FB digitalking: Standard, non-standard, or hybrid?

College

Br. Andrew Gonzalez FSC College of Education

Department/Unit

Dept of English and Applied Linguistics

Document Type

Article

Source Title

Advanced Science Letters

Volume

24

Issue

11

First Page

8328

Last Page

8332

Publication Date

11-2018

Abstract

With over two billion active users worldwide, Facebook brought the digital community to connections and opportunities. Its supremacy as focus in research articles calls for investigation on its unique language which is considered to be instrumental in the transmission of information and culture whether offline or online. This present study on Facebook language reports findings from a sub-sample of a 500,000-word corpus of communication in Social Networking Sites. The linguistic analysis

has shown that the Filipino Digitalkers have created lexical hybrids—words or expressions that are products of word- formation processes—and other features that are associated with online communication. Filipino Digitalkers have

exemplified functional use of lexical creativity in quasi-synchronous chat over Facebook. Among these were the established features of electronic communication such as acronymy, capped expression, affixation, repetition, compounding and coinage. There was also usage of what was labeled non-standard in written communication: non-capitalization, and contractions. Creativity in language use has driven FB Digitalkers to include in their utterances the features transcription of sigh, emotion, and physical feature; pun, and emoticon. This study has also explained the Filipino Digitalker’s unique use of ellipsis and punctuation which appears to have performed some pragmatic functions in communication namely immediacy and repair. This paper also addresses a current issue in language use by transfiguring Digitalk from a threat to a pedagogical tool in language classes. Digitalkers have developed an additional technologically-conditioned competence, a hybrid competence, combining both knowledge in oral and written communication online. Hence, it might prove beneficial if language teachers could start looking at digitalk as a boon, an additional hybrid competence, and an authentic linguistic resource in teaching language.

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Digitial Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1166/asl.2018.12554

Disciplines

Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics

Keywords

Facebook (Electronic resource); Social media and society; Linguistic analysis (Linguistics); Pragmatics

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