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Chapter 25
THE IMPACT OF
ELECTRONICALLYMEDIATED
COMMUNICATION
ON LANGUAGE
STANDARDS AND
STYLE
Naomi S. Baron
1. Introduction
Half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan proclaimed the medium is the message
(McLuhan 1964). While overstated, the declaration challenges us to consider
whether communication media (from the printing press to the telegraph, radio,
cinema, television, and now the Internet and mobile phones) affect the ways we
speak and write. Similarly, Walter Ong’s (1982) notion of secondary orality, largely
referring to the broadcast language of radio and television, encourages us to rethink
whether electronic communication redefines language.
If primary orality is the communication modality of societies that are
essentially nonliterate (e.g. Homeric Greece) or rely heavily upon an oral culture
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(e.g. medieval England), secondary orality is a “more deliberative and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print” (Ong 1982: 136):
[W]here primary orality promotes spontaneity because the analytic reflectiveness
implemented by writing is unavailable, secondary orality promotes spontaneity
because through analytic reflection we have decided that spontaneity is a good
thing. (1982: 137)
Replacing “spontaneity” with “informality” or “de-standardization” offers a useful
framework for considering the kind of language produced today on computers or
mobile devices.
This chapter explores the extent to which contemporary information and communication technologies (ICTs) contribute to de-standardization of either spoken
or written language. We shall see that the impact of ICTs results less from technological factors than from reinforcement of trends already evidenced in speech and
writing. These trends, in turn, reflect social change.
2. Variables shaping language
standards and style
The notion of a language standard conjures up an image of uniformity: a version of
spoken or written language in which children are educated, that government officials follow, and that editors enforce. In practice, language standards serve political and social agendas, including acting as symbols of nationhood and enforcing
internal social hierarchies. By contrast, prescriptivism is a tool for urging users to
adhere to a presumed standard.
In England, moves toward standardization—and concern with prescriptivism—reflected an emerging social structure that privileged education and status.
By contrast, American speech and writing (like much else in the United States) were
sometimes more renegade—a position H. L. Mencken (1919) celebrated. However,
while there was never a US equivalent of British Received Pronunciation (RP), educated Americans embraced a conception of standard American English that parallels the description US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart gave of obscenity:
hard to define, but I know it when I see it.
Changing social structure, particularly over the past half-century, has challenged notions of (and commitment to) a standard English against which usage
is measured. The term “de-standardization” denotes a falling away from adherence to an earlier standard, entailing acceptance of words, grammatical constructions, or pronunciations that were previously scorned as “nonstandard”. But
contemporary de-standardization also includes a growing sense that consistency
of linguistic usage or even knowledge of the rules being violated is not especially
important.
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The idea of a standard language is largely associated with writing rather than
speech. However, the relationship between speech and writing is itself complex
(Biber 1988; Chafe and Tannen 1987). Take, for example, the properties of durability and level of formality. While speech is described (paradigmatically) as both
ephemeral and informal, writing is often characterized as durable and more formal. Yet both speech and writing can be durable and ephemeral, and both can be
formal or informal (speech: the Sermon on the Mount vs. small talk at Starbucks;
writing: letter to heads of state vs. a teenager’s Facebook post). From Old English
times to the Elizabethan era, writing was often closely correlated with speech,
either representing an oral event (e.g. a will ceremony) or providing the basis
for a subsequent oral performance (e.g. reading a homily). Subsequently, writing
emerged as a medium structurally distinct from speech. However, by the latter half
of the twentieth century, the function of writing began to shift, now often serving
to record informal speech.1
Language de-standardization has many sources, social and technological.
However, the discussion is inseparable from concomitant shifts in the relationship
between speech and writing.
3. Written media phase one:
From print to Webster’s Third
For more than a century after William Caxton established his press in 1476,
the technology of print had less to do with written standardization (which
would come later) than with producing multiple copies relatively inexpensively.
Although print eventually helped lead to modern standard orthography, copies
of the “same” work continued to show considerable variation into the eighteenth
century, as exemplified by multiple versions of the King James Bible (Norton
2005).
