed in this chapter analyse ‘aggregate’
patterns of language variation and change. That is to say that
linguistic patterns in the tweets are analysed alongside millions
of other tweets in the study. Some approaches, however, have
reproduced individual tweets (e.g., Tatman, 2015). Considering the
findings from the Fiesler and Proferes (2018) study, write down
some potential ethical issues and challenges in using this data in
this way.
2. Try searching for regional variation in US lexis using ‘word mapper’
(https://​jwgri​eve.shinya​pps.io/​map​per/​). As a starting point, have a
look at the following words.
a. Pop-​soda-​coke
b. Sneakers
c. Y’all (enter yall)
d. Fleek
e. Bae
f. Slay
g. Squad
• What regional patterns can you identify?
• Are these patterns in line with your expectations?
• Can you find any sociolinguistic research which explains the
patterns you identify in the use of these words?
3. Install the Zeeschuimer plugin (https://​git​hub.com/​digit​alme​thod​
sini​tiat​ive/​zees​chui​mer). Now, navigate to one of the platforms that
it supports. Extract some text data and download it in a readable
format (e.g., TikTok comments). Manually go through the data
you have collected and try to code for any novel or interesting
words or spellings. Are there any words you are not familiar with?

6.9 Further Reading

Eisenstein, Jacob (2017). Identifying regional dialects in online social media.
In Charles Boberg, John Nerbonne & Dominic Watt (eds.), Handbook of
Dialectology, pp. 368–​383. Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell Press.
Nini, Andrea, George Bailey, Diansheng Guo & Jack Grieve (2020). The graph-
ical representation of phonetic dialect features of the North of England
on social media. In Patrick Honeybone & Warren Maguire (eds.), Dialect
 Big Data Approaches 143

Writing and the North of England, pp. 266–​296, Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press.
Shoemark, Phillipa, Debnil Sur, Luke Shrimpton, Iain Murray & Sharon
Goldwater (2017). Aye or naw, whit dae ye hink? Scottish independ-
ence and linguistic identity on social media. In Proceedings of the 15th
Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational
Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers, pp. 1239–​1248. Available at: https://​
aclan​thol​ogy.org/​E17–​1116.pdf
Tatman, Rachael (2015). #go awn: Sociophonetic variation in variant spellings
on Twitter. Working Papers of the Linguistics Circle of the University of
Victoria, 25: 97–​108.

6.10 References
Bamman, David, Jacob Eisenstein & Tyler Schnoebelen (2014). Gender
identity and lexical variation in social media. Journal of Sociolinguistics,
18: 135–​160.
Barnes, Trevor (2013). Big data, little history. Dialogues in Human Geography,
3(3): 297–​302.
boyd, danah & Kate Crawford (2012). Critical questions for big data.
Information, Communication & Society, 15(5): 662–​679.
Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox & Eivind Torgersen (2008).
Ethnicity, friendship network and social practices as the motor of dialect
change: Linguistic innovation in London. In Ulrich Ammon & Klaus J.
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7 Small Data Approaches

7.1 Introduction
In this chapter we cover the following topics:

• Language and interaction

• Interactional topics
• Language alternation: Code-​switching and translanguaging
• Stylisation
• Politeness
• Metadiscourse
• Some limitations of these approaches.

If I asked you to think of an iconic feature of DMC, I would imagine

that very many of you would say <lol>. Now, if I asked you to define
what this feature meant, I bet you would say something like ‘well, it ori-
ginally meant ‘laugh out loud’, but people don’t always use it to mean
‘that’s funny’ or to signal laughter’. That’s because although <lol> ori-
ginally emerged as an acronym for ‘laugh out loud’ and was used as a
textual representation of laughter, it is now often used in ways which
can’t straightforwardly be interpreted as the sender signalling that
something is funny. Take, for instance, the following examples from
the WhatsApp conversations between a group of young Londoners:

(1) Lisa: So turns out he’s 51 not 32

Beth: hahahaha omg looooool
(2) Isaiah: Can you send me the council tax money?
Lisa: lol, yeah, dw I haven’t forgot
(3) Ria: I’ve just locked myself out, fml.
Isaiah: lol, oh no. Is anyone home?
(4) Kate: [sends humorous meme]
Nisha: LOOOOOOOL

The examples above show us that <lol> is used in very different ways.
The first function of <lol> is its prototypical function: As a signifier of
laughter in a humorous conversation. For instance, in (1), Lisa has just

DOI: 10.4324/9781003391838-7
146 Researching Language and Digital Communication

returned from a date with a man who happened to be almost 20 years

older than he initially claimed to be. In the setting of an informal con-
versation amongst friends, this story is retold as a humorous incident.
The use of <lol> in (1) therefore appears to signal laughter. Similarly, in
(4), Kate has just sent Nisha a meme. The use of <LOOOOOOOL> here
suggests that Nisha finds this meme to be funny and/​or entertaining.
The humorous intent of these message is signalled by other linguistic
markers which appear to mark the tone of the message: In (1), <lol>
co-​occurs with the other laughter variant, <haha>, whilst in (4), <lol>
is sent in all caps and the vowel <o> is repeated –​as a way of signifying
intense emotion or expression.
Now contrast (1) and (4) with the use of <lol> in (2) and (3). In
these two messages, it is does not appear that the topic of conversa-
tion is intended to be perceived as humorous or funny. In (2), which
is from a group chat between housemates, Isaiah has sent a direct
request asking Lisa to pay her share of the council tax bill. When Lisa
responds, she prefaces her comment that she hasn’t forgotten to pay
with <lol>. Similarly, in (3), with Ria having just locked herself out
of her flat, Isaiah responds using <lol> before adding a more sympa-
thetic message. Unlike in (1) and (4), in both of these examples it does
not appear that <lol> is being used to straightforwardly represent or
signal laughter. Most people would agree that owing someone money
or being locked out of the house are not particularly funny situations.
So, what does <lol> mean? And why is it used in contexts that are
not really that funny? In order to understand the meaning of <lol> and
what discourse function it performs (i.e., laughter vs. non-​laughter),
we need to explore how this feature is used within specific moments
of the conversation. This approach means considering not just the
quantitative distribution of <lol>, but crucially analysing the contexts
in which it is used and what functions it performs in those contexts.
This includes consideration of the possibility that <lol> might some-
times function in more complex ways than simply signalling laughter.
It may, as in these examples, signal interactional qualities like sar-
casm or fulfil a more mundane role like acknowledging receipt of a
message.
The approach we’ve started to sketch out here is quite different to
that discussed in Chapter 6. In the previous chapter, we introduced a set
of ‘big’ data approaches which explain language variation in relation
to users’ membership of ‘macro-​level’ categories like their age, ethni-
city, and regional background. As we saw in Chapter 6, many of these
analyses attempt to identify significant correlations between users’
social identities (e.g., African American) and linguistic features (e.g., t/​
d deletion). The present chapter introduces an altogether different set
of approaches which can be grouped together under the heading of
‘small’ data analyses. The focus here is not on correlations between
 Small Data Approaches 147

macro-​social demographic categories and linguistic features but rather

on the interactional or discourse function of linguistic variation.
Before we introduce these approaches, a word of warning is needed
regarding the qualifier of ‘small’ in the chapter heading. As in the case
of ‘big’ data approaches, the ‘small’ label does not refer (necessarily) to
the size of the dataset. Rather, it refers to types of methodological tools
and analytical approaches that are employed to understand the ‘small’
(or ‘micro’) details of conversation and interaction. Research in this
area focusses on describing discourse-​level phenomena like the turn-​
by-​turn negotiation of identities, the inferred meaning of messages,
and the diverse range of functions that features like <lol> fulfil. In
what follows, we introduce this approach in more detail, focussing
on four main interactional topics (language alternation, stylisation,
politeness, and metadiscourse).

7.2 Language and Interaction

As noted above, the ‘small data’ label refers to the types of tools and
approaches that researchers use to understand micro-​level (i.e., dis-
course) phenomena. Researchers working in this area use a variety
of tools and concepts from different subfields of linguistics including:

• Discourse analysis
• Conversation analysis
• Interactional (socio-​)linguistics
• Linguistic ethnography.

Lots of work has effectively applied concepts, approaches, and the-

ories developed to account for spoken language phenomena to DMC.
Researchers working in this area have employed micro-​ analytical
approaches to describe topics such as the use of narratives and ‘small
stories’ in social media (e.g., Georgakopoulou, 2014; Page, 2018), the
sequential organisation of conversation in DMC (e.g., Herring, 1999;
König, 2019), and the discursive properties of ‘hate speech’ (e.g.,
Retta, 2023; Ermida, 2023).
The goal of this type of work is to consider how people negotiate
meaning in interaction. This means exploring how people use words,
conversational styles, formulaic expressions, and other types of con-
versational features to express what they mean. Typically, micro-​level
analyses have focussed on the minute detail of interaction in audio and/​
or video recordings. Researchers who apply these approaches to DMC
have gathered datasets comprising interactions from platforms such as
WhatsApp, Tinder, and IM. One particularly productive area of research
has been to understand how individuals discursively (i.e., through lan-
guage) construct and reproduce their identities in and through DMC.
148 Researching Language and Digital Communication

One core concept in analyses of language and interaction is con-

textualisation cues. Essentially, contextualisation cues are signalling
mechanisms that are used by people to indicate what they mean by
what they say. In spoken interaction, this includes paralinguistic
features like pitch, tempo, loudness, as well as facial expressions such
as smiling, raising your eyebrows, and so on. In most contexts, when
we are interacting with someone in face-​to-​face communication, we
can determine whether they’re being honest, sarcastic, or hurtful by
making inferences based on the contextualisation cues they use. For
instance, imagine you are going clothes shopping with your friends.
You enter a store, try on a new outfit, and want a second opinion.
You come out of the dressing room and ask your friend whether they
like the outfit. In response, your friend says ‘I love it’. This simple
utterance could mean one of two things:

1. They genuinely like the new outfit

2. They’re being sarcastic –​they hate the outfit.

To ascertain the meaning of your friend’s comment ‘I love it’, you will
likely use contextualisation cues to determine whether they are being
serious or not. If they intended this to be a faithful comment –​that
really do like your outfit –​then it’s likely they will use contextual-
isation cues such as a high rising intonation to signal their approval
or they might show this through paralinguistic cues, such as smiling
whilst saying ‘I love it’. Whereas if they are being they sarcastic, they
might use falling intonation and a grimacing facial expression. All of
these cues –​intonation, facial expression, and so on –​help us ascertain
the intended meaning of an utterance that potentially has a range of
different possible interpretations.
Now, contextualisation cues in DMC work a little differently. In
most DMC contexts we do not have access to the full range of context-
ualisation cues that we have in face-​to-​face or spoken interaction. This
is because DMC is often text-​based (e.g., WhatsApp, SMS, Email, and
so on) so we cannot infer what someone means by what they say based
on their facial expressions, intonation, or body language. Without these
cues, it is possible that messages will be misinterpreted. How many
times have you received an email or DM and thought ‘I am not quite
sure how to interpret this message’ or ‘are they being rude or are they
just in a rush?’. A couple of years ago, one of my friends mentioned to
me that a mutual acquaintance was annoyed with her. When I asked
her why, she said it was because all of her texts ended with a ‘full stop’
<.>. When I explained that using the <.> at the end of messages was
her ‘style’ and that she used this style regardless of her interlocutor, my
friend was surprised as thought this was ‘rude’ or ‘abrupt’. In other
words, she has misinterpreted the <.> as a contextualisation cue.
 Small Data Approaches 149

Points for reflection

• What strategies or resources do you use in DMC to account for the

lack of some contextualisation cues? Hint: Emoji!
• Have you ever received or sent a message which has been
misinterpreted? If the answer is yes, what was the cause of the
misunderstanding? Could the lack of contextualisation cues have been
a factor?

Because our text messages can be interpreted in several different ways,

users will often use orthographic and typographic features in creative
ways to signal what they mean by what they say. Take, for instance,
the following hypothetical SMS messages:

(5) What are you doing

(6) What are you doing?
(7) What are you doing?!
(8) What are you doing?! 😊
(9) What are you doing?!:)

The examples in (5)–​(9) are different ways of representing the same

text message: ‘What are you doing?’. Imagine you have just received
these five texts. Now, depending on what stylistic and orthographic
features accompany the message, we could interpret this message in
four different ways. In (5) and (6), it seems likely that the user wants
their message to be interpreted as a straightforward question (it is pos-
sible, however, that the omission of <?> in (5) is socially meaningful,
but we’ll leave this for now!). However, the meaning of <?!> in the
other two examples is less clear. In (7), <?!> could signal something
like ‘what [the hell] are you doing?!’ or it could mean ‘what are you
doing?! [I’m excited to know]’. The addition of the ‘Smiling Face with
Smiling Eyes (😊) emoji in (8) or the :) emoticon in (9), however, clari-
fies the meaning of <?!>. It seems at the very least that the message is
intended to be friendly. In this way, the emoji in (8) and emoticon in
(9) both function as contextualisation cues to help the receiver infer
the true meaning of the message, i.e., what the sender meant.

7.3 Emoticons and Emoji

As we saw in the previous examples, emoticons and emoji often
function as contextualisation cues in DMC. ‘Emoticons’ are pictorial
representations of facial expressions that are created through punctu-
ation marks, letters, and numbers, as in (9). These features were espe-
cially common in older genres of text-​based DMC, such as SMS and
Emails. Popular emoticons include:
150 Researching Language and Digital Communication

• :) ‘smiley’
• :‑P ‘tongue sticking out’
• :O ‘surprise’
• ;) ‘winking’
• :( ‘unhappy’.

Interestingly, emotions exhibit a degree of cultural variation. For

instance, the happy emoticons :) :‑) =​ :D are most commonly used in
the West (e.g., USA, UK, Europe), whilst in East Asia, ‘kaomoji’ (lit-
erally ‘face characters’) are more frequently used, e.g., (＾ｕ＾)or (＾ｖ＾)
‘happy’.
In more recent forms of DMC, emoticons have gradually been
displaced by emoji. ‘Emoji’ is a Japanese word which literally means
‘picture letter’. These are digital icons that are used to express ideas,
thoughts, emoticons, and activities. Emoji are particularly common in
text-​based forms of DMC such as WhatsApp, iMessage, and Snapchat.
Popular emoji include the 💀 ‘skull’, 😭 ‘loudly crying face’, and 🏊
‘person swimming’. Some work on the use of emoji (particularly those
that are not related to facial expressions) has suggested that emoji
can substitute for words in two ways. The first is ‘calquing’, referring
to those emoji that are literal, word-​for-​word ‘translations’ of words.
The second is the ‘rebus principle’, where the emoji is used to refer
to its sound rather than its literal meaning to represent a new word
(Danesi, 2016). Some examples include:

• Calquing: 💣 🐚 👙 ‘bomb shell bikini’, 🎤🌧️ ‘singing in the rain’

• Rebus: 🐝🍂 ‘believe’, 📖🐦 ‘book a flight’

As we saw above in example (7), emoji (and by extension, emoticons)

often function as contextualisation cues. As we don’t have access to
facial expressions in text-​based forms of DMC, users will often employ
emoticons or emoji that reference gestures, faces, and emotions to
signal how that message should be interpreted. Consider, for instance,
the following examples in (10) and (11).

(10) I hate you 😡

(11) I hate you 😂

The message ‘I hate you’ has two different meanings in (10) and (11).
In (10), the use of 😡 suggests that this message is to be taken at face
value –​the sender really does dislike the receiver –​whilst the use of 😂
in (11) infers that this message is sarcastic or tongue-​in-​cheek. The fact
that emoticons and emoji function as contextualisation cues suggests
that both features play a much more complex role in DMC than
 Small Data Approaches 151

simply conveying emotion, as is often assumed in popular discourse.

Dresner and Herring (2010) argue that emoticons indicate the illocut­
ionary force (i.e., the intention) of the message, as opposed to simply
conveying valence or emotion. For instance, they suggest that the use
of the emoticon ;-​) in a message does not convey some single emotion
but rather it signals some joking intent. Similar types of arguments
are proposed by Skovholt, Grønning, and Kankaanranta (2014)
in their study of emoticons in workplace emails. In that paper, the
authors argue that emoticons fulfil three main interactional functions.
These are:

1. When following email signatures like ‘have a nice day :-​)’, emoticons
signal a positive attitude.
2. When following utterances that should be interpreted as humorous,
emoticons signal that the message is a joke/​ irony, e.g., ‘I am
36. I have never had a car. However, I have driven others’ cars
since I was 18, without making a scratch, but that doesn’t count,
I guess. :-​)’.
3. When following expressive speech acts such as thanks and greetings
or directives such as requests and corrections, they function as
hedges. They can either strengthen the meaning of the message,
e.g., ‘great and thanks :-​)’ or soften the meaning of the message,
e.g., ‘A little Friday moaning from here :-​)’.

