NEW DIGITAL PRACTICES AND EMERGING LITERACY FORMS: A PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION OF YOUNG PEOPLE’S LANGUAGE USE IN SOCIAL MEDIA
Submitted by:
Elena Ioannidou
Abstract:
The present paper investigates the digital practices of young people (aged 14-20), in the context of Cyprus, that draw on but are also mediated by written texts. Digital literacy practices can have a productive contribution to educational practices, since this does not only involve users’ metalinguistic awareness of language choices made but it also gives way to new directions for the use of social networking platforms such as Facebook and Instagram in educational settings.
In particular, three aspects of young people’s digital uses of language are explored:
a) Greeklish (use of Latin alphabeted characters in Grek words), a common writing system used mostly among youth in social media and online interactions which is strongly stigmatized by educators and mainstream media. Greeklish is investigated as a dynamic digital practice which indexes participation in certain digital communities and as a system which is in constant interaction with traditional processes of spelling.
b) Engreek (use of Greek alphabet in English words), a popular and rather recent practice with users which can be characterised as a reversal of Greeklish. Engreek is investigated through the lens of linguistic novelty or even resistance in the sovereignty of Greeklish and English language in digital environments.
c) Hashtags in social networking sites (e.g. Facebook and Instagram) as processes of text-density.
The objective is to obtain a more rounded picture of the ways in which the different forms of digital practices and emerging linguistic choices have repercussions and potentially shape the practices of basic education of children. The main methods of data collection involve the creation of a corpus of data from participant interactions on Facebook and Instagram (25 texts), as well as advertisements on Facebook (20 texts), collections questionnaires (117 online questionnaires) and interviews to be carried out at subsequent stages of the research. For the analysis of data we adopted models of analysis that spring from sociolinguistics, from theories of Literacy, Ethnography of Communication and discourse analysis.