There has been much discussion (e.g. Chartier 1989; Eisenstein 1979) about the
rise of written (also called print) culture, by the mid-eighteenth century. This new
emphasis on writing was evidenced in the shift from rhetorical to logical punctuation (Baron 2000: chapter 6; Parkes 1991). Similarly, spelling became more consistent and a sign of education. As Philip Dormer (Lord Chesterfield) famously
instructed his son in 1750: “[O]rthography, in the true sense of the word, is so absolutely necessary for a man of letters, or a gentleman, that one false spelling may
fix a ridicule upon him for the rest of his life” (Chesterfield 1901: 355). Several dictionary projects—Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, Noah
Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, and the New (later
1 For development of this argument, see Baron (2000).
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Oxford) English Dictionary, finally completed in 1928—helped enshrine written
language as the basis for linguistic standards. To the general public, lexicographers
became ultimate linguistic authorities.
In the meanwhile, a new technology potentially challenged prevailing linguistic norms. That technology was the telegraph, publicly launched in the United
States in 1844. While its main effect upon language was to encourage a simple
(and short) writing style (Carey 1983), the telegraph typically conveyed informal
written communication between sender and recipient that was not designed to
be carefully edited, preserved, or necessarily shared with others. These same
parameters apply to contemporary electronically-mediated communication (cf.
Standage 1998).
Finally, the notion of what constituted a dictionary was eventually challenged.
Under Philip Gove’s editorship, the 1961 Webster’s Third International Unabridged
Dictionary, based upon descriptivist principles of American structural linguistics,
made spoken language (rather than just written) a legitimate basis for lexicography. Policies from earlier editions of marking certain usages as nonstandard were
largely abandoned. The American Heritage Dictionary (first appearing in 1969) took
de-standardization a step further by organizing a usage panel, which voted on the
acceptability of particular words and senses (e.g. whether finalize is an acceptable
verb). Dictionaries had evolved from being language arbiters to reporting on everyday
usage.
4. Spoken media: Radio
With the dawn of the twentieth century, several new technologies appeared—radio, cinema, and television—that broadcast voice, graphic image, or both. Unlike
the telephone, which enabled one-to-one spoken communication, these other
technologies projected content to larger audiences. By way of example, we look
at radio.
Radiotelephony was initially used for one-to-one military and commercial
communication. Following World War I, radio broadcasting to the general public became a reality on both sides of the Atlantic. However, British and American
linguistic agendas for such broadcasting followed different paths. In the United
States, radio was, from the beginning, an entrepreneurial (and commercial)
enterprise, with programming content and style designed to attract listeners. For
instance, in 1925, typical broadcast schedules for stations in large American cities showed more than 70 percent of programming devoted to music, 5 percent
to education, and less than 3 percent to politics or news (Albig 1956: 447). In
the early years, especially for local broadcasts, there was no commonly accepted
linguistic standard, though announcers were generally hired because they
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“spoke well” (Douglas 1987: 52).2 By contrast, formal language standards were a
key element of England’s radio broadcasting from its inception (Mugglestone
2008).
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was founded in the 1920s, with
the goal of providing education, information, and entertainment as a public service. As in the United States, more than half the early BBC programming was
music (Briggs 1965: 35), but a substantial proportion was devoted to the spoken
word, including radio dramas, lectures, and news. Significantly, part of the BBC’s
mission was to expose listeners to RP English. By 1926, the BBC had established
an Advisory Committee on Spoken English, and soon thereafter the first guide to
pronunciation appeared (British Broadcasting Corporation 1928; see also Schwyter
2008). Writing in 1932, Arthur Lloyd James (a BBC advisor on spoken English)
argued that “you cannot produce a uniform high standard of social life in a community without producing a uniform high standard of speech” (‘Are You Sure
That’s the BBC?’ 2005).
Over time, increased BBC programming options provided opportunities for
a widening variety of language to be broadcast, both within the United Kingdom
and globally, through BBC World Service (‘Are You Sure That’s the BBC?’ 2005).
