I find it fascinating to see how men and women represent themselves on the Internet, in terms of the avatars or images that they use, the way they represent themselves in their “About me” sections, or how they “speak” online.

In 2006, Elizabeth Coverdale, a student at the University of Southern Indiana, wrote a paper called “Cyberculture and Gender Identification in Online Chat Communities”. Her interest lies in the linguistic aspects of online interaction – basically, how men and women talk. She conducted an experiment on Second Life (SL) where although she kept the same ID, she changed her avatar to a male one for a week – albeit a slightly feminine one. As she began interacting with people – both long-time friends and people she was beginning to meet – she found the way she spoke to people changed dramatically.

She writes “I found that my sentences were shorter, more direct and filled with less chat detritus: meta-language like emoticons, laughter, and other emotional responses”. There she highlights one of the key markers differentiating the language that men and women use on the internet: what she labels “chat detritus”. I find this a very useful description: it is those conventions which can be deemed as “excess”.

Women tend to do it a lot – they add smiley faces such as , or more readily than men. They often inject giggles such as “heehee” or “hehe” into paragraphs or at the end of a sentence – they use more words like “lol” or “hugs”, and are tempted to add dozens of little kisses at the end of each conversation. Research conducted in 1994 in Multi-User Domain Communities shows that female-presenting characters used almost three times the amount of emoticons and representations of laughter than their male counterparts. I took a look at my friends’ Facebook pages to see if I could spot these conventions, and I found this little gem:

“Hey Sally,
Iheard about you and Johnny shit I’m so sorry my lovvie but you know what he wasn’t worth it at all. I think you and me should hit [the club] this weekend for a little jam-jam, if you’re feeling up to it? Also just wanted to check if you are free for a little dinner tonight?
I’m making lasagne so if you could bring some wine that would be oss-um. Heeheehee.
Many lovvies and hugs
xxxxxxxxxx” *

I would love to see the male version of this, applying Coverdale’s rule:

“Hey Johnny
Sorry about your chick. I’m heading off to the pub for a pint later, you keen?
Shot for the burger last night, it was lank awesome.
See you at the rugger at five. GO BOKKE!!!!!!
Cheers bra.”

Generally, women seek more acceptance in everyday speech than men do, which is something that Coverdale points out. Women use flippant extras to their speech in order to convey enthusiasm, support and a desire to keep the conversation “buoyant” – something that is translated into their online interactions.

I know I apply a number of these conventions: I love using smiley faces – they make me happy, too. (Ha, I sound like a woman there) And I’m really sensitive to when friends of mine use or don’t use smileys. Although I don’t go as far as using “lovvies” or “whuggles” or other nauseating phrases, I am just a part of this linguistic convention as most other girls I know.

Man, I feel like a woman.

*Any similarities to persons living or dead are not coincidental. That’s because I stole this off your Facebook page.

One of my first modules in my Linguistics class in first year was language change and variation. The lecturer suggested that in a matter of years written language could have moved from what we know today to shorthand “SMS” speak. Tracey has discussed this in her blog, so I won’t go into too much detail about it.

Much of what we consider “SMS” speak has developed from the language of the Internet – shorthand written language is extremely common in chat rooms, on forums and over instant messengers (IMs). And that has crept into the language that we use today – phrases such as LOL, WTF and pwned are all products of the Internet.

(And I won’t even go into l33t)

Language, as many linguists will tell you, develops differently according to the social group it operates in. All social groups may develop their own slang, catch-phrases or secret meanings in their speech. Eventually, accents and pronunciation may alter, turning their speech into a different dialect of a particular language.

The same is true of the language of the Internet, on a much larger scale, of course. Research has shown that the most common language of the Internet is English, with most Internet users utilising it for their websites, MySpace pages, IMs and forum personas.

Just as language develops and changes in certain groups and in certain contexts, the language of the Internet has changed, too, marking serious Internet users by the language that they use. For example, it is easy to tell who is a forum n00b by the language that they use. And, like most other groups, the n00b is ostracised until he or she can prove themselves to the larger community, at which time their n00b status may be revoked.

Kind of sounds like high school, but I digress.

Even the use of emoticons (what many people fondly refer to as “smileys”) can be considered an aspect of language use on the Internet (or, as my more computer-savvy friends assure me is the new catch phrase “the Interwebz”). I know people who have had entire conversations with just smileys, and maybe one or two words. 

What does this mean for English, then? Millions of people are on the Internet everyday, altering their language from “I laughed out loud when I saw that she had beaten him” to “I LOLed when she pwned him”.

Linguistic precedent would suggest that the fact that this is happening in Internet language usage now will eventually have an impact on English as a whole. Could this be seen as a development or a regression of the language? The general opinion seems to be that it is a regression. It seems to reduce English to a base form, removing some of the beauty of our language. This has been happening for generations though – slang has always been seen as a degradation of the language – and interestingly enough, some slang from the past has made its way to be accepted forms of our language.

What is most interesting, of course, is that where other languages develop from constant physical interaction with individuals of the same social group, the Internet does not have this. Much of the development of the language on the Internet has come from the written language of forum posts, blogs, IMs and chat rooms.

Internet society, like other social groups, has taken on a large number of its own characteristics, the most obvious of these being their language use. In the next few weeks, I’m going to start looking at the Internet as a social group, and how it could potentially develop to affect even non-users of the Internet.