Abstract
The language teens use in digital spaces—from social network posts to instant message chats to text messages—often does not adhere to Standard Written English (SWE). Their digital writing involves a combination of written and conversational languages and often has a digital thumbprint that distinguishes the writer. As a means to understand this digitalk, we conducted a mixed method study that not only examines the conventions of digitalk, but also explores the impetus behind teens’ languages choices. Over the course of 2 years and three rounds of data collection, we investigated the digital language use of 81 adolescents (Grades 7-12) from urban and suburban, public and private schools in a large metropolitan area. Data provide insight into the conventions of digitalk and the reasons these features of language have been conventionalized within adolescent digital communities. Ultimately, we see teens engaging in purposeful writing that may differ from SWE, but, nonetheless, shows an awareness of audience, efficiency in communication, expression of personal voice, and inclusion in a community of practice.
Teachers, parents, and media bemoan the linguistic practices of today’s teens, arguing that digital writing, riddled with errors, is influencing academic work. According to the Pew Internet and American Life study, “A considerable number of educators and children’s advocates . . . are concerned that the quality of writing by young Americans is being degraded by their electronic communication, with its carefree spelling, lax punctuation and grammar, and its acronym shortcuts” (Lenhart, Arafeh, Smith, & Macgill, 2008, p. 3). Adults outside the adolescent digital community see the language as “degrading,” “carefree,” and “lax.” In short, the language teens use when writing digitally is wrong.
The Pew study suggests that adolescents spend a significant amount of time writing outside of school. They post messages to social networks (SNs), chat via instant message (IM), and communicate by text messaging. However, the language used in these digital spaces often does not adhere to Standard Written English (SWE). Rather, adolescents experiment in their digital writing and the result is digitalk (Turner, 2010, 2011), a complex and fascinating combination of written and conversational languages. Much has already been written about the values of home languages and registers to provide crucial oral language skills, strong foundations for print literacy, communicative competence, and socio-emotional development (Alim, 2004; Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Compton-Lily, 2003; Delpit, 1995; Kirkland, 2010). However, the digital language of adolescents has been largely ignored in these conversations. The present study seeks to fill this gap by examining the language choices teens make when they write digitally and engage in digitalk.
Over 10 years ago, Crystal (2001) began his analysis of Internet language with the question, “Will all users of the Internet present themselves, through their messages, contributions, and pages, with the same kind of graphic, orthographic, grammatical, lexical, and discourse features?” (p. 9). We reconsidered Crystal’s words in light of the evolving community of adolescent writers and contemporary linguistic norms. Thus, our research addressed the following questions: (a) What are the conventions of digitalk? and (b) Why do teenagers make the language choices they do when they write texts, IMs, and SN posts? Such questions not only extend Crystal’s analysis, but also help to respond to Thurlow’s (2006) call to investigate the ways that individuals manipulate language in digital settings, rather than accepting popular discourse about the nature of the language and the reasons for its existence. Thus, this present study adds to the growing body of literature on the nature of digital language by focusing on a nearly absent population—adolescents who engage daily with information and communication technologies (ICTs)—and exploring the authentic, linguistic practices of this community of writers.
Perspectives/Theoretical Framework
A Community of Digital Writers
According to Vygotsky (1978), individuals internalize the language and tools of a culture by participating in that culture. Prensky (2001, 2006) suggested that the culture of today’s adolescents is highly saturated with ICT tools. As digital natives (Prensky, 2001, 2006), these adolescents have had access to computers at an early age, and they carry cell phones wherever they go. Their reliance on ICTs has helped them to internalize the tools and the languages associated with a digital world.
Digital natives communicate with each other via IM, text, or social networking tools. Although their language is a key feature in this study, the students’ communication—and the ways of being that which their language represents—cannot be fully understood through a traditional, cognitive view of literacy. Rather, a socio-cultural frame (cf. New Literacy theories; Barton, 1994, 2001; Gee, 1996, 2000; Street, 1995, 1999) helps call attention to the intricate and nuanced expressions that are inherent in digitalk, a form of communication that not only identifies an adolescent’s behavior and/or value system, but also positions the individual within and among specific communities.
Gee (2000, 2012) clarified how “discourse with a little ‘d’ just stands for language in use” (Gee, 2000, p. 204) whereas his concept of Discourses “with a capital D” acknowledged situated meanings that are tied to language and “ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing, that are accepted as instantiations of particular identities (or ‘kinds of people’)” (Gee, 2012, p. 3). Gee (2000, 2012) underscored the situated nature of language and noted that different milieux call for different genres of behavior and language; acknowledging that language and actions vary from the boardroom to the town pub, Gee exemplified how “the very form of language is always an important part of Discourses” (Gee, 2000, p. 204). Therefore, as we explore dimensions of digitalk, we may use small “d” discourse to focus a discussion on linguistic elements, but we do not see language divorced from its socio-cultural context. Furthermore, the concept of “big D” Discourses (Gee, 2012) helps us to conceptualize how value systems shape interactions as teens use modern technologies that afford them the space and the tools to form unique communities.
The examination of Discourses is inherently tied to social participation and what comes to the fore is the “encompassing process of being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities” (Wenger, 1998, p. 4). Within virtual communities, adolescents use and develop a language system that combines elements of SWE with abbreviations, fragmented sentences, “initialisms” (Jacobs, 2008, p. 204), emoticons, and other manipulations of conventional SWE. Teens embrace the creativity afforded by this non-standard language and internalize the structures that allow for shared meaning within their communities of practice where participation and identities evolve (Wenger, 1998). These communities of practice and their culturally bound language and activities can be central to the development of teens’ primary Discourses. Gee (2012) explained that
Our primary Discourse gives us our initial and often enduring sense of self and sets the foundations of our culturally specific vernacular language (our “everyday language”), the language in which we speak and act as “everyday” (non-specialized) people . . . Primary Discourses can change, hybridize with other Discourses and they can even die. (p. 153)
In this way, Discourses, like communities of practice, are protean; they are shaped and reshaped by the values and actions of those within the particular group or community. Likewise, “Discourses have no discrete boundaries because people are always, in history, creating new Discourses, changing old ones, and contesting and pushing the boundaries of Discourses” (Gee, 2014, p. 55).
Furthermore, of utmost importance is the alignment of participant and community ideals, objectives, and desires (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002), and general community practices may be modified to accommodate the needs of specific subsets of the community-at-large. With Discourses at play, individual voice becomes important. Yancey (1994) explained that voice is connected to both Discourse and audience:
Voice is not an independent variable, isolated within itself, or within only its immediate context. It is a means of expression, creation, and communication that lives according to the interaction of several variables: a writer, his or her language and knowledge of language and writers; a reader with similar knowledge, with different knowledge, able to bring both to the reading, able to hear it in some way, on some level; and the language itself, the culture it embodies. (p. xix)
In digital worlds, teens experiment with language in part to capture voice; this experimentation contributes to the evolution of their own primary Discourses.
Because communication in digital worlds is often written, not spoken, rules of reciprocity (Nystrand, 1986) apply to this linguistic play. Nystrand (1986) articulated the collaborative nature of writing: under a contract of reciprocity, each individual “presupposes—indeed counts on—the sense-making capabilities of the other” (p. ix). As Lewis (1969) explained, an individual “must choose what language to adopt according to his expectations about his neighbors’ language” (p. 8). To maintain reciprocity, writers in a virtual setting must use particular conventions because they believe that their readers will understand the meaning of their written text. For the digital generation, digitalk is standard practice, allowing the hybridization of both self and language in accordance with the expansion of audience to a more “public sphere” (Gee, 2012, p. 154). Essentially, when primary Discourses include digitalk, teens have the space and the tools to communicate in ways that distinguish their being-doing-valuing systems and mark their membership to specific communities.