Writing in 1997, John Herbert, former BBC Head of Training in London, suggested
that “the trend is away from elitist speech on all British broadcasting networks
and local stations” (1997: 19) and toward acknowledgment of local accents and dialects. Indicative of this growing recognition of linguistic varieties was the BBC
“Voices” Project (2004–2005), which collected data on regional lexical differences
and recorded hundreds of people in the British Isles speaking a wide variety of
non-RP accents (Johnson, Milani, and Upton 2010).3
In the early days of radio, news broadcasts were often similar in both content and style to what appeared in newspapers. To the extent that nonscripted
speech (e.g. when covering parades or funerals) differed from that of script-based
programs, the style “borrowed more from literary than from colloquial speech”
(Häussermann 2009: 190). With time, however, both competition from television
(or other radio stations) and increasing informality in society at large led to more
informal radio style across the English-speaking world.
Today, citizen journalism (Allan and Thorsen 2009) enables individuals to post
their interpretation of the news in written form online, using language of their own
choosing. In the case of (spoken) podcasting, anyone can become a one-person radio
station, where “linguistically, everything is possible”: “Never-before-heard dialects
or slips of the tongue, or fully improvised speech, are just as likely to be heard as oldfashioned verse or highly elaborated essay style” (Häussermann 2009: 202).
2 As national networks were established, pronunciation guides for announcers began
appearing (e.g. Bender 1943).
3 I am grateful to Jonnie Robinson and Clive Upton for background on the BBC “Voices”
Project.
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5. Written media phase two:
Electronically-mediated
communication
Finally we turn to the relationship between language appearing in contemporary online and mobile communication, and independent trends (particularly
in American English) toward informal, speechlike, and de-standardized written
language.
With the introduction of computer-based communication such as listservs,
computer conferencing, and email, the term “computer-mediated communication”
(CMC) came to refer to language produced on such platforms (Herring 1996). Over
time, digital communication also became possible on mobile phones. Text messaging (or SMS) was initially the primary form of written language on mobile phones,
though as mobiles gained Internet access, users began employing other communication functions previously associated with computers (e.g. email or social
networking). I use the term “electronically-mediated communication” (EMC) to
encompass both online and mobile communication.
There is substantial evidence (e.g. Biber and Gray, Farrelly and Seoane, this
volume; Mair 1998, 2006) that over the past century written English has become
increasingly informal. But in recent years, there also appears to have been growing nonchalance regarding the relevance of traditional spelling and punctuation
conventions (e.g. Truss 2004). Beyond the familiar “greengrocer’s apostrophe”
yielding such would-be plurals as cauliflower’s or emergency’s, or educated adults
confusing it’s and its, proofreading errors are expanding in works published by
well-respected publishers and in costly print advertisements. Growth in colloquial
style extends to grammar as well, evidenced in widespread public disregard for the
concerns of traditional prescriptive grammar. This laissez-faire attitude (at least in
the United States) derives from a nexus of social trends. The first is growing social
informality. Examples range from using first names (rather than titles and surnames) in addressing people you do not know or wearing jeans to attend the opera.
Informality extends to many educational practices. In both lower and higher education, emphasis has shifted from teacher-oriented to student-oriented classrooms.
Classroom discourse has become more casual, and contemporary writing pedagogy has replaced earlier attention to writing mechanics with increased focus on
content and creativity (Baron 2000: chapter 5).
A second factor is the rise of American youth culture—and the tendency
among adults to emulate youthful behavior patterns (Meyrowitz 1984). To wit:
people in middle age and beyond wearing clothing designed for adolescents, and
saying Awesome!, What’s up?, or BRB (for ‘be right back’). This linguistic trend
is also evidenced in use of quotative like (e.g. My daughter was like I’m not really
sorry), a construction generally associated with younger speakers (Tagliamonte
and D’Arcy 2004). Third, there is multiculturalism. In the United States, recent
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decades of struggle to combat racism have drawn attention to the linguistic
legitimacy of African American Vernacular English. During this same period,
America began actively promoting multiculturalism, entailing social tolerance
of people with nonmainstream identities or from different cultural (and linguistic) backgrounds. Current national rhetoric and local curricular design reflect
a legally and pedagogically structured acceptance of individual and group differences, including teaching children not to pass judgment on regional dialects
or nonnative speakers. In the process, traditional linguistic norms become less
relevant.
