Netspeak in The Lurker Lounge and The Elder Scrolls Forums: a study of orthographic and lexical usage within two message boards By Eirik Jakobsen May, 2006 Master’s degree in literacy studies, MLIHOV – Thesis University of Stavanger, Faculty of Arts and Education 1 Abstract The present text type study is an investigation into the use of language in Computer- Mediated Communication, specifically the medium of online message boards. The study will discuss the orthographic and lexical features of ”Netspeak”, the term used to describe the type of register unique to CMC and compares the level of Netspeak-use between two online message boards, namely The Lurker Lounge and The Elder Scrolls forums. In addition to forum posts (the text types of message boards), the present study will also describe the use of Netspeak in a smaller corpus of emails. One of the underlying assumptions is that The Lurker Lounge – which has explicit rules on language use – will contain fewer tokens of Netspeak-features than The Elder Scrolls forums, which have no such rules. The register of Netspeak is characterised by such linguistic features as non- standard acronyms and abbreviations, non-standard orthographic and lexical forms, and non-standard capitalisation. These features are also very common in discussions on video games – the domain of both The Lurker Lounge and The Elder Scrolls forums. Thus, the present study will compare the corpus of forum posts with emails, to suggest that Netspeak is more commonly used in the former text type. The present study combines a quantitative analysis of the data, relating it to variables such as gender, nationality (L1 and L2 speakers of English), message board (LL vs TES) and medium (emails vs forum posts) with a qualitative study of the different categories of features and their use in the material. The usage is further illustrated with short case studies of two participants: Occhidiangela from The Lurker Lounge and MagTech from The Elder Scrolls forums. The study also provides a detailed description of message boards as a medium and an attempt to describe forum posts and emails as text types. The study was carried out by submitting a general announcement to both message board, detailing the aims and scope of the study, and asking for participants. Almost all 46 participants from The Lurker Lounge and The Elder Scrolls forums submitted their last 20 forum posts. The following linguistic features were noted: spelling errors, spelling variants, standard- and non-standard acronyms and abbreviations, non-standard vocabulary and non-standard capitalisation. 2 Although the figures seemed to indicate that Netspeak was more frequently used in The Elder Scrolls forums than in The Lurker Lounge, the difference was not as striking as initially presumed. Moreover, in contrast to the present writer’s presumptions, Netspeak occurred more frequently in the medium of email than in forum posts. Finally, the corpus of the present study showed that males and native speakers of English produced more tokens of Netspeak than females and L2 speakers. 3 Table of content 1.0 Introduction ...............................................................................................................6 2.0. The language of online communication as a subject of study..................................9 2.1. What is Computer-Mediated Communication?....................................................9 2.2. The “third medium” ...........................................................................................12 2.3. The characteristics of CMC: earlier studies ...................................................... 16 2.4. The concept of Netspeak....................................................................................21 2.5. The Concept of 1337-speak................................................................................23 3.0 Defining the medium...............................................................................................24 3.1. The message board.............................................................................................24 3.2. The forum post as a text type .............................................................................28 3.3. The email as a text type......................................................................................34 4.0. Methodology ..........................................................................................................38 4.1 The source materials............................................................................................38 4.1.1 The choice of informants.............................................................................. 38 4.1.2 The Lurker Lounge (www.lurkerlounge.com).............................................38 4.1.3 The Elder Scrolls forums (http://www.theelderscrolls.com) .......................40 4.2 The data collection ..............................................................................................42 4.3 Organisation of the data ......................................................................................43 4.4 The features selected for the study...................................................................... 44 5.0 Description of the corpus ........................................................................................49 5.1. Overview ............................................................................................................49 5.2. Topics of conversation .......................................................................................52 5.2.1. Gaming........................................................................................................52 5.2.2. Language and communication ....................................................................54 6.0. The use of non-standard features ...........................................................................59 6.1. The overall picture .............................................................................................59 6.1.1 The forum posts............................................................................................59 6.1.1.1. A comparison of the two message boards............................................60 6.1.1.2. Males vs Females ................................................................................. 63 6.1.1.3. First-language vs second-language speakers........................................67 6.1.2. Emails..........................................................................................................68 6.1.3. Forum posts vs Emails ................................................................................ 70 6.2. Discussion of the individual features ................................................................. 75 6.2.1. Spelling Errors.............................................................................................75 6.2.1.1. Insertion................................................................................................80 6.2.1.2. Omission...............................................................................................82 6.2.1.3. Substitution ..........................................................................................83 6.2.1.4. Transposition........................................................................................83 6.2.1.5. Grapheme substitution.......................................................................... 84 6.2.1.6. Apostrophe error .................................................................................. 85 6.2.1.7. Word division....................................................................................... 86 6.2.1.8. Other.....................................................................................................88 6.2.1.9. Spelling error types: Overview ............................................................89 4 6.2.2. Spelling Variants.........................................................................................94 6.2.2.1. Symbol variant ..................................................................................... 95 6.2.2.2. Emphasis variant .................................................................................. 97 6.2.2.3. Phoneme variant................................................................................... 99 6.2.2.4. Other...................................................................................................102 6.2.3. Acronyms and abbreviations..................................................................... 107 6.2.3.1. Standard acronyms............................................................................. 113 6.2.3.2. Non-standard acronyms......................................................................114 6.2.3.3. Standard abbreviations ....................................................................... 116 6.2.3.4. Non-standard abbreviations................................................................117 6.2.4. Non-standard vocabulary .......................................................................... 117 6.2.4.1. Compounds......................................................................................... 118 6.2.4.2. Affixation and word class changing...................................................119 6.2.4.3. Clipping..............................................................................................120 6.2.4.4. Blends.................................................................................................120