engleski

Beyond Traditional Standardization: Language Policing in a Digital Era

Although often perceived as libertarian and chaotic: a space of freespeech, a place of exercising democratic values, active participation in social and political life, borderless, timeless and mostly anonymous domain of human interaction, cyber communication is nevetheless guided by various norms. In this article we shall look how to investigate these norms, specifically the problem of language policy in the new media environment, which is no longer under scrutiniy of institutions traditionally governing this doman (e.g. the state and educational institutions). Special focus will be put on „dialogic“ Web because: Web 2.0 allows users to upload their own content in diverse locations, following that it also provides an ideal space for studdying bottom-up language policing (Blommaert et al. 2009) by indviduals and/or groups at the micro level. Our corpora shall examine two Facebook groups concerned with problems of (il)literacy, mostly dealing with ortography, adherence to offline language policy as a means of acheving an online goal and humour as a discursive technique in language management. The groups in question are 'Jezični FAIL – Nepismenost naša svagdašnja' which can be translated as a 'Language FAIL – Illiteracy of our Daily Lives' and a pun- intended group name 'Tijedan polu pismenosti' translated as 'One Weak of semi literacy'. Both groups are concerned with Croatian standard language, and the users are encouraged to participate in giving examples, suggestions and problem solving, but it must be noted that pages are moderated by administrators and official disclaimer of rules concerning behaviour of group members is implemented. Our method can be described as a multimethod approach which consist of Virtual Linguistic Ethnography (Cavanagh, 1999) that takes on Conversation Analysis, also relies on Linguistic Landscape Analysis, as well as foucauldian aspects of Critical Discourse Analysis.

sociolinguistics ; pragmatics ; langauge policing ; cyber communication ; social network sites

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