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I'm doing PhD in Internet linguistics and I'm wondering about a topic that won't bore me for 2 years. Do you know some interesting works about cyberspace that have to do with language? Analysis of discourse on youtube or even imageboards would be easy and fun but cringeworthy and useless. Any ideas?

shouldn't you be asking your advisor? and/or other members of the department?

Internet memes are basically newspeak like in 1984, destroying human communication and thought. You should expose this pls

I don't know if this is really the same thing, but what about studying the transition to Unicode (UTF-8) from...whatever everyone was using before. Tom Scott did a short video about it, and I remember that there are a great many individual character encodings in use. Another option might be Emoji, and the differences inherent in their creation (say Japanese vs. English emoji).

Does the internet even have a unique pidgin or anything like that? You'd think that with people all over the world using the internet, there'd be more linguistic clashes, but everyone either learns english or sticks to their own. Or talk in emojis.

Old usenet speak? BBS lingo?

I think you're like 20 years too early for anything interesting. Maybe some soykaf about how memes/slang spread.

>>2480 OP is trying to get past that why not write a harsh crique of emerging "meme theory" an idea I had was how sure pseudo-dialects develop through similar online communities but also how regional dialects still carry onto the internet, such that cyberspace doesn't exist as a medium wholly linguistic or regional but rather a space between those two consider the works of Marshall McLuhan and his global village theory. Consider developing them into an alternative theoretical mindset from the dawkinian meme trend also consider socialization in the sociological sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialization

>>2481 hell we could even talk about the internet's role in psychosocial colonization and how it proliferates the english language as well as western values and norms much more insidiously than media on the other hand this also allows for external cultures to more immediately infiltrate those of the west, rather than the television's one-way channel

>>2482 *much more insidiously than media such as television

What about English encroaching on other languages? Do non-english speakers meme in English?

>>2474 I agree with the others. Write your paper on memes and maybe also how the internet affects a person's opinions and outlooks on life. I'll never be able to say certain big phrases with the same mindset I used to have. >>2484 >Do non-english speakers meme in English? I know some of the Russians here have started to think in English because of their exposure.

>>2484 I'm french and have been switching from french to english and english to french when I think/speak to myself for quite a few years now. I think that's mostly because most of my social interactions happen on english-speaking imageboards. Also I don't consume a lot of media but when I do it's most of the time in english. What's kind of infuriating to me is that while I feel like my french has become worse that what it once has been, I don't feel like my english has progressed that much since ~2010.

>>2485 >I know some of the Russians here have started to think in English because of their exposure. I browse english chans daily and I have begun thinking in english as well. I'm also a huge weeb learning nip so I think in japanese, english and portuguese, sometimes in the same sentence. Also, when writing texts sometimes I forget about a word in my language but I can remember it in another which sometimes helps me remember it. Knowing multiple languages fuarrrks up your brain but it's fuarrrking awesome in a way.

>>2485 >I know some of the Russians here have started to think in English because of their exposure. I can only speak for myself, I am not Russian either, but this whole "thinking in a different language", isn't this exactly what it really means to be fluent in a language? >>2487 This is definitely true, my German has been degenerating over the years and I'm nowhere near as eloquent in German as in English these days. My German feels very choppy, very formal, It sounds quite interesting to me in recordings of myself when I am talking casually. >>2484 The few people I do talk to either do meme entirely in German or interject their memery (does this actually count as real word?) clumsy, usually incorrect/inappropriate, English words.

>>2496 >what it means to be fluent. I think not. I can think the same thing in a lot of languages that I am far from fluent in. I just think in whatever I happen to think at the time, whether it is Esperanto or Russian or English or French or Romanian or Spanish. Some of those I would not even know how to say good morning in. Some people I know are also like this. A Serb who takes notes in English for school, and thinks in English and uses English more than most languages although he lives in a country where English is not the main language by a long shot is the main person I think of. That could be a really fascinating population to learn more about, these people who speak english because of the internet. I speak English nativley but I make an effort often to think in other languages. I have not written my journals in English for several years. Having recently moved to a place where English is a popular but by no means ubiquitous second language, I am interested to see how my language profficiency may change. As just a note to all those of you who speak English well from the internet, those of you that I have met in person usually are very good but undoubtably lacking in some vocabulary. But fast and fluent at speaking.

http://stevelosh.com/blog/2015/11/happy-little-words/ This might be of interest for you, OP.

>>2531 Woah.

>>2530 Fluency means you can express any idea sufficiently well in the language you're using. Thinking in a language is only possible if you are capable of doing such a thing. >Some of those I would not even know how to say good morning in. You don't to know how to say "good morning", you need to be able to express the concept the words "good morning" describe. For example, if you didn't know "Guten Morgen" you could still say something equivalent to it, like "Schönen Vormittag" or whatever, which while not the same thing, expresses the same idea. >make an effort often to think in other languages That's the thing innit? It shouldn't take effort, it should be, well, fluent, no? >As just a note to all those of you who speak English well from the internet, those of you that I have met in person usually are very good but undoubtedly lacking in some vocabulary This "in some vocabulary" construction seems very strange, I guess what I may be lacking in words, you lack in style. Also, there is a lot more than the internet that mainly uses English, to be honest.

http://www.ibiblio.org/cmc/mag/1994/jul/moo.html Here.

>>2474 Im so sorry.