Sociolinguistics of Chatting

The present workis an attempt to study the language of chatting of native and non-native speakers of English. It tackles language of chatting from sociolinguistic point of view. Precisely, it attempts to achieve the following aims: (1) finding out the linguistic structures that make up language of chatting in terms of orthographical, lexical and paralinguistic features, (2) Identifying the influence of some of the social variables like gender, nationality and education on the linguistic choices of language used in chatting, (3) Finding out differences in the use of abbreviations, capitalizations, emoticons, punctuation marks and repetition in chatting used by native and non- native speakers, (4) finding out the effects behind non-native students use of emoticons, abbreviations, capitalizations, punctuation marks and repetition in online communication on their writing habits, and (5) Finding out the motivations behind the participants use of chatting and how these motivations vary according to the effects of the social variables.... Mehr