Although widespread use of these conventions standardizes them (Lewis, 1969) within a general community of practice, we have learned that teens’ are also part of localized or friend-specific subsections of the digitalk community, and their modifications to online language help to position them within their Discourse sub-communities. Here, we call upon the notion of Discourse sub-communities (Abrams, 2009, 2013) to underscore how nuanced language and behavior situate students not only as part of a general population that uses digitalk, but also as part of a specific cadre that has its own rules, cues, and parameters (Cherny, 1999). Digitalk is a form of communication that could be used within specific affinity spaces (Gee, 2004; Gee & Hayes, 2011), but unlike passionate affinity spaces, where “who is ‘in’ the group is not always easy to define” because of varying degrees of involvement (Gee & Hayes, 2011, p. 70), users of digitalk are identifiable because of their linguistic choices. Furthermore, in our forthcoming discussion, we explain how digitalk has both general and community-specific or “closed” features. Thus, for the purposes of this research, we examined teens’ communication across a range of digital spaces— social networking sites, instant messaging venues, text messages, and email. We reconsidered the concept of a “Discourse community” as we examined how digitalk situated teens among others, and the concept of Discourse sub-communities helped us to aptly capture and explain how nuanced digital language can position individuals in specific cultural contexts and communities of practice.
Digitalk: A Discourse of a Digital Generation
In his discussion of new media literacy, Kress (2003, 2010) explained that any given mode offers affordances and limitations. The affordances and limitations of technological tools help to explain the continuous evolution of digital language. As communication technologies evolved from telephone to computer chat capabilities, the discourse of “talk” likewise transformed. Immediate conversations that once took place orally could occur via writing, in real time. To avoid overlapping utterances and to increase communicative efficiency, shortcuts that involved fewer keystrokes became standard practice among many users (Crystal, 2001).
Similarly, the development of text technology via mobile phone has afforded users the choice of immediate or delayed response. Initially, numeric keypads and the expense of text messages encouraged users to minimize keystrokes. The more recent introduction of unlimited messaging plans, QWERTY keypads, and auto-correction tools has led to more variety in language choice. Thus, digital language continues to evolve in response to the affordances and limitations of technology and the capabilities of the users.
Most teens use both the Internet and cell phones to communicate with their peers, and patterns of language cross technological boundaries. Referring to the language as either “net”-based (i.e., netspeak) or “texting”-based (i.e., textspeak Crystal, 2001, 2008a, 2008b) does not capture its true nature. For adolescents today, it transcends both spheres. Manipulation of standard written conventions most often occurs when teens “talk” to each other via technology. Writing in digital venues blends elements of written discourse with those of spoken word (Baron, 2008; Gee & Hayes, 2011) and what the terms, “netspeak” and “textspeak,” share conceptually is an attention to the oral nature of the language used in these spaces. Whether teens are sending text messages or IMs, they think of and refer to the communication as “talking.” Such talk includes each teen’s voice, or “the medium employed by the writer to create his or her presence in the text” (Yancey, 1994, p. x), and is the driving force behind much of the digital writing of adolescents.
For these reasons, the language that adolescents use in this digital communication might better be called digitalk. The term captures the nature of the writing, which in most cases replaces verbal communication, and it encompasses the wide variety of digital technologies that allow for this exchange. Becoming an adept user takes practice and knowledge of the Discourse and linguistic conventions of a community. Digitalk then, is a new literacy of the digital generation.
Literature Review
Characteristics of Digital Language
As cell phones and computers have become ubiquitous, popular media has shown great interest in the question of how language can and should be used in virtual media where teens communicate with peers. At the same time that adolescents connect online, spending a large amount of their time each day “always on” (Baron, 2008, p. xi), teachers, parents, and news outlets spend quite a bit of time fretting over the fate of the English language and the possible connection between the use of digitalk and students’ literacy skills. In a study of over 100 print media reports on digital language, Thurlow (2006) found that the portrayal of digital writing and the language that often accompanies it is vastly negative. In short, popular media indicates that digital practices have inspired a linguistic revolution that may be a threat to social order, one established on the premise that “Standard English is Right with a capital R, and that anything else is improper, bad, incorrect, and fractured” (Wheeler & Swords, 2006, p. 5). In response to his findings that media largely disparaged digital linguistic practices, Thurlow called for the systematic study of computer-mediated discourse (CMD). As Thurlow stated,
What is less certain is the degree of accuracy and the specificity of detail offered in media representations of computer-mediated discourse. For this reason, if no other, future research should pay greater attention to the linguistic and orthographic dimensions of CMD and undertake more situated analyses of CMD practice. (p. 690)
Several studies have contributed to this situated understanding (e.g., Baron, 2008; Cherny, 1999; Crystal, 2001, 2008b; Haas, Takayoshi, Carr, Hudson, & Pollock, 2011). As Crystal (2001) pointed out, online writing emulates spoken language because it has a fluid structure, spontaneity, social interaction, and limited time constraints. It corresponds to written discourse because it is revisable, constrained by space, and does not have visual and non-verbal context. Given this blending of oral and written practices, digital language has its own linguistic patterns, including graphic, orthographic, grammatical, lexical, and discourse features. In studying the online communities of Multi-User Dimensions (MUDS), which encompass virtual gaming worlds and instant messaging, Cherny (1999) identified the characteristics of a particular MUD community, which included manipulations of all five of these features of written language. Her analysis suggested that virtual communities develop their own linguistic registers, creating conventions that mark the writing of community members and serve as barriers to outsiders. “Regular” members of the MUD community in her study were able to use linguistic cues to identify a “newbie,” “guest,” or “random” (p. 43).
Cherny’s (1999) work demonstrated that linguistic conventions evolve within a virtual community of practice. However, she acknowledged that “individual creativity sometimes results in new routines” (Cherny, 1999, p. 147). These routines may be mimicked by others and eventually adopted by the community. Baron (2008), who examined the linguistic practices of IMs written by college students, suggested that by the time individuals enter college, they have extensive experience writing on keyboards for academic work, and “their fingers tend to go on automatic pilot” (p. 70). They “seem to have neither time for nor interest in such linguistic posturing” (p. 70) and that their linguistic choices lean toward standard conventions. However, her analysis found that these college students did use a variety of non-standard features, including abbreviations and acronyms.
Baron (2008) analyzed 23 IM conversations, a relatively small sample. Haas et al. (2011) also examined the IMs of college students, but their expanded sample size (N = 103) allowed them to look for “patterns of usage” (p. 379). Their analysis uncovered variations on punctuation, letters, words, dialect, and metadiscursive markers (p. 385). These alterations to the conventions of SWE are not arbitrary, but rather they serve specific, purposeful communicative needs. In his analysis of texting language, Crystal (2008a) argued that many of the apparent errors that surface in text messages are linguistic choices that are based on information value, and whether or not the recipient needs a particular linguistic feature for comprehension. For example, a “high information value” (Crystal, 2008a, p. 80) is placed on consonants (as compared with vowels) because consonants provide linguistic cues that are needed for understanding the intended word. Punctuation, in contrast, has a “low information value” (Crystal, 2008a, p. 80) and is less necessary for a reader to construct meaning. In essence, users attend to issues of reciprocity when they write text messages.
Baron (2008), Haas et al. (2011), and Crystal (2008b) all focused on the language patterns of adult users, neglecting the population of adolescents who engage with ICTs even as they learn the fundamentals of SWE. Parental, media, and teacher concerns that digitalk is affecting students’ grasp of the conventions of SWE must be addressed. To answer questions related to this issue, the patterns of linguistic choice that teens make must be examined.
Digitalk and Literacy Skills
Despite the fears of waning literacy in a digital world, a growing body of research has shown that not only is digitalk not detrimental to students’ literacy, but also the practice of manipulating language may actually signal advanced literacy skills. Many studies on the relationship between digital language and literacy measures have shown a positive correlation (Kemp & Bushnell, 2011; Plester, Wood, & Bell, 2008; Wood, Jackson, Hart, Plester, & Wilde, 2011). In a study that compared the relationship between texting and literacy skills in adolescents with and without a specific language impairment (SLI), Durkin, Conti-Ramsdent, and Walker (2011) found that adolescents with an SLI wrote shorter text messages and used less digitalk in their messages. The authors discovered that typically developing readers and writers showed a higher fluency in and use of digital language, demonstrating that use of digitalk may actually be a mark of growth and proficiency in literacy instead of a deficit.