Given that emoji appear to function in ways more complex than

simply signalling emotion, it is perhaps unsurprising that other
research on emoji has found that these features are used by authors
to do complex interactional work. For instance, Ge-​Stadnyk (2021)
analyses the use of emoji across Twitter and Weibo, focussing on the
ways in which influencers use emoji sequences when engaging in iden-
tity performances. She finds that emoji are not necessarily written
expressions of attitudes, gestures, and behaviours but rather they
often introduce new meanings to messages. More specifically, Ge-​
Stadnyk argues that emoji are often used to add emotional appeals
(e.g., affection, sympathy, flattery), making their messages more
emotionally expressive. This includes messages such as those in (12)
and (13):

(12) Happy new year 带着兄弟祝福所有人🙏 🙏 🙏 🖤️ 🖤️ 🖤️

‘Happy New Year. (I) and my brothers send our best wishes
to everyone’
(13) DIY Blotting Paper using @Starbucks tissues & setting
powder.
No more oily skin 🙅 😉
152 Researching Language and Digital Communication

According to Ge-​Stadnyk, all of these emoji modify the ‘tone’ of the

message. That is, they make the message seem less forceful or more
friendly. Ge-​Stadnyk notes that this practice is especially common
amongst influencers. This is perhaps unsurprising given that influencers
often attempt to perform a friendly and relatable persona to generate
and maintain user engagement.

Points for reflection

• If you use a platform that supports emoji (e.g., WhatsApp,

Snapchat), navigate to a recent conversation. Scroll through the
chat and take note of the emoji in the conversation. Which emoji
do you use most? Are there any emoji that are used for novel or
abstract reasons (e.g., the peach emoji 🍑 which is rarely used to
refer to the fruit!)?

A similar interactional approach to emoji is found in Gibson’s (2024)

analysis of Spanish and Danish conversations on the dating platform,
Tinder. The focus in that paper is on ‘wink emoji’ subtypes e.g., 😜, 😉,
and their use in certain ‘conversational routines’, specifically in ‘flirting’.
The goal here is to understand why people use the wink emoji subtypes
and what their function is. Example (14) is taken from Gibson’s
(2024: 13) analysis of the Danish dataset. In this example, we see that
the ‘wink’ emoji 😜 is used as part of P5’s attempt to flirt with EM.
The use of 😜 here, according to Gibson fulfils a nuanced interactional
function: It ‘downgrades’ the flirtation by marking the comment ‘I
would rather lie under your duvet’ as one that has been made in jest.

(14) 1 EM Vil du låne en bluse af mig?

2 P5 ‘Do you want to borrow a shirt from me?’
Tror hellere jeg vil ligge under din dyne 😜
3 EM ‘Think I would rather lie under your duvet 😜’
Nå, men dem har jeg kun en af, og bruger den for
ofte til at låne ud
4 P5 ‘Oh, but those I only have one of, and I use it too
often to borrow/​lend it’
Og du deler den heller ikke?
‘And you don’t share it either?’

Emoji are just one type of resource that users of DMC can employ
to signal what they mean. In the remainder of the chapter, we
develop our understanding of ‘small data’ approaches by focussing
on four main topics: Language alternation, stylisation, politeness, and
metadiscourse. I first start out introducing the general area of study
before relating this more specifically to research on DMC.
 Small Data Approaches 153

7.4 Language Alternation

If you are proficient in more than one language, it’s highly likely that
you will switch or alternate between the different languages you are
familiar with. For instance, you might use one language when you’re
with your family and another with friends. Or you might use one lan-
guage when you’re at work, and another when you are home. These
types of practices are very typical of bi-​and multi-​lingual interaction.
Consider, for instance, the following interaction (Extract (15)) between
Eleni and her husband, Nikos. Eleni and Nikos are bilingual: They
both speak English and Greek:

(15) 1 Eleni What are we having for dinner tonight?

2 Nikos We’re having kεφτεδάκια με ρύζι
‘We’re having meatballs with rice’
3 Eleni Kαλά, νόστιμο
‘good, delicious’
4 Nikos It’ll be half an hour, εντάξει;
‘It’ll be half an hour, ok?’
5 Eleni Ναί, ok!
‘Yes, ok!’

In the above extract, Nikos and Eleni can be seen to alternate between
the two languages, English and Greek. Although the conversa-
tion opens in English, when the dish (line 2: ‘meatballs with rice’) is
introduced, Nikos switches to Greek. Eleni then responds in Greek
with her assessment of the dish (line 3: ‘good, delicious’). As the con-
versation unfolds, we see that Nikos and Eleni continue to alternate
between English and Greek. Switching in this way is a very common
practice amongst those who are proficient in more than one language.
The above example demonstrates one type of ‘language alternation’.
In sociolinguistics, a great deal of research has been done on a type of
language alternation called ‘code-​switching’. This term refers to the
common practice where individuals are seen to alternate or ‘switch’
between two or more languages in a single conversation, such as the
example above. Researchers will often distinguish between shifting
within a sentence (intrasentential or code-​mixing) and across sentence
boundaries (intersentential or code-​ switching). Some examples are
found below in (16) and (17):

(16) Code-​mixing: We’re having kεφτεδάκια με ρύζι

‘We’re having meatballs and rice’
(17) Code-​switching: Πάω σπίτι. I will sleep well tonight.
‘I’m going home. I will sleep well tonight’
154 Researching Language and Digital Communication

A common misconception is that bi-​or multi-​linguals shift between

languages because they simply ‘don’t know the word in one language
or another’. However, sociolinguistic research has found that people
code-​switch for much more complex social and stylistic reasons. People
often switch between different languages to achieve a range of different
communicative goals including role-​play, establishing their identities,
or marking conversational emphasis. Because switching is motivated
by certain communicative goals, the output is not a random combin-
ation of two or more languages. Language alternation is rule-​governed
and systematic. Decades of sociolinguistic research has demonstrated
that when people code-​switch, the syntactic rules of both languages
are respected.
Returning to example (15), it is possible to present a hypothesis
as to why Nikos switches between English and Greek. Note that
Nikos initially switches to Greek when he introduces the dish he is
cooking. We could therefore propose that the switch occurs in relation
to the topic of the conversation: A Greek meal. This type of language
alternation based on topic is what sociolinguists call metaphorical
code-​switching. On the other hand, when people alternate between
languages on the basis of the situation or speech context, we can refer
to this as situational switching. An example of situational switching
is when speakers use a language like Greek at home with family but
English at work with colleagues.

Key Term: Code-​Switching

Code-​switching is the use of two or more languages in interaction.
People will often switch between two or more languages in a single
sentence (i.e., code-​mixing: We’re having kεφτεδάκια με ρύζι) or
across different sentences (i.e., code-​switching: Πάω σπίτι. I will
sleep well tonight).

So far, we’ve discussed language alternation between two

languages: English and Greek. Our analysis suggests that it is fairly
easy to disentangle when one or the other language is being used.
One interpretation of this approach to language alternation is that
the different languages we switch between are stored as cognitively
different systems. However, in some multilingual contexts, it is harder
to distinguish between languages, especially if there are multiple
languages involved. Where does one language begin and the other
end? Take, for instance, the following extract from Wei (2023: 4). The
extract is taken from a spoken recording in which the individual can
be seen to use features of Chinese, Japanese, and English throughout
the dialogue:
 Small Data Approaches 155

(18) ああそうそうそうそう
ああそうそうそうそう(ah so so so so ‘Oh yeah yeah
yeah yeah’), sorry, 我给 (wo gei ‘I get’) confused/​的了(de
la –​aspect marker. ‘I got them confused/​mixed up.’). あの
(ano –​discourse marker), 我明天(wo mingtian ‘I tomorrow’)
bring you 啦 (la -​utterance particle. ‘I will bring it to you
tomorrow.’), okay 好吗 (hao ma ‘okay’)?
(unmarked font: English, bold: Japanese; underlined: Chinese)

In example (18) above, it seems difficult to argue that the speaker is

switching between English, Japanese, and Chinese. Words, sentences,
phrases, and discourse particles from all three languages appear to be
entangled. Although this type of utterance may look unusual, in highly
multilingual contexts, individuals are often seen to engage in these
types of interactions. It is very difficult to isolate where one language
starts and another ends.
To account for these multilingual practices, researchers have
introduced the concept of translanguaging. The main argument here
is that multilingual individuals do not switch between language [X]‌
and language [Y]. The languages are not stored as separate systems
in the mind. But rather, when people interact, they strategically select
features from a single linguistic repertoire for strategic reasons like
identity and language creativity.

Key Term: Translanguaging

A theory of language alternation that views languages as part of a
single repertoire. According this theory, when individuals interact,
they do not ‘switch’ between separate languages, but rather they
draw on a multitude of different linguistic resources.

Importantly then, whilst both concepts capture aspects of language

alternation, translanguaging is different from code-​switching in that
it refers not simply to a shift or an alternation between two or more
languages. Rather, it views bi-​/​multi-​linguals as having access to a fluid
repertoire of linguistic resources that cannot be easily assigned to a
single language or variety. The trans-​prefix in the term translanguaging
refers to the transcending of distinct and, supposedly, artificial bound-
aries of named languages.

7.4.1 Language Alternation in Digital Communication

When multilingual users interact in DMC, it is inevitable that they will
use similar multilingual strategies to those that we described above
with reference to spoken interactions. Take, for instance, the following
156 Researching Language and Digital Communication

conversations (Extracts (19) and (20)) analysed by Dorleijn & Nortier

(2009: 137–​139). In the first example, a user is seen to switch between
English (in bold) and Dutch when posting to the online forum, www.
maroc.nl. In the second example, the user switches between Turkish
(in bold) and Dutch in a message posted to www.Turki​shTe​xas.nl:

(19) Ok, I admit, maar h0e wil je dan 00it mr Right vinden als je
t0ch geen relaties mag aangaan . . . behalve het huwelijk?
‘OK, I admit, but how will you ever find Mr Right if you’re
not allowed to have any relations. . . except marriage?’
(20) Is er geen moppen topic of zo, fikralar topigi falan var, mop
guzel ama, her mopa bir topic acilirsa, is een beetje onnodig.
‘Isn’t there a topic for jokes, there is a special topic for jokes,
joke(s) (are) nice but, if a topic is opened for every joke, it is a
bit too much.’

In both examples, we see evidence for language alternation: The use

of Dutch and English or Turkish. What language someone chooses to
post in is likely to be motivated by interactional concerns like con-
versational cues, the negotiation of identity, and the relevance of the
language to the topic. In the above examples, we see that the use of
English in (19) is limited to stock phrases (e.g., ‘Ok’, ‘mr Right’), whilst
the use of Turkish in (20) is heavily embedded in Dutch. Dorleijn &
Nortier interpret these linguistic practices with reference to the status
of the Turkish and Moroccan communities in the Netherlands more
generally.

Points for reflection

• If you speak more than one language, reflect on your multilingual

practices in DMC.
• Do you write messages in more than one language?
• Does it depend on the addressee or audience?
• Or does the language choice relate to the topic or style of
interaction?

Similar themes are explored by Deumert and Vold Lexander’s (2013)

in their work on ‘texting Africa’. In that project, the authors analyse
the texting practices of people from five African nations: Côte d’Ivoire,
Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa. To answer their research
questions, Deumert and Vold Lexander draw on a variety of different
corpora collected during several research projects:

• Sengalese corpus (2005–​7): 450 text messages from individuals

aged between 20 and 28 years
 Small Data Approaches 157

• South African corpus (2008): 2269 text messages from individuals

aged between 18 and 22 years
• Ghanian corpus (2011): 457 text messages from individuals aged
between 16 and 25 years
• Nigerian corpus (2011): 199 text messages from individuals aged
between 16 and 25 years
• Côte d’Ivorian corpus (2011): 35 text messages from individuals
aged between 16 and 40 years.

All of these settings are highly multilingual. Typically, speakers from

these countries will be proficient in the former colonial language
(i.e., English or French) and a local African language (e.g., Wolof in
Senegal, Ewe in Ghana). The analysis explores the use of different lin-
guistic resources (e.g., non-​standard spellings, different languages) by
the texters and the different functions of those features in conversa-
tion. Focussing on multilingualism in the corpora, the authors find
that the dominant style of texting is in the former colonial languages,
i.e., English or French. This is different to spoken interactions which
the authors suggest would usually be conducted in the local language.
This perhaps unexpected finding leads the authors to explore the social
meanings of the different languages in texting. They propose that the
use of African languages may be considered marked and so any type
of switch or shift would carry some type of socio-​symbolic meaning.
To explore this possibility in more depth, Deumert and Vold Lexander
examine the contexts in which the different languages are used. One
such example is found in (21) which is taken from the Senegalese
corpus (2013: 538):

(21) Sama téy bunek dina gathiel sama demb rawatina sama
euleuk ngir sama thiofél pour yaw. Yay sama xol, yay qui tax
ma beug téki tuki ted terala jtm
‘My present will dishonour my past, even more so my future,
when it comes to my love for you. You, my heart, you, who
make me want to travel, to succeed and make sure that you
don’t miss anything. I love you’

In the extract, the texter uses features of French (in bold) and Wolof
(the national language of Senegal) interchangeably. The authors argue
that the choice of language is not random but is rather motivated by
the social meanings of the different languages. Based on the patterns
they identify, the authors argue that French is often used by the texters
to express strong romantic feelings, whilst Wolof is used to communi-
cate a more measured form of love. In this way, writing in the former
colonial language (i.e., English or French) allows writers to perform
the ‘persona of a skilful writer’ whilst African languages can be used
158 Researching Language and Digital Communication

to create intimacy as they have come to index “sincerity and serious-

ness as well as respect for the addressee” (2013: 541). Here we see
how the choice of language used in the text messages is motivated by
the interactional functions that each language can perform or convey.
Another example of multilingual practices in DMC can be found in
Seargeant, Tagg, and Ngampramuan’s (2012) work on language choice
and addressivity strategies in Thai-​English interactions. The focus in
this study is on the motivations and functions of code-​switching in
status updates, wall postings and comments to Facebook. The authors
find that code-​mixing tends to occur when the message is directed at
a specific individual, as in the following example (22) between Mint
and Aum:

(22) Mint: seng mak loey gae sia dai roob a! kong har mai jer
laew cus lost nai maddox anyway thanks mak mak
na jaa see you soon na aum:)
‘{I’m} very bored! It’s a pity that all the photos
are gone. I can’t find them because I lost them in
Maddox. Anyway, thanks a lot. See you soon, Aum’
Aum: thank u jaa … . Love u lots naaaa:)) xxx

In Extract (22), we see how the users, Mint and Aum, switch between
English (in bold) and Thai in their messages. Here, the choice of lan-
guage is influenced by the social meanings of the language, as well as its
discourse function. More specifically, the authors observe that English
is used in discourse-​organising phrases and closings, whilst Thai dis-
course particles are used to heighten the intimacy of the conversation,
much like the use of African languages in Deumert and Vold Lexander
(2013). These choices, the authors argue, are tied to an awareness of
the site’s affordances and also the users’ sensitivity to the addressee.
A related case study is found in Ren and Guo’s (2024) analysis
of the translanguaging practices used in posts on the Chinese social
media platform Weibo (Extract (23)). Their analysis considers 300
self-​praise posts from 52 young Chinese Weibo users, focussing on the
use of multimodal resources (e.g., emoji, photos, videos), multilingual
resources (e.g., different languages), and multi-​semiotic resources (e.g.,
hashtags, punctuation marks) that users employ in self-​praise posts.
The authors find that Chinese Weibo users displayed a high level of
linguistic creativity by mixing Chinese characters with other linguistic
features and varieties. This included the combination of Chinese with
English, as in the following example (2024: 365):

(23) 洗完澡就觉得自己很beautiful [附作者漂亮的自拍照片]

‘Feeling very beautiful after taking a shower’
[The post was followed by a beautiful selfie of the author.]
 Small Data Approaches 159

In this example, Ren and Guo (2024) argue that the combination of
the Chinese intensifier ‘很 (very)’ and the English word ‘beautiful’,
rather than using the Chinese word ‘漂亮 (piao liang)’, has the effect
of mitigating the intensification of how beautiful she is. Apparently,
such mitigation of intensification is a common strategy in the speech
of young people from China. In other examples, however, Chinese is
combined with English in novel ways. For instance, in the following
extract, the user combines Chinese characters with the English pro-
gressive suffix -​ing. Chinese does not indicate the state of the verb
through the addition of suffixes, rather the character ‘在 zai’ is used to
show the progressive state of a verb (Extract (24)).

(24) 踏青ing [附作者踏青的照片]

‘Trekking’
[The post was followed by the author’s photos of trekking.]

Ren and Guo (2024) argue that these types of multilingual practices
can be interpreted as authors asserting their bilingual identities. By flex-
ibly using elements of English and Chinese, they construct their online
identity as ‘global citizen’. They observe that such practices often lead
to the formation of new scripts, that are created in novel and playful
ways (e.g., the use of English suffixes on Chinese characters). In this
way, the authors conclude that the use of different linguistic resources
cannot be understood as users switching between separate codes, but
rather can be interpreted as the translanguaging practices of multilin-
gual users online.

