The Androutsopoulis-Juffermans Editorial calls for us to be wary of the “happy heterogeneity” theory of the Internet as a vast sphere of superdiversity, where many disparate people, languages, and attitudes coexist and mesh together. Rather, the Internet can be recast not as a monolith but a collection of new technologies which independently impose different structures on its users, to varying effect.
So to what extent can superdiversity be said to exist in a communicative act such as writing on a forum or social media? Is there an inherent pressure to adopt a greatest common factor of language so that the largest number of people can understand each other? How is this diminished by the ability of niche groups to collect and communicate outside the linguistic norm they’re otherwise submerged in? While individuals may find support and solidarity this way, it still represents a diminishing diversity, ostensibly, a forum is circumscribed by its language, and individuals will remove themselves from those they can’t read and immerse themselves in those they can. Even an internet taken holistically is a strange solute, where bubbles of smaller languages float in a larger dearth of English or other dominant voices, with more or less osmotic membranes between them. But even within these bubbles, the languages are isolated and unified. It’s at their borders where actual superdiversity of language can exist. In a situation where multiple language are in play, a limiting pressure exists so long as any reader doesn’t understand one or more language, and the forum’s lingua franca naturally becomes the language with the most communicative power. Its use can be expected to rise.
The Belling article shows a longitudinal example of this process as a gifting forum moves from its inception through a period of maturation and multilingualism before a glitch renders it anarchic and eventually monolingual. In this case it was authority by moderators were attempted to maintain multilingualism on the site, and populist pressure which demanded monolingualism. There may be room for a study on just how multilingual forums are sustained on the internet, and whether their purpose (say, individuals wishing to practice one language or the other) influences how long they last. In a case such as the Luxembourg gifting forum, the multiple language were felt by many to impede the purpose of the forum. Separating this reasoning from political feelings is tricky, as both produce the same pressure towards monolingualism but come from different ideological roots. In studies throughout this course we’ve seen how eager individuals are to police themselves and each other’s speech, and so old prejudices of the written word linger and find new life on the same forums which were meant to emancipate language from these restrictions.
We’re presented then with the interesting state that Ibtisam has touched on in her previous blog post, of Ausbau languages as a potentially bottom-up construction, and their conflict with the traditional top-down imposed Ausbau language of nation states interested in unity. The Lexander article shows a profoundly interesting example of a community dynamically forging and adapting the languages at its disposal to fulfill the new role of texting in their society. Rather than compete with state-imposed standards of literacy, it coexists with it. “Through acting as mediators and as instructors, the young are put in power” this is a profound reversal of the traditional dynamic, where young people are imbued with language rules from elders and authorities, and then play and experiment with language on their own. Instead, their experimentation influences their elders, but the fact that widespread standards still arise points to the resilience of language.
This would seem to go against the claim by Androutsopoulis that technology facilitates rather than creates the interactions we see among groups seeking to communicate more frequently over longer distances. The notion of a young class of CMC-enabled people instructing their elders defies much of history, but the results are seen throughout the internet where new standards are continually being tested, warped, and reforged.