Historically, a primary vehicle for imparting linguistic standards was teaching
grammatical rules. Today, however, grammar books are no longer part of many
American schools’ curricula. Students can hardly be expected to adhere to “rules”
they have never learned and that are inconsistently evidenced in everyday speech
(e.g. between you and I vs. between you and me).
Here we find a parallel with EMC. While a few handbooks counsel how to
compose online messages (e.g. Shipley and Schwalbe 2007), there are no clear rules
(Baron 2002). Rather, users tend to imitate other people’s style or independently
write as they please. Opportunities for de-standardization are ripe.
Users of EMC often maintain the issue is not de-standardization but that such
messages emulate speech. Since speech is commonly informal—and prototypically
ephemeral—we generally do not judge it by conventions of written language. But is
EMC really just a durable version of spoken language?
The 1980s and 1990s saw considerable discussion regarding whether various
forms of EMC were best characterized as speech or writing (Baron 1998; Crystal
2001). However, there is wide variation across types of EMC (e.g. instant messaging versus text messaging) and across user cohorts (e.g. young adolescents versus
grandparents), making generalization problematic.
To begin assessing the written or spoken nature of digital communication, we
need to look at individual EMC media usage by specific cohorts. As a first step, my
students and I collected a corpus of instant messaging (IM) conversations between
university undergraduates (see Baron 2008: chapter 4 for details of analysis). By
several measures, IM resembled paradigmatic descriptions of speech. For example,
average message length more closely approximated informal speech than traditional written text. Similarly, the places in which users syntactically chunked their
thoughts into seriatim messages (e.g. Message 1: I found your jacket; Message 2:
under the chair) more closely resembled pauses in speech than breaks in written
language marked by punctuation.
A traditional hallmark distinguishing speech from writing has been that contractions (e.g. can’t rather than cannot) are acceptable in the former but generally
not the latter. In the corpus, contractions occurred 65 percent of the time they were
possible. However, a subsequent informal analysis of casual speech from a similar
cohort revealed contractions being used at least 90 percent of the time possible,
suggesting that at least with regard to contraction use, IMs had a somewhat more
written character.
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The popular press commonly depicts EMC as having a profusion of lexical
shortenings, along with “degraded” spelling and punctuation, which collectively
are said to threaten language standards (Thurlow 2006). Actual data suggest usage
is far less de-standardized. The IM analysis discussed above revealed few abbreviations (31) and acronyms (90)—out of 11,718 words. Similarly, only 171 words had
nonstandard spelling (or punctuation). Of these, more than one-third had omitted
apostrophes (e.g. thats). The rest were generally cases of missing or added letters,
metatheses, the wrong homonym, or phonetic spellings. In addition, some nonstandard spelling in EMC is intentional. Recall Ong’s observation that in secondary orality, “spontaneity” may be the result of analytic reflection. Such behavior
is seen in the way some teenagers construct IMs or text messages to friends. For
example, the teenage son of a colleague had initially written you in an IM, but upon
reflection, changed the word to U to lend a more informal tone.
Is EMC de-standardizing English orthography? While a definitive answer is
premature (given that EMC is relatively new), we can discern some suggestive patterns. Consider lexical shortenings (abbreviations such as yr for your or acronyms
such as LOL for ‘laughing out loud’). These sorts of shortenings are hardly new. In
the Middle Ages, they were often used to reduce the amount of parchment needed
to produce a manuscript or minimize copying time. In 1711, Joseph Addison complained about people using pos for positive (Crystal 2008: 52). And such shortenings
as 2U B4 can be found in Victorian emblematic poetry (Brown 2010).
A second potential domain for long-term effects of EMC on English involves
whether two root morphemes are written as separate words, a hyphenated word, or
a single word (news paper, news-paper, or newspaper). In many cases, word grouping (and punctuation) has shifted historically. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates the phrase “tea bag” appeared by 1898. By 1936, the word was hyphenated
(tea-bag), and by 1977 had become teabag.4 There appears to be a contemporary
trend toward compounding, although in the words of Angus Stevenson, editor
of the Shorter OED, “People are not confident about using hyphens anymore”
(Rabinovitch 2007).