7.5 Stylisation
In the above section, we introduced language alternation to describe
when individuals switch between two or more different languages. In
this section, we introduce a slightly different type of alternation where
individuals can be heard to ‘stylise’ a variety or language.
To briefly recapitulate a few basic facts, very early on in this book
we established that all speakers have an accent. This accent is likely
related to the social background of the speaker, such as where they
grew up (e.g., Boston, Singapore, etc.) or other aspects of their social
background or identity such as their social class, gender identity, or
sexuality. In most contexts, people will speak in a way that is expected
or ‘unmarked’. It is their habitual speech style.
But people don’t always do this. Sometimes people speak in an
accent or style that is different to how they would usually speak. This
style is highly marked as it deviates from their habitual speech style.
For instance, a young White person from London is likely to habitually
160 Researching Language and Digital Communication

speak in a variety of London English. When they speak using a var-

iety of London English, this style is unmarked and unnoticed by most
people because it is their habitual speech style. But if they decide to
‘put on’ a Jamaican English accent, this style is marked because it
deviates from how we expect them to sound or speak. This accent may
also be markedly different from those who authentically speak the dia-
lect and may sound intentionally performed or hyper-​stylised.
What we’ve been describing above is what sociolinguists have called
stylisation. In stylised performances, speakers produce “specially
marked and often exaggerated representations of languages, dialects,
and styles that lie outside their own habitual repertoire” (Rampton,
2009: 149). These types of practices are very common in media, such
as in films and TV programmes where actors are often required to
emulate the speech style of a character or popular figure.

Key Term: Stylisation

The use of a voice or linguistic variety that is different to how the indi-
vidual usually speaks. Often, stylised performances are exaggerated
versions of the variety. For instance, an individual who speaks
American English may ‘stylise’ British English when quoting the
speech of their friend who is from the UK.

In addition to media such as TV and film, people can often be heard

to stylise dialects in everyday interactions. Stylisation is especially
common in retellings of stories and events when speakers perform the
voice of a friend, family member, or character. Imagine, if you will, that
you are telling your friends about a conversation with a fellow pas-
senger at the bus stop. The passenger happened to be from Australia.
When you retell the story, you quote what she said. It is possible that
you will perform or ‘stylise’ the accent of the passenger to make the
story more engaging. We do this type of stylisation all the time.
Importantly, when we stylise, we not only emulate the accent or dia-
lect being used but we also perform the identity that is associated with
that variety. This could be some recognisable individual (e.g., Queen
Elizabeth II, the woman at the bus stop) or some imagined person
(e.g., a valley girl, a teacher). Take, for instance, the following Extract
(25) in which the Iranian-​British comedian Omid Djalili stylises an
imagined voice of an individual who has invited him to Dubai:

(25) [British English –​habitual voice] When you go there, they

always give you some kind of er… there’s always a guy who
goes [Arabic accented English] “Omid, you come here, you
come to Dubai, we are the Las Vegas of the Middle East”
(www.youtube.com/​watch?v=​4yRMNoWeIY0)
 Small Data Approaches 161

In the above example, Djalili switches from his habitual and expected
speech style (British English) to a hyper-​ stylised variety (Arabic
accented English) to not only make the story more engaging but also
to perform the identity of his interlocutor. As this example is taken
from a popular British stand-​up comedy programme, we would likely
conclude that the stylisation is employed to add humour to the story.
As the routine progresses, Djalili voices multiple different characters
(an Italian waiter, Godzilla, an Iranian tribute band) that are intended
to be perceived as humorous and add ‘life’ to the story.
Here, we see that the routine is successful in generating humour
because there is an intentional disconnect between the individual’s
expected voice/​identity and the voice/​identity performed. As in the
example of Djalili’s stylisation above, the performance is not intended
to be taken at face value. In other words, Djalili does not expect
the audience to perceive the voice/​identity as his own. Nor does he
expect the audience to perceive this as a faithful replication of how
the individual actually spoke. This paradox is what Coupland (2007)
has called strategic inauthenticity. It is precisely that the performance
is recognised as inauthentic that it is considered humorous and/​or
entertaining.
Stylisation has often been analysed using concepts borrowed from
the works of literary scholar and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Of
relevance here is Bakhtin’s concepts of polyphony and heteroglossia.
From this perspective, it is argued that language is not original or
unique but rather it references the voices of people with whom that
language is associated. In other words, when we use certain words,
phrases, and accents, we not only speak or interact, but we reference
images of the person or people who have used that language before.
Because language is polyphonous, when people stylise, they not only
perform a voice, but they also perform the identity of the (imagined)
person we associate with that voice. In stylisation, we can be seen to
voice the stylised identity for our own purposes –​what has been termed
double-​voicing. An often-​made division is between so-​called uni-​and
vari-​directional voicing. In uni-​directional voicing, the individual is
seen to align themselves with the voice/​identity of the performed style.
For instance, this is often the case when people who are not speakers
of African American Vernacular English use features of the variety to
index their engagement in Hip-​Hop. Vari-​directional voicing, on the
other hand, occurs when individuals attempt to mock or denigrate the
voice/​identity of the style that they perform. This occurs, for instance,
when individuals parody a speakers’ voice or way of interacting.
The type of identity that we reference or perform in stylisation is
often a type of characterological figure. This is a socially recognisable
identity or persona that can be performed and enacted by users (Agha,
2007: 177). Often, these figures have recognisable labels that people
162 Researching Language and Digital Communication

use and circulate in public discourse. Identities like the ‘valley girl’ and
the ‘roadman’ have become recognised as distinctive identities that are
associated with particular ways of speaking and being.

Key Term: Characterological Figures

Socially recognisable identities that are associated with certain activ-
ities, beliefs and language varieties, and can be performed by users.
These personae are often labelled as in the case of the ‘valley girl’,
‘Karen’, the ‘roadman’, or the ‘bro’.

A particular type of stylisation which has attracted a lot of attention

in sociolinguistics is crossing. First introduced by Ben Rampton, lan-
guage crossing refers to moments of stylisation that appear to move
across ethnic and/​or social boundaries. In his seminal work, Rampton
(1995) analyses crossing in the speech of young people at a secondary
school, called Ashmead. In that work, he analyses the use of an
English-​based Creole amongst young people of Anglo and Asian des-
cent, the use of Punjabi by Anglo and Caribbean speakers, and the
stylisation of Asian English by all three groups. Unlike in the example
of Djalili above, the young people at Ashmead used crossing for a
variety of different functions, not just humour. Rampton argues that
these practices are important in the construction of a ‘youth identity’.
In specific contexts of use, crossing can help establish social solidarity
across different ethnic groups, helping build friendships amongst the
young people.

Key Term: Crossing

A subtype of stylisation that refers to when people transgress ethnic
and/​or social boundaries. This occurs, for instance, when a White
speaker is heard to ‘put on’ (or stylise) an ethnic speech variety, such
as Indian English or Jamaican English that they do not habitually speak.

7.5.1 Stylisation in Digital Communication

In the above section, we introduced and discussed stylisation as a fea-
ture of spoken language. Although a lot of sociolinguistic research
has focussed on stylisation in face-​to-​face interaction, more recent
work has analysed stylisation in DMC. This includes work which
has explored how users stylise non-​standard spellings, typographic
features, and memes to perform recognisable characterological fig-
ures and to perform interactional routines. Consider, for instance, the
following WhatsApp exchange (Extract 26) taken from a conversation
between a group of young Londoners:
 Small Data Approaches 163

(26) 1 Mark Ok! I’ll meet yaaa

2 Abi Yeah George
3 I’m walking up the road
4 Stef We’re in the garden bbz
5 Abi Cooooool
6 Abi C u in a min
7 Mark You guys still there?
8 Abi Yeeeeee
In the above example, Mark has just agreed to meet his friends at
the pub (‘the George’). This extract is interesting because we see that
Mark, Stef, and Abi alternate between a more standard style of English
(‘I’m walking up the road) and a more stereotypically DMC style,
what some have labelled ‘txtspeak’ (‘C u in a min’; see Chapter 2). If
we examine the rest of their messages in detail, we see that all three
individuals who use ‘txtspeak’ primarily use Standardised English
spellings in the vast majority of their messages. It seems possible then
that the use of non-​standard spellings (e.g., ‘C u in a min’, ‘bbz’, ‘yaaa’)
represent a type of language stylisation. However, beyond simply iden-
tifying stylisation, a goal in small-​data approaches to DMC would be
to explain why the users stylise in this way. In other words, we are
interested in understanding the motivations of spelling ‘see’ as <C>
and ‘you’ as <u>.
In the above example, which I have analysed elsewhere, I suggest
that the users stylise elements of ‘txtspeak’ because of the long-​
standing association of these spellings with the ‘informal’ nature of
DMC. In other words, the non-​standard spellings (e.g., <C> and <u>)
function as contextualisation cues to help the interlocutor interpret
the tone of the conversation. If we consider the context of this inter-
action –​a group of friends who are organising a friendly drink –​it
seems reasonable to assume that users are likely to employ strategies
to signal to each other that this is a casual, informal, conversation. It
is possible, then, that certain words, spellings, and other typographical
features are used to ‘key’ or signal the exchange as a casual conversa-
tion. In this extract, we see that the use of <C> and <u> occur along-
side representations of lengthened vowels in words like <Cooooool>
and <yaaa>, as well as expressive features like the exclamation mark,
which appear to be combined as cues to contextualise or ‘key’ this as
a casual conversation.

Points for reflection

• Do you stylise any language varieties in your own DMC? If so,

why?
• Does it depend on the audience or addressee?
164 Researching Language and Digital Communication

A similar type of analysis and approach is found in work by Tagg

(2016) where she explores the texting practices of a young English
woman called Laura. In that paper, Tagg focusses on the creative
orthographic strategies that Laura utilises in her texts to perform
aspects of her identity, as well as achieve certain interactional goals.
The types of features that Tagg analyses includes:

‘Non-​speech-​related respellings’

• Vowel deletion (e.g., <spk>, <gd>)

• Standard clippings (e.g., <thurs>, <mins>)
• Missing apostrophes (e.g., <im>, <dont>).

‘Typographic features’

• Missing capitals (e.g., <monday>, <i>)

• All capitals (e.g., ‘GO ON, Jonny!’)
• Emoticons (:-​xx).

‘Speech-​related respellings’

• TH-​fronting (<wiv>, <bruvver>)

• Schwa-​representation (<ya>, <ye>, <fella>)
• Letter repetition (<sooo>, <ahhh>, <woo>, <whyyye>).

‘Intimate/​conversational register’

• Discourse markers (e.g., ‘so’, ‘oh’)

• Informal/​slang words (e.g., ‘grub’, ‘quid’)
• Response tokens (e.g., ‘okay’, ‘nah’).

‘Language creativity’

• Word play (e.g., ‘chish and fips’)

• Self-​repetition (e.g., ‘I think this is your number. This is my number.
I think.’)
• Metacommentary (e.g., ‘Cor, had to teach my phone lots of new
words there!’).

Tagg’s paper combines ethnographic interviews with quantitative

and interactional analyses to explore the language choices that Laura
makes in her text messages. The first part of the analysis identifies
features that are particularly common in Laura’s messages by com-
paring her usage with a larger corpus (CorTxt) collected by Tagg.
The analysis reveals that respellings such as <u>, <wot> and omitted
 Small Data Approaches 165

apostrophes are significantly more frequent in Laura’s text-​messages

than in CorTxt. For instance, in Laura’s messages, <wot> is used in
place of <what> in 85% of cases, whilst <u> is used in place of <you>
in 55.9% of the time. The high frequency of non-​standard spellings in
Laura’s messages suggests that she attributes some symbolic value to
these features.
In the second part of her analysis, Tagg explores the discourse
function of features such as <wot> and <u> in Laura’s texts. Tagg
argues that they are often used by Laura to fulfil some interactional
function, such as parodying the voices of others (i.e., stylisation), sig-
nalling shifts in footing (i.e., conversational alignment), or to indi-
cate the ‘key’ (or intent) of the message. Consider, for instance, the
following example (27):

(27) Ok that would b lovely, if u r sure. Think about wot u want

to do, drinkin, dancin, eatin, cinema, in, out, about… Up to
u! Wot about Sammy? X
(Tagg, 2016: 73)

In this extract, we see that non-​standard spellings such as the represen-

tation of (ING) <drinkin>, <dancin>, <eatin> and abbreviations <b>,
<u>, <r> for be, you, are, often occur in combination in Laura’s texts.
Tagg argues that Laura uses these features in this way to create ‘con-
versational informality’. In other words, she stylises features of what
we might consider to be ‘txtspeak’ to draw on their association with
informality and casualness to indicate how the intent of the message,
in a very similar way to Extract (25). Thus, these non-​ standard
spellings act as contextualisation cues to help the audience or inter-
locutor understand the intention of a message.
In my own work, I have argued that this type of stylisation is particu-
larly common in social media. And, more recently, with the emergence
of multimodal and video-​based social media, stylised performances are
increasingly commonplace. A nice example of stylisation on TikTok is
the #AccentChallenge trend which went viral on the platform in 2023.
The challenge involved users uploading videos where they attempted
to mimic (or stylise) social and regional speech styles. This viral trend
led to videos such as that in Figure 7.1. In the video, the user who
elsewhere speaks in a General American accent, can be seen to stylise
a variety of different speech styles. This includes national accents
(‘Indian’, ‘French’, ‘Malaysian’) and also some accents that are linked
to character-​types/​types of people (‘valley girl’, ‘roadman’). If we focus
on the segment in which the user stylises the ‘valley girl’ (the tran-
scription is provided), we see that this accent –​and relatedly the iden-
tity –​is performed through a number of different linguistic features
that become highly associated with this identity label:
166 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Figure 7.1 An example of the #AccentChallenge on TikTok

• High Rising Terminals (HRTs): The use of a rising intonation on a

declarative statement
• Discourse marker like as in ‘like I’m literally like annoying myself’
• Creaky voice
• Nasal voice.

(28) Ok, but like, which American one? Cos American’s are
literally gonna come for you. Right, valley girl. Ok, yeah.
Umm… that’s literally what I was doing ummm I just feel like
this is the most obnoxious accent. But you know sometimes
when I’m just feeling like a Jessica like I’m just gonna like
talk like this cos like. Ok, I’m actually gonna stop right now
cos like I’m literally like annoying myself just like talking like
this, so…

Although this is part of a series of videos framed as the ‘accent

challenge’ trend, we see that the user combines accent features typic-
ally associated with this persona with other semiotic resources, such
as bodily features: pursed lips, relaxed jaw setting, hair flick, and
 Small Data Approaches 167

hand flick. This stylised performance therefore directly references an

imagined character (or characterological figure) of the valley girl.

Points for reflection

• Are there other types of ‘characterological figures’ that people

stylise in DMC which you are familiar with? What are the linguistic
characteristics of that identity?

In my own work, I have been interested in this type of stylisation, focus-

sing on parodies of Multicultural London English (MLE) on TikTok.
In a recent paper (Ilbury, 2023), I analyse a corpus of TikTok videos
that reference a characterological figure, called the ‘roadman’. In that
paper, I analyse the stylisation of this persona performed through a
subset of MLE features and non-​linguistic tropes and references (e.g.,
costumes, participation in certain activities, particular discourse
topics). For instance, in one video, the user performs the roadman
persona in a hypothetical babysitting scenario. In the video, we see a
user (who does not habitually speak MLE) stylise various features of
the variety including:

• The use of MLE lexis including flex ‘dance’

• The discourse marker still –​which is commonly used in MLE to
signal emphasis
• Several accent features including a very front goose vowel, e.g., do
[dʏː], the monophthongal pronunciation of the vowels price, e.g.,
nice [naːʔ] and face, e.g., ok [ɔˈke], the use of [d]‌for /​ð/​in words
like that [daʔ].

In addition to the hyper-​ stylised form of MLE, the roadman is

performed through various other semiotic resources that reference this
persona. This includes his dress (a tracksuit), the background music
(a grime track), and his disposition (he is disinterested throughout).
All of these qualities are ideologically associated in some way with the
identity that the user performs: The roadman. Importantly, as with
most types of stylisation, the performance is not to be taken at face-​
value. The creator is not trying to be truly interpreted as a roadman.
Rather, the videos are parodic –​they are, strategically inauthentic.
In other videos, I show how these stylised performances link the
roadman persona (and relatedly MLE) to a much more contentious
set of issues, such as his perceived involvement in crime, drugs, and
violence. In very many settings he is positioned as someone who is
aggressive or ‘angry’ (see Figure 7.2, for example). These types of par­
odies, I argue, are relevant to sociolinguistic analyses of MLE because
168 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Figure 7.2 An example of roadman parody TikTok videos

they have the potential to shape how MLE is perceived. I return to this
discussion in more detail in Section 9.3.1.

