Enregistered spellings in interaction. Social indexicality in digital written communication

Busch, Florian (2022). Enregistered spellings in interaction. Social indexicality in digital written communication. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 40(3), pp. 297-323. De Gruyter 10.1515/zfs-2021-2033

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Against the backdrop of the societal differentiation of literacy, the paper investigates spelling variation in digital written communication beyond the binary paradigm of standard and nonstandard. To this end, the paper proposes a formal classification of digital spelling variants and then focuses on the socio-communicative functions of these variants in usage. Theoretically grounded in the notions of register and social indexicality, the paper discusses how spelling variants are metapragmatically ordered by social actors and deployed in text-messaging interactions in order to indicate interpretive context. To investigate these phenomena holistically, the paper furthermore presents a tripartite research framework that addresses digital writing regarding its I) structural variants, II) communicative practice, and III) reflexive awareness. Afterwards, this methodological approach is applied empirically. This is done based on a data set that includes samples of everyday literacy by 23 German adolescents: informal WhatsApp texting, on the one hand, formal school essays on the other. The exemplary analyses focus on phonostylistic spellings (e. g. elisions such as <ich hab> instead of <ich habe>) and graphostylistic spellings (e. g. graphemic substitutions such as <daß> instead of <dass>) in these WhatsApp interactions, reconstructing the metapragmatic status of standard orthography in digital writing. By combining structure-oriented, interactional, and ethnographic perspectives, the paper seeks a disciplinary dialogue by relating concepts of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology not only to research fields of media linguistics but also to research on writing systems.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of Germanic Languages
06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of Germanic Languages > German Linguistics
06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of Germanic Languages > Applied Linguistics and Communication Science
06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of Germanic Languages > Sociolinguistics

UniBE Contributor:

Busch, Florian

Subjects:

400 Language > 410 Linguistics
400 Language > 430 German & related languages
800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 830 German & related literatures

ISSN:

0721-9067

Publisher:

De Gruyter

Language:

German

Submitter:

Florian Busch

Date Deposited:

17 Jun 2022 09:25

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 16:20

Publisher DOI:

10.1515/zfs-2021-2033

BORIS DOI:

10.48350/170695

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/170695

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