9(1) November 2003 Margaret McLaughlin and Sheizaf Rafaeli, Editors |
 “Greeklish” involves the use of the Latin alphabet in Greek online communication. The authors approach Greeklish as a glocal social practice, and investigate attitudes towards Greeklish as they are represented in the Greek press.  English has become increasingly important on a Swiss mailing list studied by the author. She considers the implications of this case for the linguistic situation in Switzerland in general and for the global spread of English via the Internet. 
Study of a corpus of newsgroup messages written in Catalan and Spanish sheds light on the relevance of characteristics of the e-mail register, the impact of language contact and interference, and their implications for machine translation of CMC. 
Results from a study of a Portuguese CMC environment confirm traditional gender roles of men as interactionally dominant and representative of "authority," but do not support findings for English-language CMC that women are more concerned with politeness than men. 
Contrary to culturally-based expectations about the subordinate status of Thai women, females appear to be relatively empowered in the Thai chat room studied by the authors, as assessed through turn-allocation patterns. 
Formidable barriers have to be overcome before significant uptake of computer-mediated communication by small and medium-sized business enterprises can be realized. |
 The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture and Communication in Instant Messaging, E-mail and Chat Brenda Danet and Susan Herring, Special Issue Editors  The number of non-English speaking Internet users has grown to 470 million, roughly two-thirds of all users. In this special issue the authors explore the rich variety of linguistic practices emerging on the global network.  This paper presents a study of ASCII-ized Arabic used by female university students in the United Arab Emirates, drawing on data from a small corpus of instant messenger (IM) conversations, and an e-mail survey of users' experience with this form of writing. 
The author explores the linguistic and interactional properties of informal asynchronous CMC in Japanese, using Bulletin Board Systems messages as the primary source of data. 
Popular creative uses of writing systems are identified and discussed by the author: rendering in Chinese characters of the sounds of English, Taiwanese, and Taiwanese-accented Mandarin, and recycling of a transliteration alphabet used in elementary education. |