Our issue is whether EMC has a role in such orthographic confusions. The
answer is probably “yes”. Computer spell-check (rather than dictionaries) is increasingly the arbiter of lexical orthographic correctness. However, since news paper,
news-paper, and newspaper all pass spell-check, writers are left without guidance.
In fact, in Wired Style, Hale and Scanlon (1999) argue that online authors should
feel free to make their own compounding choices.
Conventions for Web page URLs may also be contributing to increased compounding, since URLs do not permit spaces between words (e.g. www.washingtonboatshow.com). Reinforcing this technologically driven format is an advertising
style, popularized in the 1990s, of combining names into single words, often in
shortened forms (e.g. NatWest for National Westminster Bank).
4 The example comes from Cook (2004: 94).
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A third domain in which new media may be leading to de-standardization is
apostrophes. As we saw, more than a third of the spelling/punctuation errors in the
IM corpus described above were omissions of apostrophes. Students tell me that in
typing essays using Microsoft Word, they often omit apostrophes, believing spellcheck will insert them in the proper places (though the strategy fails for words such
as cant, as well as for distinguishing between most plurals and possessives, e.g. cats
versus cat’s). Equally important, URLs do not use apostrophes, visually reinforcing
the growing sense that apostrophes are irrelevant.
Everyday writers have long made mistakes with apostrophes. And cities such
as Birmingham (UK) have dropped apostrophes altogether from signage referring
to areas like St Pauls (aka Paul’s) Square (‘City Drops Apostrophes from Signs’
2009). Were apostrophes to disappear entirely from written English, it is not clear
whether we should refer to the transformation as de-standardization or simply language change. Similarly, it is difficult to know whether off-line writing is the source
of ongoing shift or whether spell-check and URLs are hastening the process.
Finally, computer software may be impacting spelling skills. Current versions
of spell-check make corrections automatically, sometimes even before writers have
completed a word. Motivation to correct one’s own spelling (including looking
words up in a dictionary) is fading. The same issue applies to search engines such
as Google. If a user types in “Jon Addams”, Google inquires, “Did you mean John
Adams?” and returns listings for the second president of the United States.
Auto-corrections are convenient, but may subvert orthographic knowledge
that writers of English have traditionally built up as children. The situation is analogous to the effects of Japanese word processors. In Japan, learning to write the
kanji (Chinese characters) is a time-consuming endeavor, but seen as a vital part of
“becoming Japanese”. A critical component of writing kanji is knowing the order
in which strokes are made. Anecdotally, highly educated Japanese (including some
teaching Japanese in the United States) report that because of using word processors (which produce full-formed characters), they are forgetting stroke order.
6. Conclusions
Over the past half-century, the English language has undergone a stylistic shift,
becoming increasingly informal. This informality is evidenced in both speech and
writing, though writing itself is tending to become a medium for recording informal speech. The casual tone of both modalities often diverges from conventional
standards of pronunciation, grammar, lexicon, and punctuation.
With the appearance of digital communication technologies, new platforms for
writing have appeared. Language produced through these media is often not subject
to editing, and some members of the public have judged language in email, IM, or
text messages to be degenerate and a potential threat to written language standards.
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In this chapter, I have argued that the relationship between de-standardization
and new media language is more nuanced. Independent changes (including growing social informality, emulation of youth, and multiculturalism) have manifested
themselves in both spoken and written language, pre-dating popularization of computers and mobile phones. Radio in the United Kingdom and classroom pedagogy
in the United States became more relaxed and socially inclusive before the explosion of email or IM. While there are several instances in which information and
communication technologies may be contributing to written de-standardization
(e.g. hyphenation or apostrophes), in most instances, ICTs are simply platforms for
reinforcing a style of language that has earlier social and linguistic roots.
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Punctuation. New York: Gotham.
AQ1:
26_Nevalainen_Ch25.indd 340
Please check and confirm the Running Head
4/29/2012 4:37:10 PM