Plester, Wood, and Joshi’s (2009) study of 10- to 12-year-old children in Great Britain found a positive correlation between digitalk and a myriad of literacy skills, demonstrating the expansive benefits of digitalk in many and varying literacy measures. The children’s use of “textisms” (p. 145) correlated positively with word reading, vocabulary, and phonological awareness. Even after controlling for differences in age, memory, vocabulary, phonological awareness, and phone ownership, use of textisms predicted word reading ability. These results indicated a broader influence of digitalk, and they suggest that concerns over teens’ “text talk” and underdeveloped vocabulary (Griffiths & Gourlay, 2010) may not be warranted. In addition, Plester et al. (2009) found no relationship between use of textisms and children’s spelling ability. Despite the opining of teachers and parents, digitalk appears beneficial to students’ literacy skills and has no adverse effect on conventional spelling.
The question then becomes: What causes this constructive relationship? Powell and Dixon (2011) found that adults’ exposure to misspellings had a negative impact on spelling ability, but their exposure to textisms had a positive effect on spelling ability. This study distinguished digitalk from ordinary spelling errors in a tangible, meaningful way. While exposure to common misspellings may negatively affect an individual’s spelling proficiency, using digitalk may foster metalinguistic awareness—a heightened consciousness of how words are spelled—that leads to improved spelling capability.
In addition, Coe and Oakhill (2011) observed that poor readers spent more time on their phones per day than strong readers, but strong readers used more textisms in their messages and were faster at reading all types of messages. This study shows the unique, positive role of digitalk specifically, rather than just the effect of technology in general. General time spent online does not affect students’ literacy skills in the same ways as intentional time online spent communicating. It appears that the thoughtful, creative use of digitalk may benefit students’ reading and writing abilities. All of these studies suggested that the relationship between digitalk and SWE is complex and that purposeful manipulation of language is a literacy skill that is fostered in virtual communication.
Digitalk and Audience
Manipulations to SWE occur in digitalk, as Crystal (2008a) described, based on “information value” (p.80) or, as Nystrand (1986) might have argued, according to the rules of reciprocity. In other words, alterations to language in digital writing are made by the same metric used in all forms of written communication—the writer attends to the reader’s comprehension needs. Alvermann (2008) locates this “centrality of audience as a major contributor to adolescents’ fascination with self-created online content” (p. 10). Given the expanding social worlds and increasingly diverse audiences the internet offers, this attention to audience is one of the defining characteristics of digitalk and adolescents’ online proclivities at large.
Plester, Lerkkanen, Linjama, Rashu-Puttonent, and Littleton’s (2011) comparative study of Finnish and British preteens’ use of text-message language elucidated this influential role of audience in digitalk. Their findings show that Finnish digitalk corresponds more to the spoken Finnish register than the formal written register: “Finnish children text what they hear spoken to a greater degree than UK children do” (p. 44). Finnish children were also more likely to include “language mixing” (p. 45), even though both participant groups were equally linguistically diverse. Results also show that participants altered the amount of text-message language depending on the amount used by their interlocutor—indicating a “metalinguistic sensitivity to the communicative needs of the person who would ostensibly receive the reply” (p. 46). This research illustrated the highly influential role that audience plays, showing variation in digitalk across very distinct communities of practice.
In a study of American college students’ digital literacy, Drouin (2011) found this attention to audience a determining factor in digitalk’s influence over literacy abilities. The study identified a positive correlation between text messaging and literacy skills but also identified a negative correlation in the participants’ use of digitalk in certain contexts (i.e., social networking sites, emails to professors) and literacy skills. These results provided a nuanced picture of the relationship between digitalk and literacy and highlighted the influential role of audience in this relationship.
The positive relationships between digitalk and literacy skills identified in many studies have their limitations—namely, attention to audience. Students who did not demonstrate conscious awareness of audience in their linguistic choices, those who were not adept at code-switching, did not show the same correlations to strong literacy skills. The ability to code-switch—to alter one’s language and register to meet the needs of audience and context (Wheeler & Swords, 2006)—then becomes a crucial factor in digitalk’s ameliorative impact on literacy. In order for digitalk to have an advantageous influence on an adolescent’s language and literacy growth, it seems he or she must also have the knowledge and skills to alter language to meet the demands of settings and context.
Method
We believe that the question of how new technologies influence the development of writing and the English language is a crucial one. As teacher educators and writing researchers, we have a vested interest in understanding the evolving relationship between language and technology. For this reason, we designed a two-phased study that focused on (a) describing the digital language of teenagers and (b) exploring the reasons for their linguistic choices.
Setting and Participants
This study examined the digital language of 81 adolescents (Grades 7-12) from suburban, urban, public, and private schools in a large metropolitan area in the northeastern United States. Willing teachers invited all of their students to participate. Researchers collected consent forms during data collection visits. To protect the teen’s privacy, we asked for self-selected examples of the participants’ digital writing, which they submitted via email or transcribed in handwritten form. A demographic survey revealed that 32% of participating students identified themselves as Caucasian, 27% as Hispanic, 27% as African American, and 15% as Asian. Twenty percent of participants also reported speaking a language other than English in their homes.
In addition, this demographic survey asked general questions about participants’ digital habits to obtain an accurate portrait of the adolescents’ everyday experiences with technology. Table 1 illustrates the breakdown of those everyday experiences. These numbers suggested that the participants in this study were comfortable using various forms of technology and in using digital media in diverse and prolific ways. These digital natives (Prensky, 2001, 2006) had a primary Discourse (Gee, 2012) saturated with ICT practices.
Digital Demographic Survey Responses.
From 81 participants, we selected two students from the suburban group (Carly and Sarah), two students from the urban group (Guster and Lebron), two students from a private school (Bree and Keyla), and three students from a middle school (Dillan, Leah, and Jenny) to interview regarding their individual language choices. These students (all names are pseudonyms) were selected according to the following criteria: (a) their use of the conventions identified in our initial analyses of the writing samples, and (b) their availability to speak with a researcher. The data from these interviews influenced the design of a user-choice survey that was distributed electronically to all participants. Due to a low response rate from the initial 81 participants, we recruited additional students from their respective schools to complete this anonymous survey. We assumed peers within the schools would be similarly comfortable with technology and use out-of-school Discourses in like ways. We did not assume that the ethnic make-up of the final sample reflected the initial demographics, and, therefore, we did not attempt to distinguish results by ethnicity. In total, we analyzed 75 surveys.
Data Sources
Digital writing
To focus on the language, or lowercase “d” discourse, we asked participants to provide examples from their digital writing that used non-standard language. Though we requested writing from all digital venues (texts, email, IMs, social networking posts, blog entries, and other web posts), text messages, IMs, and social networking posts dominated the self-selected samples of digital writing from the 81 adolescents. We focused our analysis of language on the writing from these three media.
Demographic survey
Participants also completed a survey that collected demographic and technology-related data. These data helped us to understand the individual users and to identify trends in technology use among the teens in the study. The types of phones that the participants used led us to question the role of technology in the language choices that the teens made and influenced our decision to ask directly about the role of technology in user choices. The responses on this survey also helped us to interpret the written data that the participants submitted.
Focal student interviews
After we identified the conventions of digitalk, we interviewed nine focal students from the adolescents who had submitted written samples. We used stimulated-recall methodology (Dipardo, 1994), which involved showing the individuals their writing and asking them to discuss their language choices. From these interviews, we identified several possible reasons why teens used the language features that we uncovered in our analyses of their writing. These qualitative data informed our initial understanding of the students’ Discourses (Gee, 2000, 2012) and helped us to create a user-choice survey, which we administered to a larger group.
User-choice survey
We created a survey based on our analyses of the focal interviews to further explore the language choices teens made. Doing so enabled us to gain better insight into the students’ Discourses and how the students used the digital spaces and tools to express membership in unique communities. This survey focused dually on the role of technology in language choices and other purposes (e.g., personal voice, community membership) that we identified in the analyses of the interviews.
The survey consisted of 52 total questions, 42 of which were questions with quantified results and 10 of which requested descriptive or explanatory qualitative data. The survey was divided into two sections. The first section (32 questions) asked a series of questions about the students’ personal writing choices while using the computer and cellular phone. The second section (20 questions) asked students to translate two text-message samples and independent written elements within the samples. Students needed to indicate whether they had used similar conventions in their own digital writing and the reasons they believed the authors of the samples may have done so. (See Appendix A for survey questions.)