7.6 Metadiscourse
Metadiscourse is a term that refers to ‘language about language’ (or
‘talk about talk’). This label includes folk beliefs about language, lan-
guage attitudes and language awareness. Metadiscursive comments can
be observed when an individual characterises or makes a remark about
some regularity or pattern of language use. For instance, it is common
to hear people associate linguistic features or ways of speaking with
particular types of users, such as the valley girl or roadman above.
It is common to hear people say things like ‘that’s what [valley girls/​
roadmen] say’ or ‘why are you speaking like a [valley girl/​roadman]?’
or comment on the appropriacy or social meaning of forms, such as
‘I wouldn’t usually say [X]‌, because I think it sounds so uneducated’
or ‘I’m not cool enough to say [Y]’. When people make these types of
comments, they are engaging in metadiscourse.
 Small Data Approaches 169

Key Term: Metadiscourse

Language about language. When people say things like ‘[X people]
would use this word’ or ‘I don’t like how [X people] say this’, they are
engaging in metadiscourse.

Metadiscourse is often prevalent in everyday conversation. For

instance, in their research on family dinner table conversations, Blum-​
Kulka (1997) studies metadiscourse in the context of socialisation.
The focus in this work is on the ways in which parents design their
utterances to socialise children directly or indirectly into culturally
appropriate behaviours and expectations. This includes utterances
that function as conversational routine management (e.g., ‘wait until
your brother finishes talking’) as well as politeness strategies (e.g., ‘say
please’).
Metadiscourse is closely related to the concept of linguistic
ideologies. A language ideology is a set of beliefs or ideas about
language users and/​or languages. Sociolinguistics has long critiqued
the existence and circulation of ‘Standard Language ideology’ –​the
idea that there are ‘superior’ varieties of language. This ideology
has led society to conclude that there are ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’
ways of speaking or interacting. Metadiscourse is relevant here
because often comments about language enter public consciousness
and become ‘common sense’. This is the case for ‘Standard English’
which is often cited by people as the true form of English but rarely
(if ever!) defined.

7.6.1 Metadiscourse in Digital Communication

Social and digital media are prime sites in which we can observe
metadiscursive actions. Because of its participatory nature, users often
comment on or make content which explicitly references types of lan-
guage use and their assumed users. A cursory glance at TikTok returns
the following types of metadiscursive comments (29)–​(31):

(29) Why is bro speaking like that? Is he acoustic?

(30) speaking like a roadman lol
(31) What accent is this? 💀.

All of the above comments were posted to different videos on the plat-
form. In (29), the commenter responds to the creators’ unusual way
of speaking, asking if he is ‘acoustic’ (an intentional and pejorative
misspelling of autistic which is problematically used in response to
actions deemed stupid or ignorant). In (30), the user associates the
170 Researching Language and Digital Communication

creators’ style of speaking with the ‘roadman’ identity –​an identity

that is often associated with involvement in crime and violence. And
in (31), the commenter uses the ‘skull’ emoji 💀 –​suggesting that they
find the creator’s accent humorous or unusual. All of these comments
are examples of metadiscourse because they all comment on some
aspect of language use.

Points for reflection

• Next time you watch a TikTok or YouTube video or even a

Twitch stream, navigate to the comment section. Do you see any
metadiscursive comments? (Often people will comment on the
accent or speech style of the user, particularly if their accent is
regionally or socially marked.)

An academic analysis of metadiscursive comments is found in

Androutsopoulos’ (2013) paper on the stylisation of German dialects
on the video platform, YouTube. His paper focusses on the ways in
which audience comments and participatory videos engage in a type
of dialect discourse. This includes an analysis of the content of videos,
such as where German dialects are stylised, as well as the comments
on those videos. The participatory videos include hypothetical scenes
where individuals are seen to use a typical version of a Berliner dia-
lect. For instance, the video ‘Rinjehaun—​Berlinerisch für Anfänger’
(See ya—​Berlinerisch for beginners), depicts an interaction between
two girls, a local and a newcomer, in the bathroom of a Berlin night-
club. The scene focusses on the posh and preppy newcomer girl’s
misunderstanding of local Berliner ‘slang’. The following inter-
action has been reproduced from Androutsopoulos (2013: 59–​60,
Extract (32)):

(32) 1 A Ey, Puppe! Wat jeht’n, Alter? ‘Hey doll!

‘What’s up, mate?’
2 B Hallo!
‘Hello!’
3 A Ey, hast mal fünf Minuten Zeit, ick muss dir mal
wat erzählen.
‘Hey, have you got five minutes? I’ve got to tell
you something’.
4 B Ja?
‘Yeah?’
5 A Cool. Naja, jedenfalls war ick ja am Wochenende
6 mit meen Atzen aus der Hood erstmal im Freibad.
 Small Data Approaches 171

‘Cool. Well, over the weekend I went with my

Atzen (mates) from the hood to the open-​air pool’.
7 B Du warst mit deinen Eltern im Freibad?
‘You went with your parents to the pool?’
8 A Oh man, man, doch nicht mit meinen Eltern. Mit
meinen Atzen. Wo
9 kommst du denn her dass du det nicht kennst?
‘Oh, man. Not with my parents, with my Atzen.
Where do you come from if you don’t know that?’
10 B Also ich komm aus der Lünebürger Heide, falls es
dich interessiert.
11 Sonst noch Fragen?
Well, I come from Luneburg Heath if that is of any
interest to you.
Any further questions?
12 A Nee. Na det merkt man, wer Atze nicht kennt,
kann nicht aus Berlin
13 sein.
Nope. You can tell that if people don’t know Atze,
they can’t be from Berlin.
14 B Naja, kann ich ja nicht wissen. gibt ja genügend
Zugezogene in
15 Berlin.
Well, how should I know that? There are a lot of
newcomers in Berlin.
16 A Zujezogen bin ick höchstens.
A newcomer. Maybe that’s me

The above conversation emerges as a metadiscursive commentary on the

word ‘Atzen’. When the word is introduced in line 6, B misunderstands
the referent as ‘pool’. What follows is a discussion of this term and its
association with the Berliner dialect. As the conversation progresses,
we see that A associates the knowledge and use of this word as an
indication that the speaker is from Berlin. In the extract, the word is
used alongside other Berliner dialect features including word-​final /​s/​is
realised as [t]‌in words such as wat for was (‘what’) and dat or det for
das (‘the, this’) and ick or icke for ich (the personal pronoun, ‘I’).
The content of the video demonstrates one type of metadiscursive
activity: The association of words with particular dialects and people.
But Androutsopoulos also finds metalinguistic discussions in the
comment section of the videos. This includes users’ evaluation of
the dialect and questions around the meaning of the words used in the
videos (33)–​(35):
172 Researching Language and Digital Communication

(33) Berlinerisch klingt doof!

‘Berlinerisch sounds stupid!’
(34) I just love that Berlinerisch. Very cool. Weiter machen!
‘I just love that Berlinerisch. Very cool. Keep it up!’
(35) Also Atze ist definitiv Bruder, Freunde sind Kumpels. //​Atze
ist eigentlich sogar der kleinere Bruder, Keule hingegen der
große Bruder, und die Schwelle ist die Schwester, also bei uns
iss dett so, wa!
‘Well, Atze definitely means brother; friends are called mates.
//​Atze is actually the younger brother, and Keule the older
brother, and the sister is called Schwelle. Well, that’s the way
we do it, right!’
These commentaries, Androutsopoulos argues, are important to study
because the ideologies that shape them are not separate from language
use. If people think of a word or dialect as ‘cool’ or ‘stupid’, this could
shape how they use that feature or whether they avoid it entirely.
Similar types of comments are examined in Lee’s (2013) analysis of
metalinguistic discourses of English proficiency on the photo-​sharing
site, Flickr. In that paper, Lee analyses users’ explicit self-​evaluations
of their English proficiency-​level in their captions, comments, and
posts. This includes comments such as ‘My English is poor’ and ‘I’m
sorry I don’t speak English well’’. In that context, Lee argues that
acknowledging one’s proficiency level is not simply a form of self-​
abasement. Rather, on Flickr, acknowledging a limited knowledge
of English encourages social networking, widens engagement, and
supports informal learning. For instance, in the following Extract (36)
taken from Lee (2013: 81), we see how the photo caption posted by
CB 'Sorry, I know my English is so so so bad!!’, leads commenters to
respond to these comments, offering support and evaluating the users’
English as ‘good’:

(36) Commenter A: Pretty bento. And I think your English is

good!
Commenter B: Trust me, your English is a lot better than
the English of many native speakers. ^_​
CB: thank you so much, [commenter A]. . . .
I learned english for 5 years at school, but
I think it isn’t good enough for that >

Many of these metadiscourses relate to language practices and var-

ieties typically associated with offline environments. However, it is
interesting to note that internet or digital language practices them-
selves can also become the subject of metadiscourse. This includes a
feature which we discussed earlier, <lol>. For instance, in one popular
 Small Data Approaches 173

TikTok video, a user provides an analysis of the different types of <lol>

in British DMC. The video describes the following subtypes of <lol>:

• lol
Can be very passive aggressive in sentence final position, can occur
in non-​humorous environments like ‘did you bring my clothes
though, lol’
• lol???
Do you think I am an idiot?
• LOOOOOOL
When you’re actually laughing. An appropriate response to a joke.
• LOOOOOOL+​
When the laughter carries over two lines. This refers to actual
laughter. An intensifier version of the above.
• looooool
Meant to press caps lock. The topic is still funny.
• lool
Really wasn’t that funny or intended to soften the blow of a
statement.

In this way, a common feature of digital interactions <lol> has itself

become the topic of metadiscourse. Exploring metadiscourses of <lol>
might help us explain why this feature is often used in ways that don’t
straightforwardly look like laughter. This is because metadiscursive
insights often latch onto some imagined or real pattern of language use.
More recently, my colleague, Rianna Walcott, and I, have been ana-
lysing metadiscursive commentaries of ‘Gen Z’ language in TikTok.
Lots of these commentaries relate to the use of words like ‘slay’, ‘yaas’,
and ‘kween’, and phrases such as ‘ate it up’, ‘left no crumbs’, and
‘serving [x]‌’. Many of these features originated in AAVE and were
taken up in queer circles but have since been reinterpreted as features
of ‘Gen Z slang’ or ‘TikTok language’. Our focus in that work has
been to understand how different creators respond to this framing. We
find that, on the whole, Black creators reject this framing by arguing
that the labelling of AAVE as ‘TikTok language’ represents a type of
linguistic appropriation. White creators, on the other hand, tend to
argue that this is a natural process of linguistic diffusion, and embrace
the ‘Gen Z’ framing of this trend.

7.7 Politeness
The final area of micro-​analytical approaches we consider here are
studies of linguistic politeness. When students encounter the con-
cept of ‘politeness’, they tend to assume that how we use this term in
sociolinguistics is synonymous with its popular definition: Politeness is
174 Researching Language and Digital Communication

about using ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and respecting someone’s title, ‘it’s
Mrs, not Miss’. However, whilst the sociolinguistic concept includes
things like ‘please’ and deference, the academic use of this term is more
related to the types of interactional moves and choices that we make to
avoid offense. What we are interested in here is how people use con-
versational strategies like hedging, overly-​polite forms, and indirect
questions to perform politeness. Often, utterances which use polite
forms (e.g., ‘sorry to trouble you but would you mind opening the
door for me, please?’) are, at least in British English, perceived to be
more socially acceptable than those which do not use these forms,
such as direct imperatives like ‘open the door’.
The focus in sociolinguistic research on politeness has been on how
people negotiate both the addressee’s wants and desires as well as the
speaker’s wants and desires. This theory of politeness developed by
Brown and Levinson (1987), relates politeness to Goffman’s (1967)
concept of face, that is the public self-​image that people claim for
themselves. Face comprises two main elements:

• Positive face: The desire for community; to be liked

• Negative face: The desire for independence; to be respected.

The idea is that politeness is an attempt to maintain each other’s

face. When we communicate, we try to avoid imposing on others
(i.e., negative face). Our wish is for our interlocutor to perceive us
favourably (i.e., positive face). However, often we have to impose on
someone –​we might have to ask them to take the bins out –​or we
might provide some assessment that may not be perceived positively –​
you might not like their outfit. In these contexts, Brown and Levinson
(1987) contend that the request or assessment functions as a Face-​
Threatening Act (FTA). When individuals are posed with the problem
of performing an FTA, they can use a politeness strategy to mitigate
the FTA. If the request or assessment is ‘bald’ or ‘on-​record’ then it is
performed without a politeness strategy. Most of the time, however,
individuals will use a politeness or negative politeness strategy to miti-
gate the FTA. For instance, imagine you are at your friend’s house. The
window is open but it is freezing cold. There are a number of different
ways you could shut the window (37)–​(40):

(37) Brr
(38) Shut that window!
(39) I’m so sorry, would you mind shutting the window?
(40) Are you cold? I’ll shut the window for you.

In the examples above, we see different linguistic strategies used to close

the window. The example in (37) is what we would call ‘off-​record
 Small Data Approaches 175

with no politeness strategy’. The use of ‘brr’ which people often say
when they are cold implies that the speaker is cold, but they do not
explicitly ask for the window to be closed. Contrast this with (38), the
speaker uses a direct imperative and so is on-​record with no politeness
strategy. In (39), however, we see the use of an apology ‘sorry’, and
hedging ‘would you mind’ that have the overall effect of mitigating
the FTA towards the interlocutors’ negative face. A similar type of
utterance is seen in (40), where the speaker attempts to mitigate the
FTA by appealing to the interlocutors’ positive face. A final strategy is
not to do the FTA at all and simply stay cold!

Key Term: Politeness

Linguistic behaviours that are used to reduce the potential to cause
offense or upset. In Brown and Levinson’s framework, it is associated
with face, i.e., the self-​image that we project in public. Politeness is
linked to positive and negative face. The former refers to the desire
to be liked, whilst the latter refers to the desire to be free.

7.7.1 Politeness in Digital Communication

Studies of DMC have often focussed on identifying the similarities
and differences between the politeness strategies used online and those
used in face-​to-​face interaction. Early on it was suggested that since
text-​based DMC was often characterised by a short and concise style,
users were more likely to use direct forms (e.g., what did you say?)
with little to no hedging than in face-​to-​face interaction (e.g., Park,
2008). However, research has identified some similarities between the
politeness strategies in both modalities of interaction. For example,
researchers found that individuals employ similar types of positive and
negative politeness strategies in DMC. This includes positive strategies
such as seeking common ground by expressing shared background
knowledge, interests, or experiences, in an attempt to foster social
relationships with others as well as negative strategies in the form of
apologies and giving deference (Luo Carlo & Yoo, 2007; Park, 2008).
More recent research has considered the interactional negotiation
of politeness in DMC. A case in point is Darics’ (2010) analysis of
politeness in conversations between members of a virtual team. A vir-
tual team or a ‘remote team’ are a group of people (often based in
different locations) who use digital technologies to work together. This
is an interesting case study because, as members do not share the same
physical environment, they will use digital technologies to perform a
variety of work activities such as team building, norm negotiation, co-​
operation, and task completion. To understand these practices, Darics
176 Researching Language and Digital Communication

collected a corpus of Instant Messaging (IM) conversations from 18

members of a global management and consultancy company based in
London. Although the workers were dispersed geographically across
the world and spoke a variety of different languages, English was the
official language of the company. Analysing the IMs, Darics finds that
there are several different politeness strategies used by the workers.
This includes what she calls ‘strategies to represent auditory informa-
tion’. This strategy involves the use of non-​standard spellings which
emulate paralinguistic cues like pitch or intonation. For instance, in
the following extract, Darics analyses Liz’s use of the unconventional
spelling of ‘no’ as a representation of spoken language (Extract (41)).

(41) 1 Sarah its so great you are back

2 Liz it is good to be back
3 Sarah I am so sorry i have been crap at keeping in touch!
4 Liz and thanks for the text messages you sent me
5 Liz noooooooooo
6 Liz no worries at all
7 Sarah no i should have sent more!
8 Sarah how are you doing really?
9 Sarah 100% better???Strategies to represent visual
information
Darics argues that the use of <noooooooooo> in line 5 functions to reduce
the potential FTA to Sarah’s own face when she apologies that she has
been ‘crap at keeping in touch’ (line 3). The exaggeration of the vowel in
‘no’ which appears to emulate spoken language, intensifies the meaning
of the word signalling that Liz did not find it problematic that Sarah had
not kept in touch. The strategy therefore maintains conversational har-
mony and reduces any possibility that Sarah’s face is threatened.
Another type of politeness strategy Darics identifies is ‘strategies to
represent visual information’. This includes the use of emoticons or
‘smiley faces’ that provide additional contextualising information that
help the interlocutor interpret the meaning of the message. In many
cases, these are used to signal things like ‘friendliness’ or ‘sarcasm’. For
instance, in the following excerpt the emoticons :) and 8-​) are used by
Mercedes and Tanya to signal the intent of the message (Extract (42)):

(42) 1 Mercedes hi dear

2 Mercedes Can I ask you a quick question?
3 Tanya Hi
4 Tanya Sure
5 Mercedes by chance, have you received the
(abbreviation) report?
No rush … just checking:)
 Small Data Approaches 177

6 Tanya Not yet dear

7 Mercedes ok, thanks!
8 Tanya I will fwd as soon as get it
9 Tanya :)
10 Mercedes got it! thanks!:)
11 Tanya 8-​) Monitoring it
Before we interpret this extract, we will need some context: Tanya
is Mercedes’ boss. However, in this excerpt, the power dynamic is
flipped as Mercedes needs to request a report from Tanya. In line 8,
following the comment that Tanya will forward the report as soon as
she receives it, she finishes the message with a smiley face :). Darics
argues that emoticon signals the friendly intent of the message. The
informal address term ‘dear’ (line 1), the use of hedging ‘by chance’
(line 5), all seem to suggest that this is intended to be a friendly inter-
action. Finally, in line 8, Mercedes uses the emoticon 8-​) which Darics
interprets as a graphical representation of the following statement
‘monitoring it’. This emoticon, she argues, introduces a level of
humour to the conversation. All of these strategies, Darcis argues, help
Mercedes negotiate the power imbalance and mitigates the potential
FTA of making a request to her boss, Tanya.

