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Acceptable Language Online: Negotiating the Impact of Digital Affordances

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Abstract

In this chapter, Heuman focuses on ‘affordance-based’ deviations, i.e. non-standard spellings connected to the constraints and possibilities of digital communication, such as typos. Unlike rule-based deviations (e.g. confusion of their/they’re), affordance-based deviations do generally not carry presupposed indexicalities, which can result in conflicting understandings. Applying the concepts of metasociolinguistic stance-taking and language ideology, the study analyses how affordance-based deviations are negotiated in mundane interaction on two social media, Twitter and Jodel. Heuman finds that the interlocutors draw on diverging language ideological frames in the metalinguistic discussions, which results in face-threating situations and conflicts about the assignment of agency. These results underline the unsettled position and the ongoing indexicalisation process of affordance-based deviations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘Deviations’ here refer to spellings that in some way do not conform to standard orthography. Deviation should not be understood as ‘incorrect’ or as a degradation of non-standard orthography.

  2. 2.

    The original dataset consists of 534 discussion threads, 229 from Jodel and 305 from Twitter. The common theme for the collection is metalinguistic discussions. For Jodel, I manually excerpted messages that either included a deviation from standard orthography or discussed language in any way. For Twitter, I used the search function inserting keywords connected to heavily debated linguistic issues in Swedish, e.g. open compounds and misspellings (cf. the issues discussed in Karlsson and Lind Palicki 2017). Data collection proceeded until the material was saturated. Messages on Jodel were collected during 48 h in total, and tweets were collected over a period of two months.

  3. 3.

    The Swedish original is fully based on phonetic spelling, creating a sharp contrast to standard orthography. The corresponding phonetic spelling of the English phrase does not deviate as much from standard orthography.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden

    Anna Heuman

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  1. Anna Heuman
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Correspondence to Anna Heuman .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of French Studies, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Marjut Johansson

  2. Department of Languages, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen

  3. Department of English & American Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Jan Chovanec

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Heuman, A. (2021). Acceptable Language Online: Negotiating the Impact of Digital Affordances. In: Johansson, M., Tanskanen, SK., Chovanec, J. (eds) Analyzing Digital Discourses. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84602-2_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84602-2_7

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