Sociolinguistics and Gaming

P: Yoo hoo

C: Hey
A: Howdy
P: How is everybody on this fine eve?
A: Sleepy and lost all effort. Yourself?
P: Eh pretty much the same :D
C: Glad to hear everyone is ok :-)
P: Are you okay my good sir?
C: I'm not bad ^_^                          
P: Good to hear!

 

Pewds: Hey I'm jumping on you. What…
Cry: Whaa, you jerk! 
Pewds: There's gonna be a lot of that Cry. Oh so if you duck you can't die? That makes sense… What the hell am I doing? 
Cry: What have you done?!
Pewds: We're gently patting each other's back. 
Cry: Wait, I can't stop jumping on your back.. 
Pewds: Don't kill me please. 
(Bloody Trapland)

 

 

Is there a change in the pattern of interaction and conversation discourse when you compare a normal conversation with that of the two gamers, Cry and Pewdiepie? 

 

"Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used" - John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz, "Studying language, culture, and society: Sociolinguistics or linguistic anthropology?". 
 
The sociolinguistic perspective concerning online gaming and MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-play games) looks at how the growth of the gamer community affects the development of language.

 

The sociolinguistics of online gaming may also be examined through five themes: Multilingualism, Language Change, Conversation Discourse, Stylistic Diffusion and Folk Linguistics. 

 

 Dionne Soares Palmer, Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics, suggested that various languages have an impact on the overall game language. Her study was based around the idea of a native English speaker"learning Spanish through World of Warcraft".

 

The stylistic perspective examines "the ways in which the Internet and its associated technology is fostering new kinds of creativity through language."- David Crystal (2005)          
In this case we are interested in online gaming chats and although written, they are very similar to speech.  This also leads to the impact of written communication and the loss of punctuation marks and capitalisation.

Gamers also have their own unique vocabulary and specific lexis that (to an outsider such as myself) may be difficult to decipher or just make no sense at all. 

"The language of the Gamers, although written, is very similar to speech. To keep up with the speed of the conversation, the Gamers have developed words that allow them to convey meaning faster, such as their clips and acronyms." - Dana Driscoll, California University of Pennsylvania (http://www.kon.org/urc/driscoll.html). ​​

It would also be interesting to compare a spoken conversation between 2 'normal' males and a spoken conversation between 2 'gamer' males to see if there is any noticeable difference concerning turn taking and adjacency pairs. 

By Patrycja Piszczatowska