The linguistic and discoursal features of computer mediated communication by Filipino users

• Main Author: Dino, Chenee M.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2016
• Subjects: Telematics > Philippines; Language and languages; Language and Literacy Education; Linguistics
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_doctoral/456; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/etd_doctoral/article/1455/filename/0/type/additional/viewcontent/CDTG006651_F.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

Digitalk, Electronic language or Netspeak is the language of today's generation in computer-mediated communication (CMC). It is characterized by the nonstandard and non conventional use and manipulation of symbols, characters, and lexical items. Hence, Digitalk is considered informal or nonstandard in existing literature. From a corpus of around 500,000 words from different social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Online Gaming, Twitter, Edmodo and Blogs, the researcher found 30 linguistic features with linguistic functions the functions were interrelated with the linguistic features. The findings revealed exceptional use of features Contraction, Parenthetical expression, Conversion, Hashtag, Synecdoche, Retention Pun, and Collocation in Filipino Digitalk. Using gender, age, and educational category as important variables in the analysis of utterances, the study revealed the following: (1) most of the linguistic features were from Facebookers (2) females are more likely to produce linguistic features over males (3) the young was the most eager users of electronic language and (4) students deviated from the standards of formal communication. From the findings, this study introduced the coined term youngerspeak, i.e. the language of Digitalkers characterized by the elders adjustment to or use of the language of the young. Regardless of their age, Filipino Digitalkers attempted to use nonstandard language in virtual communication. This study also introduced interfunctionality, i.e. multiple functions in one or multiple features, which enabled the Filipino Digitalkers to facilitate communication for efficiency, economy and expression of emotions. The linguistic features documented in this study position Filipino Digitalk as an electronic language with some distinct or unique features among Filipino Digitalkers. Filipino Digitalkers were able to resemble face-to-face communication, overcoming the shortcoming of CMC i.e. the absence of physical actions between or among communicators. With the findings of this study on the creativity of Digitalkers, it is hoped that more linguistic studies in CMC will be done especially in the local setting.