Points for reflection

• Next time you send an email, pay attention to the politeness strat-
egies you use in that email. Make a mental note of the types of
politeness strategies you use and think about why you use them.

In my own corpus of WhatsApp messages sent by young adults living

in London, I have found similar types of politeness strategies to those
identified by Darics (2010). Most notably, the users often use styl­
isation as a politeness strategy. Consider, for instance, the following
example (Extract (43). Rachel has just got herself a new job as a
marketing analyst that she wasn’t keen to start. On her first day,
Abi messages to ask how it’s all going. Rachel replies saying she had
nothing really to do but was familiarising herself with the back end of
the website (e.g., checking visitor counts, making edits to the website).

(43) 1 Abi How was the first morning?

2 Rachel Nothing to do really just familiarising
myself with the back
end of the website
3 Abi Haha at least it’s a job bbz!!
4 Rachel Not complaining
178 Researching Language and Digital Communication

In response to this, Abi attempts to lighten the mood by suggesting

that ‘at least it’s a job’. Abi’s response is interesting because she tags
this message with <Haha> and <bbz>. In an analysis of this conver-
sation, I have argued that Abi uses these features to mitigate the FTA
of her response, ‘at least it’s a job’. If this message did not contain
<Haha> and <bbz>, it would be a ‘bald’ FTA in that it would directly
challenge Rachel’s assessment of the job. Including these two features,
however, appears to ‘dial down’ the intensity of the challenge by first
keying this as a casual response (<Haha>), before using the address
term, <bbz>, to signal their friendly relationship, and ending with a
double exclamation mark <!!> to signal excitement or support. This
seems to be effective as Rachel’s response in line 4 explicitly affirms the
intention of her original message.

7.8 Limitations
The limitations of small data approaches are, ironically, opposite to
those we discussed related to big data approaches. In the analyses that
we have sketched out in this chapter, language practices are analysed
at the level of conversation. The types of variation we have discussed
here have been understood in relation to discourse phenomena like
what is being said in the conversation or who the recipient is. This
is a very different approach to that discussed in Chapter 6 where the
variation was explained in relation to some broad level social factor,
like the demographics of a given geographical area or the gender of
the author.
As interactional approaches try to understand how language is
used within specific moments of interaction, it is sometimes unclear to
what extent the patterns identified in a given dataset apply elsewhere.
How do we know that the function of <lol> in one group conversa-
tion is comparable to how other people use this feature? The common
retort of such approaches is that the analyses are not attempting to
make general claims about the nature of language variation/​change.
Rather, they are attempting to understand language in use. That is,
in context.
Nevertheless, there are still some limitations that we should be
mindful of. One of the main limitations of this type of work is that
interactional approaches, such as those outlined here, tend to focus on
phenomena in smaller datasets. Tagg’s (2016) research, for instance,
on Laura’s texting practices discussed in Section 7.5, focusses on a
relatively modest dataset comprising 1539 text-​messages. Similarly,
Androutsopoulos’ (2013) study of YouTube videos and comments,
analyses 310 dialect-​tagged videos. Evidently, these are much smaller
datasets than the very large corpora of social media posts often
analysed in ‘big data’ approaches.
 Small Data Approaches 179

A further limitation of interactional approaches is that they often

neglect the relevance of big data. As we saw in Chapter 6, big data
approaches have been able to identify consistent and compelling
patterns of language use that can be explained in terms of macro-​
level factors. For instance, in Eisenstein’s (2013) analysis of t/​d dele-
tion on Twitter, he finds higher rates of the non-​standard spelling
(e.g., <tes> for <test) in areas with higher numbers of people who are
African American. Here, we see that there is a significant correlation
between the use of a particular type of spelling (i.e., the orthographic
representation of t/​ d deletion) and a socio-​ demographic identity
(i.e., African Americans). Nevertheless, little interactional work has
considered the relevance or application of these findings in their ana-
lyses of the small details of interaction. It seems possible and worth-
while to consider a synergy of the two approaches –​an issue we will
take up in Chapter 8.

7.9 Summary
This chapter has introduced small-​ data approaches to studying
DMC. The ‘small’ qualifier here refers not necessarily to the size of
the datasets examined in these types of studies but rather the tools
that are employed to understand the granular, micro-​level detail of
interaction. Small data approaches to DMC have employed concepts,
theories, and methods from Interactional Sociolinguistics, Discourse
Analysis, and Conversation Analysis to understand topics such as the
turn-​by-​
turn negotiation of identities, the conversational organisa-
tion of messages, and the use of contextualisation cues in signalling
meaning in interaction. To explore these topics in more depth, the
chapter has focussed on four different areas of sociolinguistic inquiry
that examine interactional phenomena: Language alternation, stylisa-
tion, metadiscourse, and politeness.

7.10 Activities
1. Navigate to TikTok and search for the #AccentChallenge. Now
choose five videos of your choice. Do any of the videos reference
identities or ways of being associated with those accents and speech
styles (e.g., roadman, valley girl, 撒娇 sājiāo)?
2. The account @islandlarder on TikTok is run by a user from
Shetland –​an island chain some 100 miles from the north Scottish
mainland. The user speaks Shetland dialect. This variety is one very
many people will have not encountered before interacting with
this page. Choose five videos from this account and collect some
comments from those videos. Try to analyse the metadiscourses
of Shetland dialect that emerge in the videos. Do people like this
180 Researching Language and Digital Communication

dialect? Do they consider it to be a variety of English? Or some-

thing else?
3. Go to your recently sent emails and select ten emails at random.
Now identify the politeness strategies used in those emails. What
are the most frequent politeness strategies that you use? Consider,
for instance, your use of devices such as emoji, address terms (e.g.,
sir, mate), openings (e.g., dear, to), and closing (e.g., best wishes,
yours faithfully). Does your use of politeness strategies vary across
audiences, platforms, and topics? Finally, compare your emails
with another text-​based platform, e.g., WhatsApp.

7.11 Further Reading

Georgakopoulou, Alexandra, Stefan Iversen & Carsten Sage (2020).
Quantified Storytelling: A Narrative Analysis of Metrics on Social Media.
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Giaxoglou, Korina (2020). A Narrative Approach to Social Media
Mourning: Small Stories and Affective Positioning. Abingdon: Routledge.
Jones, Rodney, Alice Chik & Christoph Hafner (2015). Discourse
and Digital Practices: Doing Discourse Analysis in the Digital Age.
Abingdon: Routledge.
Page, Ruth (2013). Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction.
Abingdon: Routledge.
Wilson, Guyanne (2024). Language Ideologies and Identities on Facebook
and TikTok: A Southern Caribbean Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

7.12 References
Agha, Asif (2007). Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2013). Participatory culture and metalinguistic
discourse: Performing and negotiating German dialects on YouTube. In
Deborah Tannen and Anna Marie Trester (eds.), Discourse 2.0: Language
and New Media, pp. 47–​72. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Blum-​Kulka, Shoshana (1997). Dinner Talk: Cultural Patterns of Sociability
and Socialization in Family Discourse. Abingdon: Routledge.
Brown, Penelope & Stephen C. Levinson (1987). Politeness: Some Universals
in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coupland, Nikolas (2007). Style: Language Variation and Identity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Danesi, Marcel (2016). The Semiotics of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language
in the Age of the Internet. London: Bloomsbury.
Darics, Erika (2010). Politeness in computer-​mediated discourse of a virtual
team. Journal of Politeness Research, 6(1): 129–​150.
Deumert, Ana & Kristin V. Lexander (2013). Texting Africa: Writing as per-
formance. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 17(4): 522–​546.
 Small Data Approaches 181

Dorleijn, Margreet & Jacomine Nortier (2009). Code-​ switching and the
internet. In Barbara E. Bullock & Almeida Jacqueline Toribio (eds.),
Linguistic Code-​Switching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dresner, Eli & Susan C. Herring (2010). Functions of the non-​ verbal in
CMC: Emoticons and illocutionary force. Communication Theory,
20: 249–​268.
Ermida, Isabel (2023). Hate Speech in Social Media. Cham: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2014). Small stories transposition and social
media: A micro-​perspective on the ‘Greek crisis’. Discourse & Society, 25(4):
519–​539.
Ge-​Stadnyk, Jing (2021). Communicative functions of emoji sequences in the
context of self-​presentation: A comparative study of Weibo and Twitter
users. Discourse and Communication, 15(4): 369–​387.
Gibson, Will (2024, Online First). Flirting and winking in Tinder chats: Emoji,
ambiguity, and sequential actions. Journal of Internet Pragmatics. https://
benjamins.com/catalog/ip.00107.gib.
Goffman, Erving (1967). Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-​ to-​
Face
Interaction. London: Aldine.
Herring, Susan C (1999). Interactional coherence in CMC. Journal of
Computer-​Mediated Communication, 4(4): 444.
Ilbury, Christian (2023, First View). The recontextualisation of Multicultural
London English: Stylising the ‘roadman’. Language in Society, 53(3): 1–​25.
König, Katharina (2019). Stance taking with ‘laugh’ particles and emojis—​
Sequential and functional patterns of ‘laughter’ in a corpus of German
WhatsApp chats. Journal of Pragmatics, 142: 156–​170.
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8 Mixed Approaches

8.1 Introduction
In this chapter we cover the following topics:

• Mixed-​method approaches
• Three case studies of mixed-​approaches to DMC:
• Androutsopoulos (2023)
• Ilbury (2019)
• Lopez & Kübler (forthcoming).

The two preceding chapters on ‘big data’ and ‘small data’ sketched
out two different approaches to analysing DMC. In Chapter 6, we
provided an overview of work which uses computational tools to
understand complex datasets, typically comprising millions (or even
hundreds of millions!) of messages. In this field, linguistic patterns are
quantified and interpretations are made on the basis of the distribution
of some feature. This approach was contrasted with that introduced
in Chapter 7. This work is focussed more on understanding the ‘small’
details on interaction, examining how features are used within spe-
cific moments of interaction. Qualitative approaches like Discourse
Analysis and Interactional Sociolinguistics are employed to examine
discourse level phenomena.
That I’ve decided to present these approaches in two different
chapters suggests that researchers take an either-​or approach. They
either do ‘big data’ work or they study the ‘small’ phenomena of
interaction. The analyses that people employ are either quantita-
tive or qualitative. To some degree, this is true in research on DMC.
For the most part, researchers have tended to assume that a single
methodological approach is sufficient in capturing and explaining
different aspects of DMC. However, single-​method approaches have
their limitations. Quantitative approaches have often been criticised
for neglecting the relevance of interactional and discourse phenomena
whilst qualitative approaches have often disregarded the relevance of
population-​level trends.

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184 Researching Language and Digital Communication

As a response, there has been a push in recent years for the field
to move towards so-​called mixed method approaches. The argument
is that a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods can
be useful in understanding the sociolinguistic functions and motiv-
ations for patterns of DMC. Quantitative analyses can help us under-
stand the more general distribution of a feature, whilst qualitative
approaches can explain why they are used in this way. Following this
turn, this chapter provides an in-​depth survey of three different case
studies which combine large-​ scale methodologies and approaches,
with micro-​level insights.

8.2 Case Study 1: Androutsopoulos (2023)

Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2023). Punctuating the other: Graphic
cues, voice, and positioning in digital discourse. Language &
Communication, 88: 141–​152.

• Summary: This paper investigates the function and social meaning

of the so-​called ‘indignation mark’, or <!!1!>, in the context of
German-​language threads on the platform, Reddit. The main argu-
ment is that <!!1!> is used intentionally to parody the voice of
an imagined political character who is associated with conserva-
tive and right-​wing beliefs. This includes “nationalists, supporters
of xenophobic and Islamophobic sentiment, conspiracy-​theorists,
climate change deniers, COVID deniers, and car-​crazy Germans”
(2023: 147).
• Background: To understand the use of <!!1!>, Androutsopoulos
draws on sociolinguistic research that explores how group relations
are constructed in (digital) interaction. The background refers to
several concepts that we have already introduced and discussed,
notably double-​voicing and stylisation. The focus is on how people
use elements of digital discourse (in this instance, creative typo-
graphical features) to parody non-​local voices and to distance them-
selves from contentious social identities. The work also seeks to add
to a limited body of work on variation in punctuation. As is per-
haps clear in this book, although non-​standard spellings have been
examined in detail, punctuation and typographic features of digital
communication have been examined to a lesser extent.
• Methods: The paper employs a combination of ‘computational,
sequential, and microlinguistic analysis’ (2023: 141). First, a large-​
dataset of Reddit threads and comments was obtained using Python
through the pushshift API. The programme, R, was used for fur-
ther statistical and computational analysis. The extraction process
focussed on one thread ‘r/​de’ –​established in 2006, it is the largest
German language sub thread on Reddit. The sampling strategy was
 Mixed Approaches 185

to obtain 1000 threads per half year, from 2009 to 2021 (excluding
2013 for technical reasons). This results in a corpus of 23,000 dis-
cussion threads with 386,659 comments. Metadata, including the
time stamp of the message, the user ID, the flair, and comment depth
was also obtained. This allows Androutsopoulos to (i) quantify the
number of times <!!1!> occurs, and (ii) obtain a large dataset of
Reddit threads and comments, as well as related metadata.
Since the focus here is on the interactional function of <!!1!>,
Androutsopoulos then moves to a scaled-​ down analysis of the
contexts in which this feature is used. To do this, he uses the flair
metadata of the post. On Reddit, a flair is a tag which shows others
what the post is about. It could be things like ‘video’ or ‘humour’
meaning that the post contains a video or is meant to be funny. This
allows Androutsopoulos to identify three main flairs where <!!1!>
is used: Politics (74 tokens), Humour (72 tokens), and Query/​
Discussion (90 tokens) –​a total of 236 messages. He then codes this
data for a variety of different linguistic and interactional features.
This includes:
1. The position of the indignation mark in the message
2. Whether this message is part of a longer comment or if it is the
entire comment
3. The stylised voice evoked in the message
4. Whether the people that the voice evokes are referenced in the
comment
5. Any groups named in the stylised message
6. Any graphic cues that co-​occur with the indignation mark.
Androutsopoulos notes that, since the metadata includes links to
the original posts, he also continually inspected the context of the
indignation mark as it is used in the specific Reddit post.
• Analysis: The analysis identifies some common themes in the flair
sample of 236 tokens. It does this first by identifying the types of
people who are referenced in messages which contain the indigna-
tion mark. It is at this point that Androutsopoulos observes that
it is often used in messages that are associated with conservative
and right-​wing political views. He observes that this feature often
occurs alongside overt political references, including ‘phrases such
as irgendein AfD-​Jockel ‘some AfD dumbass’ (2019–​08) and FDP
Type (2021–​08, FDP is a Liberal party)’ (p. 147). He also finds
that the indignation mark often occurs alongside other typographic
features and non-​standard spellings which sets the voice apart from
their own. This includes strategies such as writing the message in all
caps or using quotation marks.
• Conclusions: The main argument in this paper is that the typo-
graphic feature, <!!1!>, which may have once been an authentic
186 Researching Language and Digital Communication

error, has since become reinterpreted as a symbol of a particular pol-

itical identity. It is stylistically used by people who orient away from
these values, by parodying the voices of those with conservative and
right-​wing beliefs. In making these arguments, Androutsopoulos
argues for a greater focus on how typographical features become
socially meaningful for digital communities of practices.

8.3 Case Study 2: Ilbury (2019)

Ilbury, Christian (2019). ‘Sassy Queens’: Stylistic orthographic
variation in Twitter and the enregisterment of AAVE. Journal of
Sociolinguistics, 24: 245–​264.

