Speech Etiquette in Slavic Online Communities

This edited book focuses on speech etiquette, examining the rules that govern communication in various online communities: professional, female, and ethnospecific. The contributors analyze online communication in the Slavic languages Russian, Slovak, Polish, and Belarusian, showing how the concept of speech etiquette differs from the concept of politeness, although both reflect the relationship between people in interaction. Online communities are united on the basis of common informative or phatic illocutions among their participants, and their speech etiquette is manifested in stable forms of conducting discussions – stimulating and responding. Each group has its own ideas of unacceptable speech behavior and approaches to sanitation, and the rules of speech etiquette in each group determine the degree of rapport and distancing between the participants in discourse. The chapters in this book explore how rapport and distance are established through acts such as showing attention tothe addressee and increasing his or her communicative status; reducing or increasing the illocutionary power of evaluations and motivations; and evaluating one’s own or someone else’s speech. The volume will be of interest to researchers studying online communication in such diverse fields as linguistics, sociology, anthropology, programming, and media studies.

“The monograph clearly demonstrates how speech etiquette in online communication adapts to the technological conditions of virtual communication. The ways and forms of supporting verbal interaction depend on the socio-cultural and ethno-specific communicative experience of the group members, their cultural memory. Digital media, just like writing and printing, has caused another cultural revolution. They form new relationships in social reality: the analysis proves that a new culture of transition of mass communication to interpersonal communication and vice versa has been formed in online communication. The study, carried out in several Slavic languages, showed that linguistic diversity is a huge wealth of the modern world – and this is one of the strongest impressions from the book.”

-Stanisław Gajda, Opole University, Poland

“The new communicative reality and emerging discursive practices require urgent philological reflection. The volume isa pioneering experience in the study of one of the aspects of communication in social media – the etiquette. Its complexity lies in the fact that it is “dispersed” in the text flow, and it is often difficult to separate it from the informative component of media communication. The authors show that, in understanding new speech phenomena, the classical concepts of dialogue, speaker and addressee, etiquette and phatic interaction are useful and highly demanded. However, in this new communicative reality, they all “work” differently, in a new way. The most unexpected result of the study is the discovery of national-specific aspects on the etiquette side of global communication. I am convinced that not only will the book find its target readers, but it will also give an impetus to a new direction of media communication research.”

-Tatyana Viktorovna Shmeleva, Yaroslav-the-Wise Novgorod State University, Russia

“Online communication has drastically changed our values, norms and identities, and hence it has become the focus of many modern research directions in the sphere of Humanities. The monograph “Speech Etiquette in Slavic Online Communities” is a collection of intrinsic observations and thought-provoking conclusions concerning the essence of virtual online behavior, its specific trends in various social groups and its cultural diversity in Slavic languages. The joint efforts of the scholars from Russia, Poland, Lithuania and Belarus directed at the online etiquette description have resulted in an original and multifaceted linguistic and anthropological conception to be thought over and developed in various fields of discourse analysis. The book is worth reading and discussing in our academic community.”

-Vladimir Karasik, Pushkin State Russian Language Institute, Russia and Tianjin Foreign Studies University, China

“Written by a team of well-known researchers from several Slavic countries, the book about speech etiquette in online communities is excitingly interesting. It is distinguished by the innovative approach to the study of the eponymous communicative phenomenon defined as a system of norms for the organization of verbal and nonverbal behaviour. In constructing the typology of forms of virtual communication, the authors reasonably started from the specific identities of humans – homo loquens, homo communicans: informative and phatic types of interaction. To talk about something, to be together, to express something – these are the goals of both primitive people and today's homo virtualis. The idea of variability in the ratio of informative and phatic interaction proved to be productive in the construction of a linguistic typology of speech etiquette in online groups. Moreover, the appeal to the phenomenon of phatic interaction allowed the contributors of the volume to see the most significant differences in the presentation of relations between participantsamong different Slavic peoples. Thanks to the concept of etiquette in the discourse of network communities in the Slavic countries, a methodological basis for a consistent comparison of national customs of communication in the virtual world has been created.”

-Małgorzata Kita, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland

“The authors of this book are using an interesting and innovative approach in their analysis of speech etiquette in social networks. The book reveals socially and nationally specific lines of etiquette that online discussions must include in order to be successful. This book has an incredible learning potential for specialists in marketing, political science, sociology, linguistics and to those who are teaching Slavic languages. It should be read by everyone who is administering an online community. I enjoyed it from the first page to the last and found lots of valuable information for myself.”

-Alexandre Strokanov, Northern Vermont University – Lyndon, USA

Lilia Duskaeva is a Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at St. Petersburg State University, Russia, and Honored Professor of the Beijing Second Foreign Language University, China. She is Head of Media Linguistics Commission of the International Slavists Committee, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Media Linguistics (Saint Petersburg State University), and a member of the editorial boards for Verbum (Lithuania, Vilnius University) and Stylistyka (Poland, Opole University). She has written more than 250 scientific papers on linguopragmatics, functional stylistics, and media linguistics.