Data Analysis
The research team included several individuals with unique professional backgrounds and academic expertise, which included research interests in teaching composition, digital D/discourses, technology and semiotics, and urban adolescent language practices. Bringing together these multiple perspectives allowed individuals to see beyond personal biases. Routinely in our conversations and writing we challenged interpretations, and we drew on multiple fields to help situate our understanding of the data. Furthermore, we included the perspectives of practicing teachers, who served as secondary coders, to balance our researcher bias.
Conventions of digitalk
Analyzed from a framework where discourse conventions are situated within a community of practice, we looked for both SWE and non-standard features of language within the large group and across subgroups. Because three types of writing dominated the data (submitted by nearly every participant), we focused the analysis on text messages, IMs, and SN posts. We selected up to five lines of writing from each participant within each category. We limited the number of lines to five so that an individual who submitted many lines would not skew the results. If a student submitted more than five lines of any given type of writing, we randomly selected one conversation and included the first five lines of that text.
We used Atlas.Ti to code the digital writing according to the five features of language identified by Crystal (2001). We looked for data manipulations in the categories of (a) orthographic, (b) graphic, (c) lexical, (d) syntax, and (e) discourse, and inductively developed sub-codes in each area. Three coders worked collaboratively to refine the code list, using the work of Crystal (2008b) as a guide. This iterative process included multiple rounds of independent coding, discussions about the individual code assignments, turns to the literature, and refinement of the codebook. The final list included 46 codes (e.g., “non-standard capitalization,” “use of ellipses”). Inter-coder reliability was over 95%. (See Appendix B for complete code list.)
To determine the features of language that marked conventions of digitalk, we displayed the data in several ways. Unlike Ling and Baron (2007), who discerned differences between texting and IM patterns, we looked at features of language across all three media (texting, IM, and SN) and identified those features that teens used in each digital venue. Because these three types of digital writing dominated the data, we drew the conclusion that manipulations to SWE occurred most frequently when using these media and that commonalities among the media may better help us understand the community of writers at large.
From this list of features that crossed media, we examined features across users. Guided by Lewis (1969), who suggested that conventional behavior in a culture develops when members of a community may reasonably expect others in the community to recognize and accept a given behavior, we determined that those features used by a majority of participants represented community conventions. We conducted this analysis for the entire teen community (81 participants) and for communities grouped geographically as “suburban” (39) and “urban” (42). Our hope was to find conventions that crossed geographic boundaries and to discern any unique characteristics of the smaller communities.
User choice
To more closely examine the socially situated nature of digitalk, we turned from discourse to Discourse and used the list of conventions to conduct stimulated-recall interviews with focal students, asking them to explain their language choices related to the identified conventions. These interviews were recorded and transcribed for analysis. After a preliminary analysis of the transcripts, where we identified broad themes and categories, the research team met to discuss the various reasons for using (or not using) the conventions that the teens articulated. After the four primary researchers agreed upon the themes, the transcripts were coded according to the following categories: (a) efficiency, (b) peer influence, and (c) voice, understanding that the individualization of voice is rooted in each person’s “own voiceprint, the speaking analogue to fingerprints” (Yancey, 1994, p. viii). As we continued a collaborative coding process and considered theories of reciprocity (Nystrand, 1986) and d/Discourse (Gee, 2012), we revised the code of “peer influence” to “audience” and added the code of “community practice.”
From the broad categories we identified in the transcripts, we developed a user-choice survey that focused on the influence of the tools of technology and on other reasons for language choices among the teens. After we piloted this survey with the focal students, we refined it for distribution to the larger group. We charted the closed responses to the user-choice survey, using frequency counts to lead us to trends among the participants. We coded the extended responses according to our developing scheme, using the interview data to elaborate on the survey results. Though we do not claim that the nine students interviewed were representative of the group, their responses, which guided our development of the survey, did elaborate the quantitative results and helped to enrich our understanding of digitalk. A final review of all of the qualitative data through the lens of voice, audience, and efficiency helped facilitate a thorough discussion of digitalk and students’ intentions.
Results and Discussion
The analysis of the data enabled us to determine what features of language the group of teenagers used in their writing, and it allowed us to explore why teens make the choices they do when they break from standard conventions.
Conventions of Digitalk
Though little has been done to analyze the digital writing of teens, popular opinion suggests that this kind of communication lacks convention. The data showed that adolescents have, in fact, adopted conventions within their digital communities and that these choices vary by geographic location as well.
For the entire sample, including teenagers from both suburban and urban schools, 17 discourse features met the criteria to be labeled conventions of digitalk. In other words, these 17 discourse features were used by a majority of the participants in the study, and they occurred across all three digital venues. (See Table 2.)
Percentage of Participants Using Features of Digitalk.
Found in over 50% of participants and across all three media.
Not found in over 50% of participants or not found across all three media.
Of these features, four follow conventions of SWE: (a) complete sentence, (b) question mark used, (c) end period used, and (d) apostrophe used. The remaining features follow non-standard conventions. These include (a) end period not used, (b) non-standard capitalization, (c) acronym, (d) abbreviation: cut off end, (e) logograms: letters for sound, (f) apostrophe not used, (g) fragment, (h) lowercase i, (i) run-on, (j) compound words, (k) multiple consonants, (l) ellipses, and (m) multiple vowels. Other discourse features were used by a majority of the teens in the sample, including (a) standard capitalization, (b) phonetic spelling, (c) slang, and (d) capital I. However, these features were not used across media and therefore not included on the list of digitalk conventions.
Overwhelmingly, manipulations of Standard English occurred at the orthographic level (72% of coding frequency). Grammatical (12%), lexical (12%), and graphic (4%) codes surfaced in the analysis, but changes in spelling, punctuation, and capitalization dominated the data and the list of conventions of digitalk.
Demystifying Digitalk
To begin, some popularized notions of digital language (e.g., using numbers to represent sounds, as in “I g2g,” or abbreviations by omitting vowels, as in “tmrw”) do not appear as conventions. Despite the popularity of these linguistic practices in the media (e.g., Griffiths & Gourlay, 2010; Jokinen, 2009; Lee, 2002), this inquiry did not find these features as defining characteristics of teens’ digital language. In fact, using numbers to represent sounds and abbreviations without vowels, two popularized notions of digitalk, did not appear in the top 50% of usage among the teens in this sample. Some stereotypes of digitalk simply do not correspond to the reality of adolescents’ actual use of language within this study.
Also contrary to popular misconceptions (Dillon, 2008), teens do write in complete sentences with attention to standard punctuation. Nearly all of the participants (97%) used complete sentences in their writing. Despite all the freedom of digitalk to invent, create, and break SWE, adolescents in this study chose to adhere to foundational structures with the basic unit of communication—the sentence—holding syntactic power for teens in their out-of-school discourse. Interestingly, though their syntactic patterns followed standard rules and a majority of teens did use end periods and questions marks, these same participants frequently omitted end periods and capital letters that traditionally mark sentence boundaries. For example, one student wrote, “they’re letting me go at 8:30” without capitalizing or providing an end period. Like many teens in this sample, this individual constructed a complete sentence but chose not to follow other standard conventions. These conventions of digitalk (the absence of end periods and non-standard capitalization) break from SWE in ways that spark condemnation from readers outside the community; however, the lack of periods and capitals in digital communication does not detract from reciprocity. Teens have widely adopted the non-standard practices.
The fact that four of the digitalk conventions adhere to SWE and the remaining alter standard practice indicates that the adolescent participants made purposeful and consistent choices about which rules of SWE were necessary and useful for them given the affordances and limitations of digital communication. A cursory glance at the list of digitalk conventions raises questions about conflicting practices. For example, “apostrophe used” and “apostrophe not used” both made the list of conventions. Further analysis of the data revealed reasons for these choices. In the case of apostrophes, the type of phone or autocorrect program may influence the practice. Another curious, and seemingly contradictory, practice occurred with end punctuation. Though using an end period and omitting the final period were both acceptable in this teen community of digital writers, the participants were twice as likely NOT to use end periods. Given the same choice with interrogatives, they were four times more likely to use the question mark. Omitting this punctuation did not appear to be an acceptable convention. It seems that teen writers have determined that periods may not be needed, particularly when a line break serves the same communicative function, but question marks are necessary to transmit their intended messages. Likewise, omitting apostrophes has little impact on the message, and therefore, when technology does not intervene, adolescents find this practice acceptable.
