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Return to Introduction updated Tuesday, 24 July 2001
‘Although the boundaries can blur, there are basically five different forms of internet chat:: telnet[1], IRC[2], web chat[3], direct chat[4], and world chat[5]. All of these mediums are different ways of allowing people from all other the world to come together and interact and interact on a real-time basis.’ (Cyberdude[6])
The language frontier: Chatrooms as the
beginning and end of language.
With the wide availability and increase in
devices to receive and relay text messages, languages have become the latest
frontier in communication. Language is
perhaps the biggest remaining hindrance to any interaction online. The Internet
has made the world a global village, with English as the lingua franca of
cyberspace, but the numbers of non-English speakers and those who don't share
English as their first language are rising rapidly and will soon overtake the
number of native English speakers. One of the fastest growing non-English
speaking Internet communities is in China, where Web sites are springing up in
local languages faster than ever before.
According to IDC,
the number of people accessing the Internet in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan is
expected to reach more than 200 million by 2003. There are also more Web sites
specific to Spanish speakers found online as well as other Asian and European
languages. Not surprisingly, all these people prefer talking in chatrooms in
their native language. However there is a way for interaction between people of
different language by using automated translating services. There are already a
number of these on the Internet and perhaps the most famous is AltaVista's Babel Fish site, which
boasts high accuracy and has a growing number of users. The name Babel Fish
stems from a fictional device (a small fish) which intergalactic travellers put
into their ears to understand any language. The Babel Fish translator was
dreamt up by Douglas Adams in his novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Whether we use Halliday’s (1994: 68-71) approach
to interaction from a functional-semantic perspective; or Crystal’s (1992: 409)
listing of theoretical approaches to grammatical analysis (Case grammar,
Relational grammar, X-bar (x) grammar, Montague grammar, Generalised phrase
structure grammar, Functional grammar, Realistic grammar, and Network grammar (2). (which may be the closest to the study of on-line grammar
using emoticons and abbreviations)
notes
and references