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2010 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

Language Deterioration Revisited: The Extent and Function of English Content in a Swedish Chat Room

verfasst von : Malin Sveningsson Elm

Erschienen in: International Handbook of Internet Research

Verlag: Springer Netherlands

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Abstract

Ever since the internet first became familiar to ordinary people and to popular media, it has been surrounded by conflicts and moral panics. Even if the technology has been praised for the advantages it may bring to its users, it has also been accused of influencing its users in a variety of negative ways. For example, during the late 1990s and early 2000s, the internet was accused of influencing people’s language style, and teachers especially were concerned by the way it might affect children’s language use as well as their knowledge of the vernacular language.
Several years have passed since these debates took place. With the distance that looking in the rear view mirror gives us, we now have the opportunity to revisit the debate and see which arguments still seem to hold. This article will examine a corpus of Swedish computer mediated discourse collected in the late 1990s, to see 1) to what extent English content really occurred, 2) what type of content users chose to write in English, and 3) what functions it may have filled – i.e. how much, what and why.

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Fußnoten
1
However, such claims were criticized by researchers such as Walther (1992).
 
2
In order to render some of the local colour of the chat room, the users’ nicknames have not been changed. Therefore, the choice was made to not reveal the real name of the chat room, even though it is unlikely that any of the users quoted in this article would still be there, almost 10 years after the data were collected. For an extended discussion on research ethics, see Sveningsson (2001b, 2003).
 
3
The words “not” and “sure” are sometimes used to convey ironic distance to an assertion just made in spoken Swedish too.
 
4
The reason why the figures are so high is probably that public web pages in smaller languages are translated into other languages that foreign interested parties would understand, in most cases English. Most universities, for example, have duplicates in English (Callahan & Herring, 2007). If one should only count independent web pages, which are not translations of other web pages, the figures would probably be less extreme.
 
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Metadaten
Titel
Language Deterioration Revisited: The Extent and Function of English Content in a Swedish Chat Room
verfasst von
Malin Sveningsson Elm
Copyright-Jahr
2010
Verlag
Springer Netherlands
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9789-8_27