The influence of technology on user choices in orthography could be seen in the use of lowercase and capital I, both of which appeared throughout the data. Sixty-three percent of the participants used lowercase I, and 50% used Capital I. In other words, many of the teens used both at some point in the sample of their writing, sometimes adhering to SWE and sometimes breaking from it. In the technology survey, participants’ responses showed that this choice about whether or not “i” is capitalized was sometimes based on their phone’s automatic functions (about 55% of participants had cell phones that capitalized “I” automatically). When students made a conscious decision to use a lowercase i, 52% of the teens reported doing so for the purposes of speed and efficiency, but another 36% chose to use lowercase i to instill personal voice in their writing; in choosing not to capitalize the letter “i,” the students exercised the agency inherent in digital communication. What this example illustrates is that although technology has played a pivotal role in the development and evolution of this discourse of digitalk, it is not the whole story. Teenagers are also making choices that ignore and may even defy the ease of technology, choices based on a broader set of personal, social, and communicative aims.
Popular impressions of digitalk have suggested that teenagers’ language is inhibited by the limitations of technology and that these same teens are too lazy to put in the extra effort required to follow SWE (Lenhart et al., 2008). In short, this perception has assumed that digitalk is solely a by-product of a cell phone keypad and not a Discourse of its own built on socially co-created purposes. Certainly some of our data supported this point with the affordances and limitations of technology playing a role in language choices. However, the manipulation of SWE is, in fact, a choice users make, and the systematic conventionalizing of non-standard features by a large community of teenagers suggests purpose in their use. Some of these purposes are related to the individual and community identities of the writers.
Geographical Group Differences
A remarkable feature of the data was the general uniformity of conventions. In both suburban and urban samples, the top three conventions (each used by at least 94% of the subgroup participants) included (a) complete sentence, (b) end period not used, and (c) non-standard capitalization (see Table 3).
Conventions of Digitalk and Percentage of Users by Geographic Subgroup.
The fact that nearly all of the participants used these three conventions shows that there exists a relatively consistent system of language use within the large group and that teens from various subgroups are likely to understand and accept the conventions used by other teens outside their geographic communities.
Although there is uniformity in the results across groups, the analysis of the data by geographical group revealed distinctions between the urban and suburban communities. For example, when compared with their suburban counterparts, more urban teenagers manipulated the grammatical, lexical, and graphic features of language. As a community, the urban teens conventionalized (a) abbreviation (missing vowel), (b) phonetic spelling, and (c) use of slang. Lines like “just wanted u to kno u aint the only one in trbl these dayz” captured a distinct voice of the urban data. Abbreviations like “trbl,” without the vowels, phonetic spellings like “dayz,” and the use of slang like “aint” were much more common among the urban teens in the sample than they were among suburban users.
In the suburban community, fewer than 40% of participants used these features of language; the high percentage of teenagers from the urban community that used them showed a marked difference between the two groups. These differences (types of manipulations and adopted conventions) may reflect urban vernacular structures and phonetic variations within these dialects. In essence, the adoption of these conventions may reveal socio-culturally situated ways of being or the hybridization of Discourses (Gee, 2012), suggesting that digitalk can include nuances of urban dialectical patterns as well as related ways of being.
In a similar vein, suburban teens adopted two conventions unique to their subgroup: (a) exclamation point used and (b) logograms (noises for actions). In the line, “Hardy har har i love you too. And my sunburn hurts so bad!” the author captured a laugh action through the phrase “hardy har har” and included an exclamation point. As both of these conventions relate to emotion within the text, their adoption, like the distinct conventions of the urban teens, may signal attempts to incorporate personal voice into the forms of digital writing that embrace digitalk. The two groups have simply chosen different features of language to accomplish similar goals.
The differences in types of manipulations and adopted conventions illustrate that teenagers do participate in distinct communities of practice, using language in their own subtle but distinct ways, and suggest that digitalk may extend Discourses into digital communication spaces. The choice to adopt community conventions is made by the individual writer, and the manipulation of SWE is purposeful.
Purposes Influencing User Choices
In this study, we wanted to examine the language that dominates teens’ out-of-school writing. Analyses of the data collected showed that, though teens in the sample experimented with their digitalk, at times they also adhered to SWE if they felt that using SWE conventions was a better fit for their message or voice they were trying to convey in a particular digital space. For example, students often forwent capitalization, punctuation, and correct spelling (even with devices that had an autocorrect function) in text messages or IMs. However, when posting to SN sites, they expressed that they consciously shifted their digital language choices to align more with SWE because they innately understood the power of reception and perception in digital messages, as well as the need to adjust language within dominant, digital and/or cultural conventions.
With regard to technological devices and if/whether their affordances influenced students’ writing choices, it seemed that the answer was somewhere between “sometimes” and “not terribly.” For the most part, it appeared that students chose to express themselves using SWE even though it would seem that some technological settings would encourage the use of alternative, digitally influenced modes of expression. When they chose to deviate from SWE, it was a deliberate choice (rather than a “lax” or “carefree” one), made overwhelmingly for reasons of efficiency or voice. It seems that the participants primarily made writing choices that were convenient and/or meaningful for them and depended somewhat less on technological affordances.
Efficiency and Technology
In collecting and analyzing our data, we did not assume that students made purposeful choices in their digital language. In fact, we questioned them specifically on how technology might have made choices for them. For example, survey questions 1 and 2 asked respondents to indicate whether they used a phone or computer that automatically capitalized “I.” A majority of respondents used technology with this affordance (phone, 55%; computer, 79%), and they allowed the phone and computer to make this correction automatically. Even so, 39% of the teenagers in this study reported that they had used a lowercase i purposefully (see Table 4).
Digitalk User-Choice Survey Results: Section 1.
These respondents suggested two distinct reasons for this choice. About half of these students reported that the use of “i” increased the efficiency of their communication. However, 36% of the teens who purposefully used this convention suggested that audience and voice also influenced this decision.
Initial data suggested that technology, and not the user, made linguistic choices for a writer. The influence of technology became clear in autocorrect functions, as in the capitalization of “I.” Most students owned phones and computers that would capitalize the “I” for them automatically, and they would allow this correction to stand. However, if this function was disabled or unavailable, the students often did not capitalize “I.” Guster and Lebron explained their acceptance of the choice of the technology:
Okay, so one thing I noticed is that you capitalize all your “I”s.
Oh, yeah.
That’s, that’s on my phone.
My phone, it automatically does it. So I can’t. I don’t want to backspace and put it in lowercase.
Like with this here, the “I’m,” it capit . . . it fixes that all the time.
All the time.
If it didn’t, you wouldn’t?
If it didn’t I wouldn’t. I’d leave it.
I’d leave it.
How about in your instant messages? Do you capitalize your “I”s?
It’s the same thing.
Same thing.
Guster and Lebron confirmed that the phone and the computer made the choice for them in certain situations. Their decision to accept the technology’s correction stems more from matters of efficiency than of correctness, however. As Lebron said, “I don’t want to backspace” to change the capitalized I to a lowercase i. Keyla gave a similar explanation of the role of technology in her language use: “Like my phone . . . if it recognizes like a proper noun, like for example, New York, it will capitalize New York for me. In web it won’t capitalize for me. I don’t choose to either. Just quick, you know, hello/goodbye conversation. So that’s my reason.” Keyla’s acceptance of the technology relates directly to her purpose of efficiency in communication.
The adolescents in this study often cited efficiency as a reason for making linguistic choices within digital spaces. Our interpretation of this purpose grew from the students’ references to the ease and speed of modified language. For example, survey responses to the question of why the user chose lowercase i included the following: “Because it is easier” (Survey 21); “It is faster to get my message accrossed [sic]” (Survey 71); and “I don’t want to waste time capitalizing” (Survey 25). These types of comments clearly demonstrated the purposes of ease and efficiency in the writers’ choices.
