Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 939

Part of Session 156: Mobile Literacies in Late-modern Cape Town (Other abstracts in this session)

Cyber socialising: emerging genres and registers of intimacy among young South African students

Authors: Bock, Zannie
Submitted by: Bock, Zannie (University of the Western Cape, South Africa)

The popularity of social network media for socialising among the youth is well documented. Researchers point to the importance of these media as sites for engaging and affirming friendship networks, negotiating identities and remaining socially visible and integrated (Thurlow and Poff 2012, boyd 2007). Much has been written on the emerging norms of textese or textspeak. However, becoming a proficient user of textspeak involves more than simply mastering this code: it requires knowing the appropriate genres and registers of chatting.

This paper aims to explore these conventionalized genres and associated styles from a discoursal perspective drawing on the genre and register theories of Hyland (2008), Johnstone (2008) as well as Systemic Functional linguists such as Eggins and Slade (2005). It analyses data collected by undergraduate students at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, who use the application, MXit, for chatting with friends. The context is multilingual and diverse and, as a result, the data reflects a number of localised linguistic features, such as code mixing, which Blommaert and Backus (2011) refer to as a ‘localised supervernacular’.

The analysis shows how, despite the seeming unrestrained and non-standard nature of MXit chatting, it is highly conventionalised and structured. It shows how student participants use a range of predictable stages to initiate and establish contact as a preparation for the ‘exchange of news’ which forms the kernel of the conversation. It also shows how ‘communicative competence’ in this context requires being able to use the appropriate ‘register of intimacy’ for this genre which relies heavily on evaluative language and affective markers and serves to establish and affirm the friendship bonds between users.

This paper argues that despite its conventionality, the genres and associated registers are fluid and hybrid. They establish a creative and potentially transgressive space in which linguistic innovation and creativity can flourish. This enables users to style for themselves identities which combine elements of global sophistication with local situatedness and construct themselves as artful, slick users of the linguistic repertoires at their disposal. They allow users to signal solidarity and alignment with an alternative ‘cool’ reality shared with their peers and to ‘dis-identify’ with the dominant mainstream reality and its norms of formal standard written English.

References:

Blommaert, J and Backus, A. 2011. Repertoires revisited: ‘Knowing language’ in Superdiversity. Working papers in Urban Language and Literacies, Kings College London.

boyd, d. 2007. Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning – Youth Identity and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 119-142.

Eggins, S. and Slade, D. 2005. Analysing Casual Conversation. London: Cassell.

Hyland, K. 2008. Genre and academic writing in the disciplines.Language Teaching 41:4, 543–562

Johnstone, B. 2008. Discourse Analysis. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Thurlow, C and Poff, M. 2012 (in press). Text messaging. In S. Herring, D. Stein and T. Virtanen (eds), The Handbook of the Pragmatics of CMC. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Cyber socialising: emerging genres and registers of intimacy among young South African students