Corela ()
Internet representations of dialectal English
Abstract
This paper presents an account of how alternative spellings found online can be linked to phonetic and phonological roots, especially in settings where dialects are encouraged. These spellings are part of Netspeak uses, and dialectal spellings are influenced by official, lexicographical sources and a personal desire to spell words as they are pronounced. Consonants and vowels are affected by these choices, and this paper will mainly discuss consonantal changes and the limits of vocalic alternations.Non-traditional spellings aim at showing an alteration of the same type of sound, irrespective of the dialect and there are common underlying mechanisms between dialects of English. Exposure to the Internet culture, and forum-specific uses may account for neography. Limits reached by these respellings (homophony, semantic ambiguity) will also be discussed. The corpus of this study is composed of written productions found in African American and Scottish online communities, Black Planet and Scotster. These will be examined to compare the parallel development of alternative spellings of these dialects. Indeed, they contravene the rhoticity of the variety of English spoken in their country.The wider ecological1 context of writing online is the first focal point: Netspeak influences alternative written practices, and censorship is part of this environment. The typology of alternative spellings will be defined: they are not limited to simple deletion or doubling of letters, and their difference with spelling mistakes will be specified. The stance of linguistic studies on spelling and lexical differences with standard English will shed light on the official stances regarding these two dialects, and which rules alternative forms found on the forums are supposed to follow. While Scots spelling is seen with a little more prescriptivism, works on African American Vernacular describe forms and sanitize them (there is very little profanity in dictionaries). Bearing in mind these specificities and the wider online context, consonantal substitutions will be tackled, both generally, and then more specifically when they are applied to grammatical words. Vowel changes and limits created by homophony will be the point of the last subsection.
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