Understanding this purpose, we also examined the responses of students who claimed that their choices stemmed from laziness. For example, one survey response stated, “too lazy to capitalize the ‘i’ whenever i say i’m doing something . . . like right now” (Survey 10). This student characterized himself as lazy; however, he chose to use the convention of digitalk on a handwritten survey that he completed in school, where using a capital I took no more effort than the lowercase. We found his characterization interesting, just as we found the judgments many students made about the sample messages on the survey. While students often characterized their own reasons for using conventions of digitalk in terms of ease and efficiency, many respondents suggested that the authors who composed the sample messages were lazy. For example, one response said that the author used “wat” rather than “what,” “Because they get lazy to write” (Survey 31). Another suggested that the use of “u” was because the author “maybe was lazy to write the whole thing” (Survey 29).
As socio-cultural researchers who understand digitalk as a Discourse, we feel that these pejorative characterizations result from the larger discourse about language practices of teens in digital spaces. When asked specifically about their reasons for using conventions like lowercase i, non-standard capitalization, or logograms (like “u”), most of the teens in our sample suggested that ease and efficiency in communication affected their choices. When asked to make a judgment about why other writers use those same conventions, many of them attributed it to laziness. This inconsistency may reflect the stereotypes that society has created about teenagers and their digital practices. In some cases, they have internalized this view.
Despite the pejorative connotation of “lazy,” the students have called attention to their need to convey meaning in an effective and efficient manner. Digitalk has helped them do just that. For example, not capitalizing proper nouns and the beginnings of sentences, which takes extra effort on most phones and an extra stroke on a keyboard, “takes less time” (Survey 70) and teens are able “to send the message faster” (Survey 25). In her interview Carly noted, “When I am chatting online, it is quicker to respond if I don’t bother with capitalization or punctuation.” As Carly suggested, use of end punctuation is also largely a matter of efficiency. Nearly 38% of our survey respondents indicated that they sometimes chose not to use end periods. Interestingly, 96% of the writers in our sample did not use end periods, making it the second highest ranked convention evolving from our data. This disconnect in the data may reflect features of particular types of digital writing, where line breaks in IMs and SN posts, and the nature of finality in hitting the send button for a text message effectively perform the same function as a period. As one participant wrote, “In texting it’s not necessary” (Survey 41).
In essence, the teens may not recognize the omission of the period as a choice because it is standard practice in digital communication. Those who did note the choice to omit end periods cited speed and efficiency as primary influences. For example, one survey respondent said, “When I’m fast in a hurry I don’t bother” (Survey 76), and another wrote, “Just to save time” (Survey 16). However, many of the users who indicated that they chose not to use end periods explained their purposes in terms of reciprocity. Comments like “The person I’m writing should know when I’m done typing” (Survey 57) and “still makes sense without it” (Survey 63) indicate that the need for efficiency is accepted by the end user. In short, the audience would understand what they had written without the inclusion of the period at the end of the sentence.
Because students recognized the connection between audience and efficiency, we were not surprised that when we asked the participants to analyze sample messages, they were able to decipher and anticipate the writer’s intentions; their explanations as to why the author chose to make non-SWE writing choices were primarily for reasons of efficiency and secondarily for reasons of voice or audience. In five of the nine sample questions, reasons of efficiency were (sometimes overwhelmingly) cited as the driving force behind the author’s choices (see Tables 5 and 6). The samples were as follows: Sample (1). Sameee . . . so wat did u get on the chem test, and Sample (2). ahh that sucksss. im gonna have to make it up =/.
Digitalk User-Choice Survey Results: Section 2, Sample 1.
Note: DI = done it; HSI = have seen it; HNSI = have not seen it; V = voice; R = reciprocity; E = efficiency; T = technology.
Digitalk Exit Survey Results: Section 2, Sample 2.
Note: DI = done it; HSI = have seen it; HNSI = have not seen it; V = voice; R = reciprocity; E = efficiency; T = technology.
With regards to Sample 1, the large majority of students answered that three non-SWE elements of the message were chosen by the author for reasons of efficiency: (a) wat (rather than what) 91%; (b) u (rather than you) 96%; and (c) chem (rather than chemistry) 95%. When asked to give reasons as to why they thought the author chose to use the non-SWE term “wat,” their responses included “To write faster, to save space” (Survey 34); “save time” (Survey 35); “I use it a lot to make typing shorter” (Survey 48). Similar explanations were given for the choices of the non-SWE terms “u” and “chem”: “Shorter than chemistry” (Survey 36); “short cut” (Survey 41); “type faster” (Survey 48).
In Sample 2, students felt that two elements of the message used non-SWE terms for reasons of efficiency: (a) im (rather than I’m) 82% and (b) gonna (rather than going to) 65%. When asked to give reasons as to why they thought the author chose to use the non-SWE term “im,” students generally continued the theme presented in Sample 1 of saving time, writing more quickly, or laziness on the part of the author. For the non-SWE term “gonna,” the same themes of speed and/or laziness were cited in the majority (65%) of the students’ explanatory responses.
Though we have focused here on the purposes of efficiency and technology, the data clearly demonstrated other influences on the writers’ linguistic choices. For example, one survey respondent indicated that she used non-standard capitalization (including lowercase i) because “it looks better” (Survey 12). Another suggested the role of audience in language choices: “To my friends, I write how I want to write” (Survey 63). These types of responses suggest that audience and voice also play key roles in digitalk.
Audience and Voice
Elbow (1994) indicated that “audience has a big effect on voice” (p. 4). When individuals speak, Elbow argued, they both imitate and respond to the listeners. Though “spoken language has more semiotic channels than writing” (Elbow, 1994, p. 5), authors attempt to achieve a “presence in the text” (Yancey, 1994, p. x) using nuanced language features. Digitalk, a blend of spoken and written discourses, allows for teens to project a voice and to place themselves in a community through the written word. Given that voice and audience are linked (Yancey, 1994), the discussion of one is connected to that of the other. Keyla’s interview helped to highlight how digitalk is rooted in factors other than efficiency:
So what about you? Why would you use “u” instead of “you”? Is it an abbreviation as well or--
For me it’s like a shortcut term basically. It depends on the situation and the audience I’m speaking to. Like if it’s freezing cold outside, your thumbs are just not working out. And somebody asks you something ridiculous or something, I’ll just write like, use “u.” Or like when you start spelling W-H-A-T as in what, spelled what as in W-A-T. It’s just short terms, depending on the circumstances, but depending on the audience. It just becomes basically after a while when you start thinking in the beginning that it’s cool, let me start talking like that. It becomes a habit after a while.”
Similar to communicating via IM or SN sites, texting is a social literate activity that can “cement” relationships (Taylor & Harper, 2003, p. 268) and can represent individual and/or community Discourses. The conventions of digitalk not only reveal how adolescents use voice to communicate, but also indicate an understanding of context and audience. Given that digital language can “embody that which is special to the owner” (Taylor & Harper, 2003, p. 273), it comes as no surprise that the students used digitalk to create and/or extend a social voice or linguistic imprint (Yancey, 1994) in a digital, literate space.
Audience Awareness
Inherent in the discussion of digitalk is an understanding of how an audience will perceive and respond to digital communication. Results from the user-choice survey suggested that the participants had a heightened awareness of the digital context and how their use of language “depends on the person whom you communicate to” (Survey 35). Likewise, the interview data helped to clarify and confirm that the perceived context influenced ways of being and communicating digitally.
The students we interviewed appeared to modify their form of digitalk according to how they perceived the intended recipient’s authority, technological savvy, and/or inhabitation of Discourses. As Keyla noted in her interview, she felt comfortable adopting the conventions of digitalk when she communicated with a fellow member of her Discourse community; however, when she sent a text to one seen as an outsider, she reverted to the traditional conventions of SWE. She said,
I’m not going to sit there and write the whole [word]—unless I’m talking to an adult, like maybe my dance teacher texts me about dance . . . if I’m talking to an adult that I know that is not, they’re young but they’re not my level young but they still text so they know some of this technology . . . but if they like kind of old . . . just not as cool . . . I just talk properly to them.