• Summary: This paper explores the stylisation of African American

Vernacular English (AAVE) in tweets posted by White British gay
men. The paper argues that a subset of AAVE features have been
appropriated by the men and are stylistically used to perform a
‘sassy’ gay persona. This analysis argues that stylisation is not
only commonplace in social media, but it poses an issue for com-
putational approaches (outlined in Chapter 6) which have not
considered the potential that users may use features of language
varieties other than their own.
• Background: The background of this paper first introduces work
in the emerging field of Computational Sociolinguistics such as
work by Eisenstein (2015) which found that patterns of ortho-
graphic variation in Twitter broadly correspond to those observed
in speech (see Section 6.5.2 for a discussion of this paper). It then
goes on to explore research on ‘stylisation’ –​that is when individ-
uals use language that is markedly different from their habitual
style. In Section 7.5 we introduced stylisation when we saw that
people often use features of non-​ local dialects (e.g., Jamaican
English) to align with identities or meanings associated with indi-
viduals who use that dialect. Although CS research has examined
language variation in social media, no research had considered
language stylisation. This paper suggests that stylisation may be a
problem for CS approaches which assume that ‘individuals write
how they speak’.
• Methods: This paper uses a large dataset of Tweets from ten British
gay men. The rationale for choosing this demographic was because,
as a member of this community myself, I was aware that gay men
often stylise aspects of AAVE in speech. For instance, lots of the lan-
guage which people describe as ‘gay slang’ like ‘hunty’, ‘slay’, and
‘kween’, are actually words that originated in AAVE and have been
borrowed into gay culture. Based on these observations, I wanted
 Mixed Approaches 187

to see if people used features of AAVE in Twitter. This ‘insider’

perspective is what is called an ‘emic perspective’. In other words,
my analysis is informed by my own positionality –​as a queer
British man –​who participates in this culture and has an insider
understanding of the community under study.
I chose a small number of individuals to study (ten men) because
I wanted to make some more detailed claims about the men’s lan-
guage practices. Generally speaking, CS work like Eisenstein’s
(2015) analysis explores variation in datasets comprising billions of
tweets from millions of users. The social identities of users are typ-
ically inferred indirectly through things like the users’ name and/​or
their location metadata. This study, however, intentionally restricts
the dataset, focussing on the profiles of just ten men. This enabled
me to manually inspect the timelines of each of the users to confirm
that (i) they identify as male, (ii) they are from the UK and likely
speak a variety of British English, (iii) they are young adults, and
iv) they identify as gay.
Once I had identified ten users, I extracted all of their tweets
through the Twitter API using twitteR (this is a package used
in the R language programming software). In total, I extracted
15,804 tweets. I then manually inspected the tweets and coded
them for a variety of AAVE features. Many of these are ortho-
graphic representations of spoken language processes and phe-
nomena. This includes features such as completive done (e.g., ‘I
done bought up all the good ones) and the monophthongisation of
/​aɪ/​which is orthographically represented as <a> in place of <y>,
<ye>, <ie>, <uy>, and so on (e.g., Story of ma’ fuckin life). I then
counted how many times each of these features occurred. From
this point, I then used interactional analyses to examine how the
features were used in conversation.
• Analysis: The analysis finds that, of the 15,804 tweets extracted
from the ten users, 307 (1.9%) tweets contain AAVE features.
Although this number might seem very low, remember these men
are not AAVE speakers. That they are using AAVE features at all
is potentially interesting. And, importantly, they don’t appear to
be using just one feature. They use a range of syntactic, ortho-
graphic, and lexical features. This includes syntactic features like
copula absence –​i.e., the absence of is/​are (e.g., @User @User oh
you nasty), phonological features such as the realisation of /​ɛː/​ as
[ɚ] orthographically represented as <ur> (e.g., My huur done gone
CRAY!), and AAVE lexis including bae, hunty, ratchet, thirsty, and
so on.
One of the main findings of my paper is the AAVE features
are more common in directed messages, that is when users direct
a tweet to another individual by tagging their username. In fact,
188 Researching Language and Digital Communication

60.9% (n =​ 187) of the 307 tweets containing AAVE features are

directed. When we break this down even further, we see that they
tend to be used in interactions between gay men. 90.9% (n =​ 170)
of the 187 directed tweets are to other gay male users. This suggests
that using AAVE has a particular symbolic value as a ‘gay male’
in-​group style.
After exploring the quantitative distribution of the different
features, interactional analyses are then employed to understand
where and how features of AAVE are used. By focussing on the
use of AAVE in the tweets, I argue that users are stylistically using
features of this variety to perform a strategically inauthentic style.
In other words, the use of AAVE in these tweets is not to be taken at
face value: The men were not attempting to be perceived as AAVE
users. Rather, they selectively and strategically used a subset of
features for some more abstract purpose.
To understand this abstract function, I decided to consider how
AAVE and AAVE-​speaking individuals are represented in broader
digital culture. If we look at popular memes of Black women –​many
of whom speak AAVE –​we see that there is a general tendency
to characterise or represent Black women as ‘sassy’, ‘fierce’ and
‘aggressive’. This, I argue, is linked to a long-​standing media trope
of the ‘sassy Black woman’. Memes like the ‘strong independent
Black woman who don’t need no man’, for instance, recycle these
tropes in the context of DMC.
At this point, I argue that these mediatised representations of
Black women might help us to explain why the gay men in my
study use features of AAVE. I argue that we should not interpret
the use of AAVE by the gay men as an attempt to actually be read
as Black women (as a CS analysis might predict). This is a too
simplistic reading of the variation. Rather, I contend that the men
use features of AAVE to perform social meanings associated with
African American women. More specifically I suggest that, by using
features of AAVE, the men draw on a trope of Black women as
‘sassy’ –​a value which is often valued in certain subcultures of the
gay community. In this way, the gay men create and circulate a
linguistic style which is associated with a particular gay identity –​
what I call the ‘Sassy Queen’ (‘queen’ is a label used to describe an
effeminate gay man).
• Conclusions: The paper argues for a greater focus on stylisation
and appropriation in digital communication. It argues that stylisa-
tion may be problematic for CS approaches which have assumed
that people write how they habitually speak. Finally, it calls for
more work which combines quantitative and qualitative methods in
explaining patterns of DMC.
 Mixed Approaches 189

8.4 Case Study 3: Lopez and Kübler (f.c.)

Lopez, Holly & Sandra Kübler (forthcoming). Contextualization in
abusive language annotation and corpora development. Discourse,
Context, and Media.

• Summary: Research on hate speech has typically taken one of two

approaches. Interactional work has described the discursive features
of hate speech, focusing on issues such as impoliteness and ambi-
guity. Computational approaches, on the other hand, have focussed
on developing models which can automatically identify and classify
abusive language. This paper brings the two approaches together
arguing that Interactional Sociolinguistic approaches could explain
discrepancies in the manual annotation of hate speech.
• Background: The paper first surveys computational research on
hate speech. In this field, hate speech is generally identified via
automated means, such as sentiment analysis (i.e., how positive or
negative a text is). These approaches require large corpora which
are used to develop models of hate speech. Human annotators must
first make decisions about which messages are considered harmful
or abusive before these decisions are used to train machine learners.
As the authors acknowledge, this is not an objective process: The
annotators’ biases and beliefs are likely to influence what they
find harmful and/​or abusive. These biases in turn are fed into the
automated systems that identify hate speech. One potential issue is
that the annotators do not have access to the context of a message;
they must determine whether the message is harmful based solely
on the content of an isolated message. The background goes on
then to juxtapose this approach with that used in Interactional
Sociolinguistics where context is key to understanding the intended
meaning of a message.
• Method: The authors use a large corpus of messages which is often
used for abusive language detection: Jigsaw’s Unintended Bias in
Toxicity Classification corpus. This corpus was created using con-
tent from the Civil Comments platform. A now defunct news sharing
platform, Civil Comments, asked other users to review and vet con-
tent before it could be posted. When the platform ceased operations
in 2017, they made ~2 million messages publicly accessible. The
corpus which this paper uses was created as part of a shared com-
petition to develop the best machine learning approaches to iden-
tifying harmful speech in social media. Crowdsourced annotators
were asked to label the toxicity of messages on a scale of ‘very
toxic’, ‘toxic’, ‘non-​toxic’, or ‘hard to say’.
The authors of the paper first reclassified a sample of the
messages in the corpus to help the classifiers make more nuanced
190 Researching Language and Digital Communication

identifications about what the intention of the message. The anno-

tation criteria included three abusive categories (e.g., implicit,
explicit, and self-​ abuse) and five non-​ abusive categories (non-​
abusive, argumentative, meta, casual profanity, and irony). The
first step was to ask a group of minimally trained people to anno-
tate 325 messages from the original corpus. The annotators were
initially introduced to literature on profanity and hateful language
in a classroom setting. They then practised their annotations on
20 examples before discussing their coding in groups. After they
had completed these tasks, they were given 50 messages to anno-
tate. The authors then compared the coding by the minimally
trained annotators with the original annotation from the corpus
and also annotations by an expert. Any disagreements were iden-
tified and computer mediated discourse analysis (CMDA; Herring,
2004) was employed to understand why those disagreements arose.
More specifically, the authors employ concepts from Interactional
Sociolinguistics to understand how contextualisation cues, ambi-
guity, and other discourse phenomena, might have influenced the
annotators’ decisions.
• Analysis: The first part of the analysis explores annotator
(dis)agreements. This section compares annotations made by
untrained crowdsourced workers, minimally trained annotators, and
an expert. High degrees of agreement were found only for the cat-
egory of irony. Other categories, such as ‘argumentative’ messages,
showed low levels of inter-​annotator agreement. The authors suggest
that this finding is indicative of the fine line between content that is
contentious and that which is harmful, hateful, or inappropriate.
The second part of the analysis tries to understand the causes
of the disagreements. They suggest that contextualisation cues and
other interactional phenomena might help explain why there are
low levels of agreement between the annotators. For instance, they
analyse one instance which includes the message ‘toxic feminism
is the real problem’. This message was originally labelled abusive
by the crowd-​sourced annotators but it was labelled ‘non-​abusive’
by the expert. Without an awareness of the context, it is very hard
to understand what this message means. In other words, ‘toxic fem-
inism’ could reference any number of political ideas or perspectives.
It is therefore very difficult for annotators to infer whether this type
of message is intended to be abusive if they do not have access to
the broader conversation in which this message appears.
A second issue the authors discuss is the fact that annotators
often don’t have access to or knowledge of popular culture and
current events referenced in the message. For instance, one of the
messages references the Denver Broncos, an American football
 Mixed Approaches 191

team. The message itself, as replicated below, was initially labelled

as ‘abusive’ by the crowdsourced annotator but as ‘non-​abusive’ by
the expert (Extract (1)):
(1) ‘Actually many Bronco fans do have issues with it. So glad you
just lump yourself in as a ‘true Bronco fan’ because you agree
with some of the players (note some of the players, not all). And
I am sure the fact that since last year, the ratings continue to go
down for NFL games. And the fact that Alejandro Villanueva’s
jersey overnight became the #6 bestselling jersey at NFL.com.
You sure do miss a lot of facts. Did you miss that Denver
sunk it up yesterday? Gee, they sure did. A true fan would be
more bothered by how they played and the game plan and the
coaching decisions rather than this garbage’.
It is unclear from the message alone why the annotator had labelled
this as ‘abusive’. There doesn’t appear to be any explicit hateful sen-
timent in the message. However, if the reader has some awareness
of the cultural references the message makes, it is possible to under-
stand why this message was originally labelled as ‘abusive’. The
message makes references to Alejandro Villanueva –​an American
footballer who was involved in a political controversy in 2017.
His team, the Steelers, had decided not to take to the field for the
national Anthem to avoid controversies surrounding the protest of
taking the knee in response to racial inequality in the US. However,
Villanueva was unaware of this decision and so walked onto the
pitch and stood for the national anthem. Although this was unin-
tentional, his actions were interpreted as an attempt to undermine
his teammates and the efforts of those fighting racial inequality. On
social media, he was hailed by right-​wing pundits for apparently
taking a stand against the growing tide of protests. By referencing
this event, the author of the above message appears to align with
this misreading of the events, using Villanueva’s actions to diminish
the experiences of African Americans. This interpretation, however,
relies entirely on the audience having quite considerable knowledge
of American football and racial politics in the US.
• Conclusions: The paper shows that annotator agreement on abu-
sive language is difficult to attain given that annotators rarely have
access to the context of the message. The researchers suggest that
giving access to the entire conversation in which the message is
located might help annotators make more informed decisions as to
whether the message is abusive or not. In other words, interactional
approaches (such as contextualising messages) might help improve
the accuracy and efficiency of computational models in detecting
hate speech.
192 Researching Language and Digital Communication

8.5 Summary
This chapter introduced and summarised three contemporary
approaches which combine ‘big’ (i.e., computational) and ‘small’ (i.e.,
interactional) methods. Androutsopoulos (2022) argues that users
deploy typographic features to parody voices of imagined people with
a particular world view. Computational tools are used to extract a
large corpus of Reddit posts and their related metadata before dis-
course analysis is employed to understand how <!!1!> is used in con-
versation. Similarly, in my own work (Ilbury, 2019) I automatically
extracted a large corpus of Twitter posts before examining stylised
performances of AAVE in the tweets. I argued that the stylisation of
AAVE referenced a particular racialised imagining of Black women as
‘sassy’. Finally, in Lopez and Kübler (forthcoming), the authors argue
that discrepancies in hate speech annotation are due to differences in
awareness of the message context. An understanding of the message
context might help improve agreement in manual classification. In
turn, this would benefit the automatic detection of hate speech as
models are trained on manually coded datasets. All three papers dem-
onstrate the analytical potential of combining ‘big’ and ‘small’ data
approaches and perspectives. A synergistic approach which benefits
from quantitative and qualitative insights will enable us to provide a
more complete account of language and DMC.

8.6 Further Reading

Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2021). Polymedia in interaction. Pragmatics and
Society, 12: 707–​724.
Androutsopoulos, Jannis (f.c.). Methodological synergies in the study of
digital discourse [special issue]. Discourse, Context, & Media.
Bamman, David, Jacob Eisenstein & Tyler Schnoebelen (2014). Gender
identity and lexical variation in social media. Journal of Sociolinguistics,
18: 135–​160.
DILCO Lecture Series (2022, 2023, 2024). www.dilco.uni-​hamb​urg.de/​act​ivit​
ies.html. University of Hamburg.
Nguyen, Dong (2017). Text as social and cultural data: A computational per-
spective on variation in text. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Twente.
www.don​gngu​yen.nl/​the​sis/​thes​is_​d​ong_​nguy​en_​2​017.pdf
9 Beyond the Online

9.1 Introduction
In this chapter we cover the following topics:

• Earlier perspectives on media influence

• The concept of ‘mediatisation’
• From language change to sociolinguistic change
• The ‘post-​digital’ turn.

Throughout this book, we have introduced and described some innova-

tive and creative ways that people are using digital technologies to
communicate. It is now perhaps uncontroversial to conclude that a sub-
stantial chunk of our daily interactions take place in and through digital
technologies. This new reality often leads people to conclude that digital
technologies are radically altering society and social interaction. As a
sociolinguist, I often encounter a commonly held belief that digital tech-
nologies and social media are fundamentally changing the way that we
speak and interact. So does social media lead to language change?
If you do a quick survey with members of the general public or your
friends and family and ask people the question ‘does the media influ-
ence the way we speak?’, most people will quickly and confidently
assert that ‘yes, without a doubt, social media, TV, film, and so on,
all influence the way we speak’. People will then very likely go on
to cite specific examples of how different types of media have led to
language change. Common examples include claims that ‘we’re all
now speaking ‘txtspeak’’, references to an American child who has
apparently picked up a British accent from watching the children’s TV
show Peppa Pig, and the assertion that there is now a ‘TikTok accent’.
Similar to these claims, newspapers are awash with articles that decry
the loss of ‘proper grammar and punctuation’ apparently thanks to
Twitter’s character limit, whilst others warn of the serious and detri-
mental effects of social media on Standardised English. What we see in
all these claims is an extremely common and often undisputed belief
that media, especially social media, has led to dramatic changes in lan-
guage and social interaction.

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194 Researching Language and Digital Communication

However, if you ask a sociolinguist a similar question –​‘do media

lead to language change?’ –​you may be surprised to hear that our
answer isn’t a straightforward ‘yes’. This is because the role of media
in language change is heavily contested in sociolinguistics. Although
many people will claim that people pick up accents from their favourite
films, TV shows, and other forms of media (see the Peppa Pig and
TikTok accent examples above), as Tagliamonte (2014: 229) concedes,
‘the impact on language of media is surprisingly difficult to substan-
tiate’ in sociolinguistics.
You may be even more surprised to hear that quite a few sociolinguists
have gone further to dismiss the influence of media on language change.
The prominent sociolinguist, Peter Trudgill (2014), claims the influence
of media is ‘irrelevant’ to language change, whilst the founding father of
variationist sociolinguistics, William Labov (2010) contends that media
do not generate change, but rather reflect it. For many sociolinguists,
the only conceivable media influence on language change is at the level
of lexis. Trudgill and Labov concede that it is uncontroversial to claim
that people borrow words from their favourite programmes they watch
or from social media communities they engage in. But beyond lexis,
very many scholars have questioned the idea that media has any sig-
nificant role in language change. In recent years, however, this view
has been challenged as sociolinguistics has reassessed the relationship
between society, (digital) media, and language.
In this chapter, we survey sociolinguistic approaches and theories
of media influence in language change. We will see that the approach
to studying media and language has heavily evolved in recent years.
The field has gradually moved away from viewing media influence as
something that can be measured directly and which has an influence
on language change towards a more holistic approach which considers
the role of higher-​level media processes (e.g., mediatisation) in socio-
linguistic change.

