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.

Hello all,

I recently went out from Facebook because I’m pretty busy and felt overwhelmed for all the politics and hatred in the world. Last night I entered back for some minutes. I found this new Moby’s videoclip. I watched and I closed my account again.

I hope you find this song interesting (as I did). It’s all about the dark side of CMC. 🙁

See you soon (off-line)!

A handful of “beauty boys” have primped and preened their way into the female-centric world of Instagram and YouTube makeup artistry—and the cosmetics industry wants in.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/19/arts/design/those-lips-those-eyes-that-stubble-the-transformative-power-of-men-in-makeup.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0

Mark Sebba’s chapters 2 and 5 discuss orthography as an ideologically charged social practice. Through many examples, he shows that conventions as well as their violations convey social meaning.

The ausbau-abstand paradox: In order for a language to gain legitimacy as a “high” form, it has to increase its abstand (distance) from other languages, but at the same time, nearly all ausbau (development) languages have been modeled on an existing standard which already has a status of a literary form. For example, writing notin or not’n for nothing to express Jamaican Creol’s difference from English still makes use of the variation potential of English orthography. An attempt such as nuttn will fail to convey the meaning.

Standard Arabic orthography is both phonetic and deep. If a letter is written it has one pronunciation, and no two letters constitute one sound (with one exception). However, short vowels are not written, so they have to be guessed based on the grammatical context. In addition, geminates are written as one letter with a symbol that is usually omitted. That is, every word without a context has several possible readings that change the category (noun/verb/adjective) and the meaning of the word. Luckily, CMC allows Arabic speakers to model their language either on Fusħa (Standard Arabic), or on Latin alphabet.

In the early days of chat rooms, writing in Arabic was not possible for technical reasons. Arabic speakers were forced to use the Latin alphabet which does not have enough consonants to account for Arabic sounds. As a solution, they started substituting the missing Arabic letters with numbers that resemble their shape ح=7 ع=3 ط=6 ء=2 etc. and this practice quickly became the norm. However, the real potential of Latin alphabet to represent the missing vowels and geminates in writing was not fulfilled. I found the following examples in the same facebook comment: tmsk for [timsek], both t3llm and t3lam for [tʕallam], nzlha for [nazzilha] and bt3rraf for [btiʕraf]. As you can see, the presence or absence of vowels and geminates does not follow any rule. Using Latin alphabet did not eliminate the influence of Fusħa conventions, it only mixed them with English and French conventions too, creating a highly inconsistent orthography.

Writing in Arabic alphabet became very easy with the spread of smartphones. The problem here is that dialects differ from Fusħa on the morphological and phonemic levels (among other things). However, Arabic speakers can still take advantage of Fusha’s phonetic potential to write their dialects. For example, as you can see in the table, the final vowel [u] in northern Palestinian dialects is used with 5 morphemes that are different from their Fusħa counterparts. Since the vowels are not represented, I indicated what letter(s) is used (<letter>) and how it is pronounced when the vowels are recovered ([sound]). Notice that the last case, they, is the one exception I mentioned earlier where the sound [u] is represented by two letters <ua>.

The question is which letter do Palestinian speakers use to represent the vowel [u] in each of these cases? The options are (1) adhering to the convention of Fusħa although they don’t represent the sound (2) representing all morphemes phonetically by using the letter <u>, although the semantic contrast will be lost (3) chaos.

I have been collecting examples of this variation for a while, and my impression is that the more proficient a speaker is in Fusħa the more she adheres to its conventions. The writing of speakers who are not proficient in Fusħa (who are the majority) is chaotic. I have not seen a speaker who uses option (2) consistently, although it is the “easiest” from a linguist’s point of view. Ambiguity and garden path effects are expected in this situation, but some of the forms that result from this “pick and mix” practice are completely counter-intuitive. The closest analogy I can offer for using the highly marked <ua> where it is not licensed is writing ogh for of. I thought of Sebba’s claim that the ‘informal ideology’ is implicit and below the level of awareness for most writers, but I don’t think it applies here. A more plausible explanation is that although <ua> is marked by virtue of being the only non-phonetic sequence, a final <u> could be just as marked because it is infrequent in Fusħa (this is an intuition, not a fact). With this in mind, low exposure to the literary language accounts for both getting used to reading this sequence as [u] and not knowing exactly where it appears (only in verbs).

In general, assigning social meanings such as “symbolic distance” or “ideological informality” to the practice of writing in Arabic dialects feels imposed and inaccurate. Most Arabic speakers I have asked object to the idea of making their dialect an accepted written language, if they recognize it as a language at all. One of my friends went as far as to accuse me of “romanticizing the poor”. Interestingly, the few people who do see the value of legitimizing dialectal writing adhere to Fusħa conventions, and thus demonstrate the abstand-ausbau paradox. I was not sure whether I can make this last generalization based on my small sample until I read Sebba’s chapter. He explains that in standardizing orthographies, what users are lead to want and expect is a set of rules, and this need is likely to be more, not less, strongly felt by users of language varieties which lack status and a prestigious literary tradition. In Alexandra Jaffe’s words “it is not only important to ‘have’ an orthography, but it is crucial for that orthography to have prescriptive power – to be standardized and authoritative like the orthographies of dominant languages”.

Multilingualism and Language Empowerment: A Response to Inequality
A Graduate Center Symposium

WHEN:
Friday, September 23, 2016

WHERE:
Segal Theatre at The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York (CUNY Graduate Center): 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10016.

DESCRIPTION:
Language and language choices play a significant yet often unacknowledged role in fostering inequality. This is most evident in the spheres of education, the workplace and public health, where insufficient services in “minority” languages result in disparities and lack of opportunities for speakers of those languages.

This symposium highlights the value and relevance of language and literacy projects conducted at the Graduate Center to New York’s multilingual population. Presentations throughout the day will focus on the education of immigrant students and speakers of minority languages, and will present the value and relevance of multilingualism and multilingual approaches as an effective way to combat inequality of access.

We hope you’ll join us to hear the latest research on the relationship between the maintenance or acquisition of languages and increasing equality of opportunity for speakers of minority and underrepresented languages.

REGISTER HERE

MORE INFO HERE