Anticipated acceptance of digitalk, therefore, seemed to guide the linguistic judgments the students used when “talking” to someone within or outside of the digitalk community. In fact, all the students we interviewed alluded to and/or distinguished the difference between their digital communication and “proper” or “school” writing, which in their view involved adhering to the conventions of SWE. Keyla even acknowledged that she did not talk the way she texted because “that would just make me sound kind of like uneducated.” This teenager, like many in our sample, recognized the pejorative positioning of digitalk conventions in relation to the traditional Discourses of SWE. She understood socially situated practices and contexts.
This awareness of audience also calls attention to the ways in which the students recognized the disparities between their digitalk and academic worlds and their ability (most of the time) to use purposeful language across and within Discourse communities. Echoing previous sentiments, Keyla explained that knowledge of her audience was the driving force behind linguistic choices: “If it’s a friend, it’s different. But if it’s like to you as a teacher or to another teacher, I will capitalize. I will use commas. I will use parentheses and stuff like that.” Likewise, Lebron was aware that there were specific times when he could not abbreviate language or use symbols: “Only with my grandmother, that’s when I text proper. She really doesn’t understand the abbreviations.”
Social expectations also surfaced as a factor. In the user-choice surveys, student responses included the following: “friends might find it funny if you write correct” (Survey 29), “my friends and I definitely have our own language that we understand” (Survey 70). Lebron, Keyla, and 18 of the survey respondents noted that language choice changed according to the medium (e.g., Facebook, IM, email, text) and audience; one survey respondent explained that she used language differently “depend[ing] on who I’m talking to” (Survey 64). In a similar vein, the students we interviewed unanimously understood that the conventions of digitalk were socially based and were not acceptable in schoolwork or teacher−student communication. Nonetheless, the use of digitalk seemed automatic and students admitted that their abbreviated language occasionally surfaced in academic essays. Sometimes they would not recognize the error, as Lebron explained, “because you’re so used to reading it” in digital communication, which they were not accustomed to rereading or revising; for these students that aspect of the writing process seemed solely reserved for academic contexts.
Voice and Digitalk
As noted above, Keyla anticipated her reader understanding the abbreviated language, thus suggesting that the cross-over of community Discourses into digitalk is connected with an awareness of audience. Attention to voice, or linguistic fingerprints (Elbow, 1994; Yancey, 1994), is important when considering how students claim, maintain, and/or create a social space in the digital world. Digitalk grants students a degree of agency to develop situated voices that can even be community specific.
The disparity between the students’ adherence (or attempted adherence) to conventions of SWE in schoolwork and those of digitalk in their communication to friends reveals the socially situated and proprietary nature of digital genres that allowed students to experiment with language and symbols and claim a space that was their own. The world of digitalk appears to be free from the intrusion of academic assessments, where, as Dillan noted in an interview, it “doesn’t really matter [to have proper grammar] because [friends are] not gonna, like, fix it for you.” This freedom from the formality of SWE also makes text messages, IMs, and SN posts reminiscent of a first draft; as Jenny stated, “it’s like free-writing. Cause nobody . . . it’s not like it’s going to get graded. It’s just whatever you want.” Teens’ out-of-school writing often remains in draft form because students rarely proofread it, perhaps in the name of efficiency, convention, or even control. Knowing their grammatical errors will escape critique, adolescent users of digitalk have the ability to play with language, and, as one female participant noted, claim a level of autonomy over a linguistic space: Keyla asserted that “it’s my decision . . . because I already talk properly all the time so it’s one time not to talk properly.”
Teens use digitalk at times to take an agentive stance in their digital communication. In the survey responses, 79% of the teens indicated that the repetition of vowels and consonants were direct attempts to insert voice. For instance, Lebron noted that emotion could be expressed in multiple vowels: “like basically if you saying somebody got hit, like hit by a car or something, nobody’s gonna put ‘wow’—w-o-w. They gonna be like ‘woooooow.’ They gonna express theyself. Basically, it’s like an emotion.” Leah echoed a similar sentiment, noting that “like if you’re upset, you say it’s ‘baaaaaddd’” in an effort to accentuate voice, or, as Leah explained it, to sound “more enthusiastic.” Sarah stated that the presence of multiple consonants could be for emphasis, just as she would “do like a triple V . . . to emphasize like the forever.” Carly also asserted that the repetition of vowels can be “for emphasis like soooo,” but that she used double Ks when writing “thinkk” because “I think it’s just how I say it . . . Everyone thinks I have an accent . . . I say think like ‘think’ [said with emphasis on the ‘k’]. Like it should be two Ks.” In other words, the presence of multiple vowels and consonants may have phonetic or linguistic emphasis that helps teens to infuse their voice, or even personal accent, into digital conversations.
Similarly, digitalk afforded students the liberty to invent terms with ephemeral or lasting cache. When explaining how his friends and he used the word, “slime,” in place of “friend,” Lebron noted how words, similar to clothing, went in and out of fashion: “You know how people change like their whole clothing wise . . . basically that, if a new word comes in, then they be using the new word . . . it’s like a new pair of Jordans. Everybody’s going to get them. It’s the same thing as a word, you know?”
Lebron’s discussion of “slime” also brought to light that some aspects of digitalk were not consistent across Discourse communities. Some conventions, such as abbreviations, absence or presence of certain punctuation, compound words and multiple consonants, and vowels appeared to be an accepted practice among the general digitalk Discourse community. However, there were Discourse sub-communities that recognized and used community-specific nuanced language and value systems (Abrams, 2009, 2013). In other words, when cadres of friends communicated with each other through digital means, they acknowledged and privileged semiotic signatures used to identify themselves within their specific, local communities. Just like the “gangstas” in Moje’s (2000) and MacGillivray and Curwen’s (2007) studies, students created (digital) tags to mark their association with others. Given that “we identify and recognize people by their voices” (Elbow, 1994, p. 3), personal tags within digitalk served as ways to extend place-based voices and Discourses into digital communication. In this way, digitalk facilitated the creation and/or extension of social voices into the digital realm.
At times, certain linguistic choices also became socially identifying features. Carly explained that, among her friends, ellipses did more than just help her to maintain a flow of conversation; it was a style that others identified her with because “I’m like the only person who does it.” Guster called attention to specific identifying features when he explained that “everybody that texts will always have one special signature” that helps distinguish him/herself and verify one’s presence. Lebron supported this notion when he acknowledged that his friends “know how I talk,” and would recognize his use of the numeral 5 in place of the letter S. Similarly, Carly knew that the repetition of letters in multiples of three was her sister Sarah’s “thing.” Linguistic fingerprints, therefore, enabled students to create and/or maintain a voice that not only situated them within their communities, but also helped them to claim ownership within their digital literate spaces and identify themselves as individuals.
In addition to maintaining a voice or linguistic rhythm and distinguishing ownership, language choices also protected the privacy of a conversation. If specific stylistic elements were missing, then friends could be aware of imposters: Guster explained that linguistic style helps him discern if his best friend Lebron is texting or if Lebron’s girlfriend is using the phone: “If I see ‘What’s’ doesn’t have a 5 at the end and how [Lebron] writes ‘what you doing,’ I know it’s not Lebron.” At that point, realizing that Lebron’s voice might not be present in the text, Guster might modify his communication, knowing he might not be able to trust the recipient on the other end.
Finally, image was important to the teen writers in this study. They adhered to conventions and manipulated language to project personality, voice, and personal style, all seemingly in the name of satisfying peer expectations. As noted earlier, across all demographics students seemed to transfer nuances of oral language into texts, sometimes in an attempt to maintain a station. Lebron, who acknowledged that his friends “know how I talk,” purposely omitted the letter, “g,” for words that end in “ing,” replicating in written text the sound of his voice when he spoke such words aloud, such as “chillin.” Sarah explained that she wanted to be perceived as “cool,” and therefore adopted language she thought her readers would associate as “cool.” As a result, Discourses from spoken language entered the digital realm as a means for students to claim space and/or replicate linguistic identifiers. It was a purposeful semiotic manipulation to perform and maintain a specific image. Students assumed their readers would identify them by personal language patterns and choices, suggesting that the Discourse sub-community would recognize a user’s experimentation and divergence from SWE as a mark of confidence, savvy, and individualism. Furthermore, an individual’s language also situated his or her membership to a specific Discourse community that valued and understood the particular form of digitalk as an extension of a real-world social context. Digitalk, therefore, helped to bridge individual and collective Discourses across non-digital and digital worlds.
