Variety Attribution Of Netlanguage

The advent and global use of computer and the Internet has resulted in the emergence of a new way of communication — computer-mediated communication, whose influence on various aspects of language use is enormous. Thus, in addition to spoken language and written language, there now is a third language medium, language in the Internet. We refer to this type of language as "netlanguage" which represents humans interacting with humans through synchronous and asynchronous, bi-directional communication through the Internet or intranets. It consists of three elements: (1) technical terms that are related to computer science and network technology; (2) new words and phrases that are related to cyberculture; and (3) cyberslang that is used mainly in CMC (Qin Xiubai, 2003). Because cyberslang is the most active element in netlanguage and what is more, it is frequently used in chatrooms we will focus on cyberslang of chatrooms in this paper.The dissertation aims to explore the variety attribution of netlanguage. That is,whether netlanguage is technical or non-technical, formal or informal, written-like or spoken-like. The data for this analysis was collected from a virtual chat environment within Chat.Yahoo!. Approximately three hours of "chat" discourse were recorded for the...