Digital Orality

Digital spaces have pulled a great deal of everyday writing toward the rhythms and looseness of speech, and this collection examines that trend closely. Its contributors look at dialect-inflected, vernacular and other speech-like writing online, tracing how the move away from a print-centred world is changing the ways people understand themselves and connect with one another.

The chapters draw on material from several language communities, including kiAmu, Lebanese, Ettounsi, Shanghai Wu, Welsh English and a range of American English varieties. Across these cases, writers adopt unconventional symbols, alphabets and spelling choices to signal who they are or who they hope to become.

The book is aimed at students and researchers who study how social media affects language use, writing style and spelling conventions. It will also interest readers who follow literacy, communication, contact between languages and linguistic change more broadly.