Language Socialization in Online Communities
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LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES
INTRODUCTION
This chapter considers how communication in computer-mediated digital environments has been and could be approached from a language socialization perspective. The study of computer-mediated communication (CmC) and cyber-culture encompasses a range of disciplines, including communication, linguistics, cultural studies, and sociology, to name a few, with research findings emerging and scholarly debates becoming prominent only in the last 10 years given the relatively recent popularization of the Internet in the mid- to late-1990s. Even with its short history, the exploration of linguistic and social behaviors in online settings has dealt with issues that are germane to language socialization research. In this chapter, I review and assess how the study of online communication draws upon and extends our understanding of language socialization in new technological and global contexts of communication. The thematic areas that comprise the focus of this discussion are (1) the role of language practices in the formation of culture and community online, (2) socialization in transnational and diaspora networks as facilitated by the Internet; and (3) language ideology and language change in online contexts. Both the educational implications and promising research directions for each of these research areas are addressed. THE LINGUISTIC CONSTRUCTION OF O N L I N E C O M M U N I T I E S: E A R LY DEVELOPMENTS (1990S)
The notion “virtual community” came into prominence in the early to mid-1990s with the popularization of the term by Rheingold (1993) in his book, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. This period saw the growing adoption of the metaphor of “community building” in both Web media promotion and scholarly research of CmC (Jones, 1995, 1997; Porter, 1997). Researchers of communication, media, and linguistics started to explore the linguistic construction of community in, for example, Usenet newsgroups (e.g., Baym, 1995; Tepper, 1997), Internet Relay Chat (e.g., Bays, 1998; P. A. Duff and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 8: Language Socialization, 301–311. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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Liu, 1999), MUDs and MOOs (see definitions below) that allow multiple users to communicate with each other in real time and interact with objects in a virtual setting (e.g., Cherny, 1999; Soukup, 2004), and, more recently, weblogs or blogs that are online journals or discussion forums maintained by single or multiple authors (Wei, 2004). These studies show the use of linguistic and interactional patterns, genres, and discourses as a means for creating group culture in online communication. For example, in her research of a Usenet newsgroup (rec.arts.tv.soaps) devoted to the recreational discussion of daytime soap operas, Baym (1995) reveals the various forms of conventional expressions shared by members of the group, including the codification of acronyms for th
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