Implications
In the past few years, several articles that explored the nature of digital language have been published (e.g., Baron, 2008; Cherny, 1999; Crystal, 2001, 2008b; Haas et al., 2011). The recent interest in what we call digitalk has resulted from the increased use of non-standard language in some forms of digital writing and discourse practices that may be influencing teenagers’ academic work. The veracity of the claims by adults that “the abbreviated language styles of text messaging, email, and wall posts are filtering inappropriately into formal school writing” (Lenhart et al., 2008, p. 21) have been challenged by Baron (2008) and Crystal (2008b), and it seems important for scholarship in educational research to test these claims by examining the writing that teenagers produce in school. Both Baron and Crystal, in addition to the recent publication by Haas et al. (2011), focused their analysis on the writing of adults, but there are distinct differences between middle and high school students and college/adult learners. This study focused on the teenage population and their out-of-school Discourse communities, specifically the communities that were virtual and fostered digital writing as the primary means of communication.
At the beginning of this study, we did not take for granted that students used “textspeak” only in text messages or “netspeak” only in their computer-mediated communication. Rather, we asked the teenage participants to share with us the writing that exemplified digitalk. We suggested genres such as (a) email, (b) blogs, (c) SN posts, (d) text messages, (e) IM conversations, and (f) other digital writing where they did not write in SWE. The data corpus, collected throughout the calendar year of 2009, contained only seven emails and two blog posts or other form of writing. SN posts, text messages, and IMs dominated the data. Since we asked the teens to submit examples of writing where they broke from the conventions of SWE, our first finding indicated that these three media facilitate the spaces where non-standard writing occurred most frequently.
This finding is consistent with the other results of this study, namely that teenagers gained facility in audience and voice in their out-of-school Discourse. By conforming to the conventions of their digital communities, teenagers experimented with language and received immediate feedback from their peers. They adopted non-standard conventions to meet the expectations of their audience. They manipulated features of SWE to project a personal voice within the community. When asked, teenagers articulated why they made the choices that they did. The survey and interview data from this study clearly showed that the participants made conscious choices. This metalinguistic awareness, facilitated by our questioning, suggested that adolescents did not seem to be blindly following trends in language use nor did they seem to be acquiescing to the affordances of technology.
Teens who fluently wrote and communicated digitally with peers took ownership of their language. Although the digital world grants them autonomy to experiment, they found freedom in conformity. Adolescents were immersed in a world outside of school where the written discourse differed from SWE. As Gee (2012) might say, their primary Discourse conflicted with the secondary Discourse of school. When teens enter school, they are asked to conform to the conventions of SWE and are often penalized if they do not. In the digital world they can freely experiment with language while they must adjust to reap the rewards of the academic community. For some, these rewards are tangible and the motivation to code-switch is evident. For others, adjusting to the constraints of SWE is neither automatic nor welcome.
This study revealed that students’ writing was purposeful and that they made language choices based on efficiency in communication, the desire to belong to a community of practice, and the need to express personal voice. The teens in this study understood the concept of audience, and rules of reciprocity guided their choices. Though digital conventions may have caused them to slip in academic settings where they did not consciously attend to language, they valued SWE and, surprisingly, the rules of academic language played into their digital writing. Not only did teens adopt conventions of SWE, but, as Guster admitted about the language he used in school, “It just sticks in your head sometimes,” and it influenced the choices he made in his digitalk.
Language practices are complex and the discourses used in schools differ from those teenagers use in their out-of-school Discourse communities. Perhaps teachers and parents should not look at digitalk as deficient, but rather as a form of motivated code-switching. If adults can guide students to see their digitalk as a legitimate use of language within a specific community and to understand the conventions that guide that community’s practice, choices in language can be made consciously, and students can bridge the divide between their out-of school practices and the more formal register of school. They can bring their knowledge of audience, purpose, and voice, which they have developed in their digital communities, into the writing classroom.
In order for this shift in thinking to occur, educators must recognize that many mainstream stereotypes (e.g., those present in the media articles cited throughout this study) about digitalk are simply not accurate. The analysis of the writing from teens in this study indicated that some popularized notions of digitalk (e.g., using numbers to replace sounds) are, at best, outdated. Alternative spellings exist, but for the participants in this study, phonetic spellings helped convey voice, and they were not in fact common across users.
Given that individuals can choose to write in phonetic spellings, despite the fact it is not necessarily conventionalized across users, demonstrates the power of these digital, “literate spaces” (Abrams & Merchant, 2013). Without fear of a red pen, teens develop their awareness of audience and context, building their 21st-century skills in an authentic 21st-century setting. Educators have the power to help students become more conscious of this knowledge, build metalinguistic awareness, and make linguistic choices purposeful in all contexts. This process begins by asking students why they use the language that they do in out-of-school writing, rather than simply telling them the language they should be using in academic contexts. Though we approached the task as outside researchers who examined the writing of a diverse group of students, we believe that our study can be replicated by classroom teachers and the adolescents they teach. Asking students to bring samples of their digital writing to the academic table will value their out-of-school Discourses, even as it focuses on the specific contexts and communities of those teens. The present study revealed that language choices are, indeed, influenced by communities of practice. Instruction in language, then, should begin by understanding the community, both in and out of school.
Future Research
We acknowledge that the writing samples we collected during the calendar year of 2009 might already be out of date. Digitalk is an evolving Discourse that may have general characteristics, but it also has unique variations according to the user community. For this reason, it is important for teachers to question stereotypical portrayals of teens’ language in the media and to conduct classroom analyses of students’ out-of-school writing. We advocate for instruction like that outlined by Wheeler and Swords (2006), who documented contrastive analysis with speakers of African American vernacular, and Smith and Wilhelm (2007), who suggested that teachers look for patterns of error and prioritize their teaching. The practices suggested by these authors value students’ out-of-school Discourses. Since digitalk is one such Discourse, we call for future research to explore how and why digitalk might be brought into the classroom—and the effects doing so might have on students’ and their writing.
Language is constantly evolving, and this understanding applies to digitalk as well. Demystifying digitalk doesn’t mean that educators and researchers need to understand every abbreviation; on the contrary, given our data that reveal community-specific digital communication, we cannot assume that students are using digitalk in uniform ways, even if they are following the conventions we’ve found, such as abbreviating language, using multiple consonants, and omitting end periods. Furthermore, we cannot assume that future generations of pre-service educators will understand how digitalk can be incorporated into the classroom; future research is needed to explore how these young teachers value digitalk and recognize it as a socio-cultural (and possibly socio-political) artifact steeped in authorial agency.
Finally, the present study looked broadly at language features and did not focus on the role of first languages and non-standard dialects on digitalk. Because digitalk blends both spoken and written literacies, the effect of home languages on digitalk is important, particularly in multicultural settings. The variations in urban and suburban conventions in the present study indicated there is more to be uncovered in this area. In short, we advocate for continued analysis of both the what and the why of digital language practices. This kind of work must question mainstream stereotypes and value non-standard practices as they evolve in a digital world.
Footnotes
Appendix
Instant Messaging: Is there anything else you want to tell us about the way you use language in instant messaging (IM)?
Text Messaging: Is there anything else you want to tell us about the way you use language in text messages?
Social Networking: Is there anything else you want to tell us about the way you use language in social networking?
Translate this message into Standard English:
“sameee…so wat did u get on the chem test”
Why do you think the author used the following? Write your reason in the box and check whether you have ever done something similar, have seen it but never done it yourself, or have never seen it.
Translate this message into Standard English:
“ahh that sucksss. im gonna have to make it up =/”
Why do you think the author used the following? Write your reason in the box and check whether you have ever done something similar, have seen it but never done it yourself, or have never seen it.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.