UDC

Marianna Zaverukha

Ternopil Volodymyr Hnatiuk national pedagogical university

Scientific supervisor:

Prof. Dr. Liliya Morska

THE INFLUENCE OF NETSPEAK ACRONYMS ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND ON LANGUAGE IN GENERAL

Introduction

The Internet as an information and communication platform has become essential in our daily life. Thought the last decades, linguists, such as David Cristal,BrendaDanet, Susan C. Herring have been concerned with the influence computer mediated communication (CMC) may have on a living language. The disturbing object is the main characteristics of Netspeak[1]that are reduced usage of punctuation, the use of contractions, loose sentence construction, subject ellipsis (Will let you know), colloquial abbreviations (bye, cos, v slow, s/thing),cool acronyms (CU, idk, lol) and emoticons. The prime scientist who studied this notion from the sociolinguistic point of view was David Crystal who determined Netspeak as a medium "which is electronic, global, and interactive" [5, 18].

Exposition

In 2003 British linguist Naomi S. Baron distinguished two linguistic features of the conversational nature of CMC: emoticons (smileys) and flaming [2, 20].

Emoticons first appeared in 1982, the creator is Scott Fahlman who was at Carnegie Mellon University. Fahlman wrote at the time: "I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-). Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this use :-(” [3]. Nowadays, there are more than 75 kinds of emoticons constructed not only by combining punctuation marks (as it was at the time they were produces) but also numerals and letters to symbolize emotions (happiness, sadness).

The second linguistic feature according to Baron is flaming - that is "use of rude or profane language” and it is considered as a result of "the lack of auxiliary auditory and visual cues in CMC”[2, 21]. However, it is empirically questionable whether flaming exists in all spheres of CMC and Netspeak as well, since the diversity of users, settings and communicative purposes of e-mail or other area of computer mediated communication. Besides emoticons and flaming, Baron descried another typically written feature that has also been prominent in CMC – that is use of abbreviations or acronyms [2, 21].

Dissimilar to emoticons, abbreviations and acronyms occurred as far back as ancient manuscripts. Their most common function in both off-line writing and CMC is to preserve either energy or space, or both of them. For manuscripts, for instance it is reducing the number of expensive to that time pages to construct a book, and for computer users, it is more of saving time and vigour, especially when the computer mediated conversation is on-line. Esteem is given to those who can transfer the most information, whether direct or implicit in the shortest amount of time.

Still, there is a second motivation for incorporating acronyms into CMC, which should be regarded form the sociolinguistic point of view; it is the desire to indicate one’s membership among network connoisseurs. David Crystal, describing the role of in-group language, notices that "The chief use of slang is to show that you’re part of the gang!” [4, 56]. Like the use of slang in face-to-face speech or written language, acronyms in CMC often are a way of indicating group membership.

The most spread acronyms in Netspeak are[2][2, 21]:

brb             be right back                         imho          in my humble opinion

btw             by the way                             irl                in real life

cul8r          see you later                         lol               laughing out loud

Furthermore, with the increasing popularity of using acronyms, appeared a range of acronyms-synonyms which can be used at the same situations and constructed by either letters only, or by letters and numerals [5, 85]:

1)                           cul              see you later               3)      idk              I don’t know

cul8r          see you later                         dk               don’t know

2)                            jk                just kidding                  4)      ta4n           that’s all for now

hhok          ha ha only kidding                  tafn            that’s all for now

The acronyms are no longer restricted to words or short phrases, and can be sentence-length: aysos(Are you stupid or something?), cid(Consider it done), cio(Check it out), gtg(Got to go), wdys(What did you say?). Individual words can be reduced to two or three letters: pls(please), thx or tx(‘thanks’), we (‘whatever’) [5, 86]. David Crystal compared the notion of sentences restricted acronyms to rebuses, "in that the sound value of the letter or numeral acts as a syllable of a word, or are combinations of rebus and letter initial: b4n (Bye for now), cyl(See you later), l8r (later)” [5, 86].

Since Netspeak is actually a written medium, it is not unexpected that some of its linguistic norms (especially acronyms) find their way in traditional off-line communication and writing. It penetrates not only in the oral and written language of teenagers and students [e.g., 8], but in mass media such as newspapers, magazines and TV [e.g., 6]. Moreover, acronyms such as

ASAP        as soon as possible

FYI             for your information (interest)

COB          close of business

EOD          end of day

become routine in business communication among office workers.

Besides conversational acronyms that can be observed above, in business world always were such acronyms as NATO and EU which are created to make the exchange of information easier. However the list of such acronyms nowadays is greatly expanded by different institutions and companies some of which even make a list of acronyms used in the establishment[e.g., 9].

The fact of great popularity of acronyms among white-collars disturbs experts in office management. Lynn Gaertner-Johnston, business writing specialist, criticizes the overuse of acronyms, "Why do they splatter acronyms and initialisms across their messages to us without telling us what they mean?” [7]. Even staff of a company are often confused when hear acronyms such as DOS (Director of Sales), DOM (Director of Marketing) SME (Subject Matter Experts). In addition to that, there are an extensive variety of homonymic acronyms. The most spread of them are:

STD           Short Term Disability

STD           Sexually Transmitted Disease

PDA           Personal Digital Assistant

PDA           Public display of affection

TBD                  to be determined

TBD                  to be done

TBD                  to be discussed

TBD                  to be defined