9.2 Media and Language Change

Language change is a natural and inevitable fact of life. Evidently,
the English that we use today, such as that used in this book, is not
the same variety that would have been spoken or written in the 17th
century. Some of this language change has occurred above the level of
consciousness (what linguists call ‘change from above’). Although lots
of language change occurs below the level of consciousness (‘change
from below’). Some examples of language change include:

• Semantic (meaning) change: Today, the adjective gay is used to refer

to ‘someone who is attracted to someone of the same sex’. The term
can be traced back to the 12th century where it meant ‘full of joy or
 Beyond the Online 195

mirth’. In the 1980s, gay acquired a pejorative meaning: It is some-

times used to mean ‘dumb’ or ‘stupid’ (e.g., that song is so gay).
• Phonological (sound) change: In Received Pronunciation, a socio-
lect spoken by the social elite in the UK, the vowel /​æ/​was tradition-
ally pronounced [ɛ], such that words like happy to be pronounced
like ‘heppy’. Over time, the pronunciation of this vowel in RP has
moved more towards the Standard Southern British pronunci-
ation, [æ].
• Grammatical change: The second person singular pronouns thee
and thou, common in the work of Shakespeare for instance, went
into decline in Early Modern English. Today, these pronouns are
absent from most varieties of Modern English.
• Lexical change: In contemporary forms of British English, the term
‘cinema’ is generally used to refer to the ‘place where films are
shown for general entertainment’. Some of the older generation,
however, use the term the ‘pictures’. This term comes from ‘motion
picture’ but is now considered outdated by younger generations.

Language change is often propelled by social change. As people move

around and settle in new areas, they bring with them new ways of
speaking and interacting. These language innovations diffuse through
speech communities. Diffusion refers to the process by which features
from one dialect or variety spread to another. Trudgill (1986; 2014)
argues that linguistic diffusion is primarily propelled through accom-
modation in face-​ to-​
face interaction. Accommodation here can be
defined as the tendency for speakers to adapt their linguistic behav-
iour to that of the person they’re interacting with. In simple terms, this
means to talk like others do. As speakers interact with one another,
they make small adjustments to how they speak (i.e., they accommo-
date). Over time, these adjustments lead to more general changes in
the linguistic norms of a speech community.
Because language change has typically been viewed as a product of
synchronous face-​to-​face interaction, media –​especially asynchronous
media like television and films which are often defined as ‘passive’–​
have not been typically thought of as possible influences on language
change. Trudgill (1986: 40) concludes, the ‘point about the TV set is
that people, however much they watch and listen to it, do not talk to
it (and even if they do, it cannot hear them!), with the result that no
accommodation takes place’.
Subsequently, and as mentioned in the introduction to this chapter,
for many sociolinguists, the only conceivable form of language change
that could be reasonably attributed to media influence is lexis. This type
of perspective is evident in Chamber’s chapter in the book Language
Myths, in which he attempts to dispel to belief that ‘TV Makes People
Sound the Same’ by arguing that media are limited to the diffusion of
196 Researching Language and Digital Communication

vocabulary and catchphrases. For Chambers, it is perfectly conceiv-

able to assume that we might watch a TV show or film and think,
‘hey, that’s a cool or catchphrase word, I’ll use it’. The term catfish ‘to
deceive someone, typically by using an anonymous or fake persona
on a social media site’ apparently entered British English in this way,
having been first used on the 2010 American documentary of the same
name. Other examples include the catchphrase ‘ya-​ba da-​ba doo’ from
the cartoon, The Flintstones, and the use of ‘-​NOT!’ onto the end of
positive declarative statements, originally from the American sketch
comedy program Saturday Night Live (Chambers 1998: 125). Trudgill
likewise acknowledges that people may adopt words and phrases from
print media having himself acquired “American words like campus and
freshman in the 1960s, without ever having visited the U.S.A., from
reading American novels” (2014: 215). But beyond lexis, for these
researchers, media is unlikely to play a role in ‘higher-​level’ (i.e., syn-
tactic and phonological) language change. This perspective is perhaps
best summarised by Trudgill who dismisses media influence entirely,
concluding that “the question of what role the electronic media may
play in linguistic change […] is therefore of no great interest in solving
the big challenges of linguistics” (2014: 221).

Points for reflection

• The above debate on ​media influence on language change focusses

mainly on ‘old’ media like television, books, and radio. Do you
think Trudgill’s claims regarding the lack of relevance of media
to language change apply to ‘new’ media genres like digital and
social media?

Other researchers, however, have not been so dismissive of the poten-

tial for media to influence language change. This includes work
which has suggested that television –​along with other sociolinguistic
factors –​could be a factor in sound change. For instance, in their
work on the speech of young people in the Scottish city of Glasgow,
Stuart-​Smith and colleagues (2013) find that, in addition to other
more conventional factors, television is an important factor in ongoing
linguistic changes in the community. They find that the use of two
features which had diffused from London (TH-​fronting: the use of [f]‌
for /​θ/​and L-​vocalisation: The vocalisation of coda /​l/​in words such
as milk and feel), was accelerated by a strong engagement with the
London-​based TV soap, EastEnders. Crucially, however, in this study,
TV is not attributed to be the cause or sole factor of language change.
It is one of many factors. This finding demonstrates why it is diffi-
cult to isolate the role of media in language change: Media is highly
imbricated in the social fabric of everyday life.
 Beyond the Online 197

As perhaps evident in the discussion so far, the debate regarding

media influence and language change has overwhelmingly focussed on
one type of media: Television. Arguably, television is a very different
type of media when compared to the highly interactive and participa-
tory spaces of social and digital media that we have introduced in this
book. Trudgill (2014), for instance, appears to dismiss the influence
of media on language change because his definition of media is based
primarily on television –​a form of mass media which does not facili-
tate face-​to-​face interaction. But the introduction of DMC and video
platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Skype have complicated
this understanding of media engagement. Many of these services
enable users to communicate via digitally mediated synchronous, face-​
to-​face interaction. If diffusion takes place via face-​to-​face interaction,
it seems conceivable that platforms like Zoom and Skype could facili-
tate this. Any theory of media and language change would need to
take into account both types of media engagements.
In response, others have suggested that sociolinguistics had been
working with a narrow view of media influence. One main critique
is that researchers had only really considered the possible effects of
media on language change. Research had concentrated heavily on
the question of whether engaging with types of media could lead to
changes in an individual’s language variety, such as their accent or
grammar. This is quite a narrow view of the role of media in social
interaction. As we have seen throughout this book, digital and social
media appear to be prime forums in which representations of speakers
and varieties are circulated, debated, and consumed. It seems entirely
plausible that performances of dialects, metadiscursive commentaries,
and other sociolinguistic phenomena will have some impact on how
language is used.
The exclusive focus on ‘media and language change’ in earlier
work was, however, not shared in all subdisciplines and traditions of
sociolinguistics. Androutsopoulos (2014: 13) observes that German
sociolinguists had engaged with this question for some time. He cites
work by Holly and Püschel (1993: 148–​152) who suggest that tele­
vision had an impact on contemporary forms of German in four
main ways:

1. Promotion of the standard variety

2. Awareness of other (non-​standard) varieties
3. Circulation of norms of interaction
4. Intensification of linguistic innovations.

Notably, in this framework, television is not simply ‘a platform

through which linguistic innovations diffuse’. Rather, the influence of
television on language is related to standardisation and dialect levelling
198 Researching Language and Digital Communication

(1), language attitudes and functions (2, 3), and promoting the spread
of neologisms (4). The focus here then, is less on language change,
and more on how media promote and circulate ideologies, beliefs, and
values which have sociolinguistic implications.

9.3 Media and Sociolinguistic Change

In current work on digital communication, researchers have moved
beyond a focus on language change towards a theory of media and
sociolinguistic change. Although this might initially seem a minor ter-
minological difference, this reconceptualisation forces us to reconsider
how media may be implicated in sociolinguistic processes beyond
structural language change, such as the types of standardisation and
representation outlined by Holly and Püschel (1993). This approach is
summarised by Androutsopoulos (2014: 6–​7) who argues that a focus
on sociolinguistic change enables us to:

1. Analyse changing relations between language and society beyond

focussing on specific linguistic features that are defined as belonging
to a ‘single’ language.
2. Analyse individuals’ linguistic practices in interaction, as opposed
to examining linguistic features.
3. Analyse the relevance of language ideology in the interaction
between use and change.
4. Analyse language use beyond spoken interaction. It considers how
language is used across media and institutional contexts.
5. Analyse the relevance of individuals’ agencies in sociolinguistic
change.

This type of perspective is much more in line with contemporary

post-​structuralist approaches to language (e.g., Bucholtz & Hall,
2005) that consider how language ideologies and broader processes of
socio-​cultural change may be implicated in how people use language.
In this way, ‘the media’ can no longer be considered some mono-
lithic entity that has a quantifiable influence or effect on language
and society. Rather, this approach considers how “specific contexts,
representations, and actors of media discourse draw on linguistic
resources in ways that may be relevant for change in language/​society”
(Androutsopoulos, 2017: 240).

9.3.1 Mediatisation
A key concept in the move towards understanding the role of media in
processes of sociolinguistic change is mediatisation. The term has been
defined in various ways by different researchers but for the purposes
 Beyond the Online 199

of this book, we use the term mediatisation to refer to “societal

changes in contemporary high modern societies and the role of media
and mediated communication in these transformations” (Lundby,
2009: 1). In other words, mediatisation allows us to explore both the
interrelation of change in media and communication, and social and
cultural change. Importantly, whilst this approach acknowledges the
fact that our social lives are increasingly configured in and through
digital technologies, it rejects the ‘external influence’ or ‘effect’
conceptualisations of media that were typical in earlier sociolinguistic
research (cf. Labov, 2001; Trudgill, 2014). Instead, it emphasises the
relevance of mediatised engagements in shaping sociolinguistic prac-
tice. In this way, mediatisation cannot be confirmed or disproved by
any single research project but operates at some ‘higher level’ of social
structure, comparable to other socio-​cultural forces like globalisation,
commercialisation, and commodification.

Key Term: Mediatisation

Mediatisation refers to changes which media bring about in everyday
life. This includes the role of media in processes of communication,
cultural practices, and social organisations.

This is a much more complex and abstract way of considering the

role of media in sociolinguistic change. But what does it actually
mean in practice? What types of sociolinguistic projects engage
with mediatisation? How is a research project which examines
media influence different to one which engages with processes of
mediatisation?
A good example of the type of research that emerges from this
approach is that which considers how people use media resources
in their everyday interactions. Sierra (2021), for instance, shows
how American youth make references to popular internet memes in
everyday conversation. In her work, Sierra argues that these inter-
textual media references serve important functions in discourse and in
the construction of social identity. Here, we see that, memes –​which
we typically think of as elements of digital communication –​take on
new meanings and functions as they are imported into everyday, face-​
to-​face, conversation.

Points for reflection

• Do you or your friends reference internet memes in conversation?

Why do you do this? What effect (e.g., relationship building, iden-
tity) do those memetic references achieve?
200 Researching Language and Digital Communication

Similarly, in my own work, I have examined the implications of the

mediatisation of language varieties. In work which was first introduced
in Chapter 7 (Ilbury, 2023), I have argued that the creation and
sharing of parodic TikTok videos that reference language varieties and
imagined users have the potential to shape how people use those lan-
guage varieties. My analysis focusses on a persona, ‘the roadman’, that
is closely associated with the dialect, Multicultural London English
(MLE). I argue that, as users create and share these parody videos,
they contribute to the reinterpretation (or ‘recontextualisation’) of this
variety from a dialect spoken by young working-​class people in East
London, to a style associated with ‘road’ culture and, more specific-
ally, an identity: ‘the roadman’. This identity is often depicted as
hyper-​masculine, and is associated with violence and criminal activ-
ities and, importantly, it is racialised as Black. TikTok performances
of the roadman, I argue, have important consequences for sociolin-
guistic change because they reconfigure our understanding of what
MLE is. In the videos, we see the outcome of the recontextualisation
as some TikTok videos inaccurately –​and problematically –​describe
features of MLE as ‘roadman English’ (see Figure 9.1). Though I focus
on digital data here in the form of TikTok videos, my argument is that
these performances are likely to influence and shape our understanding
of the speech variety more generally.

Figure 9.1 Roadman ‘translation’ TikTok video

 Beyond the Online 201

As these examples illustrate, in this work ‘media’ is not considered

some external ‘factor’ that can be operationalised as having a direct
effect on language change. Rather, we see how mediatisation –​of
speech styles, of speakers, of varieties –​may have sociolinguistic
consequences that go beyond the remit of digital communication. In
these examples, we see how references to internet memes are recruited
to fulfil interpersonal functions in everyday conversation and, through
TikTok parodies, users circulate ideologies of speakers and their
speech styles. Clearly, then, media and digital communication can no
longer be considered as distinct, locateable platforms that can be easily
disentangled from everyday life, each with their own sociolinguistic
conditions. Rather, they are now part of our everyday communicative
practices and so are likely to have major consequences for social inter-
action more generally.

9.4 The Post-​Digital Turn

Over the nine chapters of this textbook, we have tracked the develop-
ment of digital communication research from a field squarely focussed
on identifying and documenting a unique online variety bounded to
‘cyberspace’ (i.e., ‘internet linguistics’), towards an approach which
considers how digital communication is deeply embedded within
the infrastructures of everyday social interaction. The contemporary
approach we have outlined concludes that individuals’ digital practices
need to be considered alongside their other sociolinguistic practices,
and that media engagements, representations, and ideologies are likely
to inform and shape social interaction.
The development of this approach is, perhaps, indicative of just how
far we’ve come in embracing the internet and digital technology. Over
the course of 30 or so years, the internet has gone from something that
was once novel, used by few, and restricted in use, to a social com-
modity that is now mundane, highly pervasive, and easily accessible
(for most!). Today, very many of us use digital devices and platforms
in ways that are not particularly spectacular or even worth deliber-
ating. When I woke up this morning, turned off my alarm, and imme-
diately checked WhatsApp –​as I do most mornings –​I can’t say this
event was a standout moment of my day. Digital and social media are
so embedded in our lives –​in news, in school, in politics –​that these
interactions and practices are rarely, if ever, remarked upon.
Given that digital technologies are now relatively unremarkable,
some researchers have suggested that we are living in a post-​digital era.
This frame acknowledges that although digital technologies are clearly
very important in contemporary society, they are no longer considered
extraordinary or disruptive in any meaningful way (Tagg & Lyons,
2022; Bhatt, 2023). This term isn’t meant to refer to a period after
202 Researching Language and Digital Communication

digital technologies. Evidently, most people continue to use mobiles,

computers, and other digital devices in their work and social lives. But
it is intended to describe a shift in our relationship and engagements
with digital technologies.
With the post-​digital turn, we are forced to redirect our
attention: Away from studying patterns of communication in specific
digital sites and platforms, towards considering how users’ digital
practices are embedded within broader systems of social differentiation
and how these practices are interrelated with offline activities, roles,
and contexts. Work which takes a post-​digital approach considers not
only how users’ digital practices take place within everyday contexts of
interaction, like the park or at school, but also how those interactions
may shape sociolinguistic contexts and relationships that have typic-
ally thought of as ‘offline’.

Key Term: Post-​Digital

Post-​digital refers to the fact that digital technologies have ceased
to be disruptive. The current period can be defined as ‘post-​digital’
in so far that digital technologies are now considered by most to be
relatively unremarkable and have largely become embedded into our
everyday social practices in relatively unspectacular ways.

In work that employs a post-​digital framework, a common approach

has been to undertake blended ethnographic studies of communities
to understand how individuals use networked technologies in their
everyday communicative practice. Much of this work illustrates
that, for very many people, digital technologies have ceased to be
spectacular or novel (cf. Chapter 1; Turkle, 1995). Rather, for most
people, these platforms, services, and networks are highly mundane
and unspectacular. This is evidenced by the fact that people are seen to
continually switch between digital and physical contexts of interaction
without any real deliberation or effort.
I have found these practices to be especially common in how young
people use social and digital media. In what could now be described
as a ‘post-​digital’ ethnography of a youth group in East London
(Ilbury, 2022a), I found that, although the young people were frequent
and avid users of social and digital media, these platforms were so
embedded in their everyday communicative practices that they rarely
discussed platforms or services in conversation. When I tried to engage
them in discussions of ‘Snapchat’ or ‘who uses Facebook’, I found
that many of the young people found these to be trivial topics that
were not particularly interesting. The lack of interest in these topics,
I argue, can be understood in relation to the ‘post-​digital’ status –​or
 Beyond the Online 203

Figure 9.2 Snapchat stories depicting everyday life in East London

‘domestication’ –​of social and digital media. For many of the young
people (most were between the ages of 12 and 16) at the youth group,
social media had always been a fact of life. It was just another way
of communicating. Social media platforms and technologies were not
particularly remarkable or noteworthy for the young people –​they
were just another way of interacting with their friends. For instance,
in the following excerpt (1), 12-year-​old Harinder’s response to my
question ‘do you use social media’ suggests that it is a moot point since
“everyone uses social media” (Ilbury, 2022a: 4):

(1) Christian do you use social media?

