Internet Language and Group Identification (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,3, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, language: English, abstract: The Internet has enabled people from all over the world, with different backgrounds and different social status, to communicate with each other. Through instant messaging and other platforms it has become possible to have written conversations with another person. Therefore, the Internet has become an important part of communication and over time different ways of communicating and expressing oneself on the Internet have developed. This has different reasons and meanings. To understand this, various aspects have to be taken into account. In this paper, I will focus on the social factors of the question what Internet language is and how it developed and continues to develop.

First of all, I will examine to what extent Internet language is jargon or slang and the reasons for this. In order to do that it first has to be looked at what the differences between the two types of language usages are and special attention has to be paid to who uses these varieties and how they are used by these people. It also has to be looked at where on the Internet these forms are used and what the meanings of the use of such a language are to determine what Internet language actually is.

In the second part of this paper, I will continue to discuss my findings of the first part in terms of the social aspects of Internet language and its meaning for the construction of identities and judgment of others. Therefore, my paper will focus on the question of what social identity (or construction of identity and identification with a certain social and age group) has to do with different language usage among different groups of Internet users. I will argue that language use on the Internet functions as a method of social identification with and among certain user-groups and differentiation from other groups.