Harinder yeah everyone uses social media it’s just like
innit. Contact your friends and stuff, you can call
people for free

These comments went hand in hand with the ways in which the young
people used social media. Their Snapchat posts did not present some
alternate reality or highly edited version of themselves. Far from it.
They uploaded stories that documented their everyday lives: From
journeys on the bus through Hackney central (an area of East London)
to playing basketball in the local park (see Figure 9.2). What we see
here then is that digital media –​and social media practices –​have
ceased to be novel. They are now everyday contexts in a post-​digital
era of social interaction.
204 Researching Language and Digital Communication

9.5 Where Next?

The field we’ve surveyed in this chapter looks very different to that we
introduced and discussed way back in Chapter 1. We’ve moved quite
quickly from a field squarely positioned on studying the ‘language
used on the internet’ to one which attempts to understand how digital
communication practices and technologies are embedded in everyday
contexts and dynamics. What people do online and how they commu-
nicate there now looks less novel or unusual than it once did. We now
know much more about the language used in digital communication
and the processes which shape the content of those messages. So where
does that leave a researcher interested in studying the sociolinguistics
of digital communication? What questions are worth pursuing? What
are some open issues in the field? What are our research priorities?
In his overview paper of the field, Androutsopoulos (2021: 719)
proposes a future research agenda that orients to five main issues:

1. Digitally mediated interaction: Research has moved from focus-

sing squarely on the analysis of language variation and change in
CMC towards an approach which considers the ‘[a]‌ccomplishment
of communicative goals, sequential procedures, [and] contextual-
isation practices’ in digital interaction.
2. The offline/​ online dichotomy: The focus should be on how
practices transcend the offline/​online. How those practices overlap,
complement, or contradict one another, as opposed to viewing
digital communication as a separate sphere of interaction
3. Holistic datasets: Research should examine how user’s digital
practices entwine with other modes of interaction. To do this, we
will need to employ blended ethnographic methods, as opposed to
simply focussing on publicly available posts.
4. Polymedia: Acknowledges that users will move between platforms
and channels for a variety of social and interactional reasons. Analyses
of digital communication should take stock of these polymedia
practices, as opposed to focussing on a single platform or channel.
5. Repertoires: Analyses will consider the multimodal and multilingual
practices of users, as opposed to focussing solely on monomodal/​
monolingual approaches.

Androutsopoulos’ agenda quite nicely summarises the theoretical

story that we have developed in this book. But I think we could go
further to add a few other research concerns:

• Critically consider the relevance of users’ social and personal iden-

tities in DMC: Media research has increasingly demonstrated the
central role of digital technologies in the formation of digital cultures
 Beyond the Online 205

related to race, sexuality, and gender. What linguistic practices

emerge from the digital publics that platforms enable minoritised
users to form? What role do identities like ‘Black British’ and ‘gay’
play in the formation and maintenance of digital cultures and,
relatedly, DMC?
• Focus on appropriation and commodification in DMC: Research
such as that discussed in this chapter has argued that people
regularly recycle and reuse resources from DMC in everyday
interactions (e.g., Sierra, 2021). Some of these features appear to
be from varieties that they do not habitually use and potentially
reference ideologies of those who typically use those varieties (e.g.,
Ilbury, 2019; 2022b). A critical approach needs to consider how
these features are appropriated and for what reasons and what the
consequences of those appropriations are.
• Consider users’ beliefs in relation to their practices: In our discus-
sion of metadiscourses, we argued that ideologies and beliefs that
people hold shape their linguistic and digital practices. Future
work on DMC should therefore engage more seriously with ‘lay
perceptions’ of digital communication. What can user perceptions
and metadiscourses tell us about language practices in DMC?
• Synergistic relationships between fields: Sociolinguistic analyses of
DMC will benefit greatly from a closer synergy between related fields
such as digital culture studies, media studies, computational lin-
guistics, anthropology, and communication studies. The increasing
availability of tools and approaches from other fields allows us to
scale up, scale down, zoom in, and zoom out to provide a more hol-
istic picture of DMC practices.

9.6 Summary
This chapter has introduced and explored a long-​standing debate in
sociolinguistics: The potential for (digital) media to promote language
change. We have seen how the field has gradually moved away from
focussing squarely on media ‘influence’ and ‘effect’. By considering
this development, we have seen how scholars have started to under-
stand the relationship between media and everyday language more
holistically by considering mediatisation and sociolinguistic change.
Within this development, there has been a tendency to focus less on
digital communication and social media as isolated contexts of inter-
action and more on how these platforms and services are embedded
in offline contexts and interactions. This has led us to introduce the
‘post-​digital’ turn in sociolinguistics which acknowledges that digital
technologies and social media are now relatively unremarkable aspects
of social life. Finally, we have sketched out a future agenda for the field.
206 Researching Language and Digital Communication

9.7 Activities
1. Informally ask your friends and family what they use social media
for. Are their profiles similar to or different from the identities that
they perform in everyday life? Consider your findings in reference
to the work on the post-​digital discussed in this chapter.
2. Check your recent uploads on Snapchat and/​or Instagram. What
do you post on your stories? Are these mundane posts or are they
highly cultivated? Who are you posting for? Why do you upload
these types of posts?

9.8 Further Reading

Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2014). Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change.
Berlin: De Gruyter.
Cramer, Florian (2014). What is ‘post-​digital’? APRJA, 3(1): 10–​24.
Lane, Jeffrey (2019). The Digital Street. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lyons, Agnieszka & Caroline Tagg (2024). Post-​digital connectivities: Framing
offline encounters in a digital prospection space. Applied Linguistics, 1–​20,
advance.
Miller, Daniel (2016). Social Media in an English Village. London: UCL Press.
Mortensen, Janus, Nikolas Coupland & Jacob Thorgersen (2017). Style,
Mediation, and Change: Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Talking Media.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

9.9 References
Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2014). Mediatization and sociolinguistic change.
Key concepts, research traditions, open issues. In Jannis Androutsopoulos
(ed.), Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change, pp. 3–​ 48. Berlin: De
Gruyter.
Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2016). Theorizing media, mediation and
mediatization. In Nikolas Coupland (ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical
Debates, pp. 282–​302. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2021). Polymedia in interaction. Pragmatics and
Society, 12: 707–​724.
Bhatt, Ibrar (2023). Postdigital possibilities in applied linguistics. Postdigital
Science and Education.
Bucholtz, Mary & Kira Hall (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural
linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–​5): 585–​614.
Chambers, Jack K. (1998). TV makes people sound the same. In Laurie Bauer
& Peter Trudgill (eds.), Language Myths, pp. 123–​131. London: Penguin.
Coupland, Nikolas (2009). The mediated performance of vernaculars. Journal
of English Linguistics, 37(3): 284–​300.
Holly, Werner & Ulrich Püschel (1993). Sprache und Fernsehen in der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland. In Bernd U. Biere & Helmut Henne (eds.),
Sprache in Den Medien Nach 1945, pp. 128–​157. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
 Beyond the Online 207

Ilbury, Christian (2019). ‘Sassy queens’: Stylistic orthographic variation

in twitter and the enregisterment of AAVE. Journal of Sociolinguistics,
24: 245–​264.
Ilbury, Christian (2022a). Discourses of social media amongst youth: An
ethnographic perspective. Discourse, Context, and Media, 48: 100625.
Ilbury, Christian (2022b). U Ok Hun?: The digital commodification of white
woman style. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 26(4): 483–​504.
Ilbury, Christian (2023, First View). The recontextualisation of Multicultural
London English: Stylising the ‘roadman’. Language in Society, 53 (3): 1–​25.
Labov, William (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change, Vol. 2, External
Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lundby, Knut (2009) Introduction: ‘Mediatization’ as key. In Knut Lundby
(ed.), Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, pp. 1–​18. New York:
Peter Lang.
Sierra, Sylvia (2021). Millennials Talking Media: Creating Intertextual
Identities in Everyday Conversation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stuart-​Smith, Jane, Claire Timmins, Gwilym Pryce & Barry Gunter (2013).
Television is also a factor in language change: Evidence from an urban dia-
lect. Language, 89: 1–​36.
Tagg, Caroline & Agnieszka Lyons (2022). Mobile Messaging and
Resourcefulness: A Post-​Digital Ethnography. Oxon: Routledge.
Tagliamonte, Sali A. (2014). Situating media influence in sociolinguistic con-
text. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(2): 223–​232.
Trudgill, Peter (1986). Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell.
Trudgill, Peter (2014). Diffusion, drift, and the irrelevance of media influence.
Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(2): 213–​222.
Turkle, Sherry (1995). Life on the Screen. London: Simon & Schuster.
Index

#AccentChallenge 165–​166 characterological figures 162,

(ING) variation 45, 112, 137–​139, 165 165–​168
4CAT 116 chatspeak 19
Cheshire, Jenny 134
accommodation 45–​46, 195 Chicano English 61
affordances 36, 38–​43; high level Chinese 48–​49, 82–​83, 155,
40–​43; imagined 43; low level 39 158–​159
African American Vernacular citizen journalism 80–​81
English (AAVE): appropriation code-​mixing 48–​49, 153–​155
of 2, 31–​32, 173, 186–​188; as an code-​switching 48–​49, 153–​155
ethnolect 61; regional diversity in commodification 186–​188, 205
132 Communication Accommodation
algorithms 44, 85 Theory 45–​46
alt accounts 53–​54 Communities of Practice 73–​75
Androutsopoulos, Jannis 26, 170–​2, Computational Sociolinguistics
184–​186, 198, 201 129–​131
anonymity 64–​65, 69–​71 Computer Mediated Communication
Apify 117 (CMC) 13, 18–​27
appropriation 2, 31–​32, 173, constraints 36, 38–​43
186–​188, 205 contexts: collapse 49–​54; design 54;
Arab Spring 80–​81 collision 52
asynchronous CMC 19, 47 contextualisation cues 148–​152,
Audience Design 44–​46 189–​191
corpus linguistics 113, 164–​165
Bakhtin, Mikhail 161 Côte d’Ivoire 156–​157
BeReal 37 COVID-​19 12, 80, 118, 123, 184
big data 122–​141 crossing 162, 165–​168
bilingualism 48–​49, 153–​159 Crystal, David 18–​20, 22–​23
Black Twitter 69, 71, 132–​134
blended ethnography 115–​116, Danet, Brenda 65
202–​204 Danish 140, 152
boyd, danah 12, 40–​43, 52–​54, Dawkins, Richard 81–​82
67–​68, 124 dialectology 126, 131–​136
branding 31–​32, 108, 114–​115, diffusion 135–​136, 140, 173, 195–​197
151–​152 digital dualism 65–​66
bricolage 63 digital ethics 96–​108
broadcast media 79–​81, 194–​196 digital ethnography 53, 113–​116,
business communication 175–​177 202–​204
 Index 209

digital identity 63–​69 Harlem Shake 81–​83

digital tools 116–​118 hashtags 36, 41, 43, 47
discourse analysis 147–​178 hate speech 70, 147, 189–​191
doge 86–​87
Douyin see TikTok Ilbury, Christian 53, 94, 134–​137,
Drag Race 84 see also LGBTQ+​ 167–​168, 186–​188, 202–​203
Dutch 140, 156 imagined audience 46–​49
implicature 148–​152, 189–​191
emoji 149–​153 inauthenticity 161
emoticons 149–​153 indexicality 17, 124
enregisterment 77, 162, 165–​168, influencers 31–​32, 108, 114–​115,
184–​188 151–​152
ethnicity 69, 71, 132–​134, 156–​157, informed consent 100–​103
162, 165–​168 Instagram 10–​12, 36–​40, 43, 68, 74,
ethnography 53, 113–​115, 105, 117
202–​204 Instant Messaging 10, 18, 21, 25,
ethnolect 61 see also AAVE and 176–​178
Chicano English intensifiers 25–​26, 112
Ewe 157 Interactional sociolinguistics
145–​180
face 174–​176; Face Threatening Acts internet linguistics 9 see also Crystal,
(FTAs) 174; positive/​negative face David
174 intertextual references 199, 205
Facebook: affordances 39, 40–​44, intraspeaker variation 199, 205
48, 52; identity 67, 68; political Irony 148–​152, 189–​191
uprisings 80; status updates 158;
use or non-​use of 53, 54 Japanese 155
Far-​right 81–​83, 184–​186 Jurgenson, Nathan 65–​66
films 79–​81, 194–​196
FireAnt 116 Labov, William 17, 45, 125, 194
Fischer, John 17 language alternation 153–​159
flaming 70 language change 194–​205
French 157 LGBTQ+​ 32, 54, 62–​63, 173, 187
lol 25–​26, 102, 112, 145–​147, 173
gay men 32, 54, 62–​63, 173, 187 LOLCat 86–​88
Gen Z 60, 63, 173 London 134–​136, 162, 165–​168,
Gender 22–​26, 65, 95, 106–​107, 202–​203
112–​113, 140–​41
General Data Protection Regulation Madianou, Mirca 30
(GDPR) 101 media influence 193–​198
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra 16, 22, mediatisation 194–​201
26, 147 memes 81–​89, 118; Language of
German 184–​186 86–​89; references to 116, 199
Ghana 156–​157 metadata 113, 128, 130, 140
Goffman, Erving 49 metadiscourse 168–​173
Greek 16, 153–​154; Greeklish 16 micro-​celebrity 31–​32, 108,
Grieve, Jack 104, 128, 131–​134, 114–​115, 151–​152
133–​140 Miller, Daniel 30
Grindr 70 mixed methods 183–​192
210 Index

Multicultural London English research proposal 95–​96

(MLE) 134–​136 research questions 95–​96
multilingualism 48–​49, 153–​159 roadman 162, 165–​168
Multimodality 10, 27, 29–​30, 96, role playing games (RPGs) 11, 64,
104, 158–​159, 204 66
Multi-​User Domains (MUDs) 11,
64, 66 Scotland 15, 131, 136
Mumsnet 74–​77 searchability 43
Senegal 156–​157
netlish 4, 19 see also Crystal, David Shetland Islands 31, 179
netspeak 20, 23 Sierra, Slyvia 199, 205
Newspapers 79–​81, 194–​196 Skype 197
Nigeria 156–​157 small data 145–​179
SMS 19, 24–​25, 112, 149
observer’s paradox 125 Snapchat 28–​29, 40, 53, 117,
offline-​online 28–​30 202–​203
online communities 71–​77 Social Networking Sites 66–​67
orthographic variation 15–​16, 86, sociolinguistic change 198–​204
111–​112, 132, 137–​139, 149, soda-​pop-​coke 126–​129
164, 186–​187 South Africa 156–​157
Outer Hebrides 136 Spanish 152
spelling variation see orthographic
parody 184, 192, 200 variation
participatory culture 78–​81, 63–​75 Stuart-​Smith, Jane 196
Parton, Dolly 68 style 44–​46, 59, 63, 73, 86–​89,
Pepe the Frog 81–​83 159–​162, 167–​168
persistence 40–​43 stylisation 159–​162, 167–​168
personae see characterological stylistic variation see style
figures synchronous CMC 19, 47
politeness 173–​178
polymedia 30, 33, 204 Tagg, Caroline 54, 109, 113, 158,
polyphony 161–​162 164–​165, 201
positionality 110, 187 Tagliamonte, Sali 25–​26, 112, 194
post-​digital 201–​204 Technological Determinism 21
produsage 79–​80 telegrams 23–​24
public figures 107 television 79–​80, 195–​197
Python 116–​117, 184–​186 Thai 158
TH-​fronting 15, 164, 196
queerness 32, 54, 62–​63, 173, 187 TikTok 30, 43, 79–​80, 85–​86, 98,
104, 116–​117, 165–​170; accent/​
Race 69, 71, 132–​134, 156–​157, voice 30–​31, 173, 193–​194
162, 165–​168 Tinder 68, 152
Ramaphosa, Cyril 58–​59 translanguaging 155, 158–​159
Rampton, Ben 160, 162 trolling 70
Reddit 53–​54, 74, 95, 104, 106–​107, Trudgill, Peter 45, 194–​197
116, 130, 184–​186 Turkish 156
reflexivity 110 Turkle, Sherry 64–​66, 114
repertoire 62, 155, 204 Twitch 60, 72–​73, 75–​76
 Index 211

Twitter 9, 30; affordances of 39, voicing 161 see also Bahktin,

41–​43, 46–​48; dialectology on Mikhail
127–​140; identity on 58–​59, 69,
151–​152, 186–​189; methods 100, Weibo 10, 93, 151–​152, 158–​159
103–​107, 118; microblogging on Welsh 140
80 WhatsApp 8–​9, 42–​43, 94–​95, 100–​
txtspeak 20, 23 102, 145–​146, 150, 163, 177–​178
Wolof 156–​157
valley girl 162, 165–​168
variationist sociolinguistics 45, 62, X see Twitter
111–​112, 125–​129
Virtual communities 71, 72 see also YouTube 79–​80, 117
MUDs; virtual worlds
virtual worlds, 11, 64, 66 Zeeschuimer 116, 142
visibility 31–​32, 41–​42, 85–​86 Zoom 10–​12, 96, 197