Conference on Language, Norms and Digital Lives

How do we talk on digital media? How do we talk about digital media? How do we talk with digital media?


Given the development of the Internet and digital media over the last three decades and the impact this has had on the way that people interact both online and offline, these questions are pertinent. Countless online platforms, many of which can be accessed at any given point in time via portable app technology, have given birth to countless communities of practice, ranging from the mainstream to the fringes. Norms and conventions of interaction come into being, some of which are transient and some of which are more permanent.

The lines between online and offline life have become increasingly blurred as it is not only the case that offline practices influence online ones, but online practices also bleed into the offline world. This socio-technological evolution has thus had, and continues to have, ramifications for multiple aspects of language - from structural ones to socio-cultural ones. Linguistic varieties, including registers, discourses, and even digital sociolects, have emerged, as have more generalized conventions. As observed by David Crystal, language change processes, including language death, take place at an accelerated pace in online contexts. The Internet has facilitated new ways of expressing social identity deployed both online and offline, an example of which could be how the language of social media influencers has made its way into the everyday speech of people of all ages. Linguistic interactions in echo chambers on the fringes of the Internet have had real-life consequences ranging from linguistic influence on social upheaval and downright acts of crime. The role of language in people's digital lives has thus become an extremely important object of linguistic research.

In recognition of this, the first Conference on Language, Norms and Digital Lives explores language on/around/about/with/through the internet and invites contributions addressing issues related to language and the digital. We welcome different theoretical frameworks, approaches, and methods – qualitative and quantitative – for example, corpus linguistics, linguistic ethnography, sociolinguistic interviews, and discourse analysis.

 

Thursday 28 November

08:00 - 09:00 Sign in
09:00 - 09:15 Welcome
09:15 - 09:45 Sean Hughes: The construction of gender identity in an online non-cisnormative coming-out narrative: A conversation analytic account
09:45 - 10:15 Janet Ho & Jiapei Gu: Empowering women in social media discourse
10:15 - 10:45 Shutong Han: The Negotiation of Chinese Gay Norms on Douyin: Stylised performance of Sajiao: among Chinese gay influencers
10:45 - 11:00 Break
11:00 - 11:30 NienEn Bonnie Liu: Performing Digital Professionalism through Prosody among Taiwanese Educational YouTubers
11:30 - 12:00 Luigi Arminio: Sociolinguistic Codes and Communication Practices in Polarized Climate Discourse on Facebook: An empirical analysis
12:00 - 13:00 Lunch
13:00 - 13:30 Emad Abdul-latif: The rhetoric of memes: How do Egyptians say what they cannot say in virtual space?
13:30 - 14:00 Tina Thode Hougaard and Lasse Balleby: Meme makers’ influence
14:00 - 14:30 Andre Joseph Theng: Membership Categories and the Interactional dynamics of a Catholic Facebook Community in Singapore
14:30 - 15:00 Coffee and cake
15:00 - 15:30 Kasper Engholm Jelby: Studying AI in academic practice: Some methodological considerations
15:30 - 16:00 Paul Ueda, Ka Fai Law, Justin R. Leung, and Marjorie K.M. Chan: Generative Artificial Intelligence and Regionally Marked Variation Perception
16:00 - 16:15 Wrapping up

Friday 29 November

08:00 - 09:15 Sign up
09:15 - 09:45 Raymund Vitorio and Anne Storch: #AuPairsInGermany: Contesting Precarity through the Mediatization of Emotions and Lived Experiences of Filipino Au Pairs in Germany
09:45 - 10:15 Miriah Ralston: Ventriloquizing on the Internet: Using Dogs to Manage Delicate Conversations On TikTok
10:15 - 10:45 Kira Molina: Exploring pragmatic variation in digital spaces – A diasporic perspective on Mexicans in Germany
10:45 - 11:00 Break
11:00 - 11:30 Nicole Mellin and Ann-Kathrin Thierfeldt: In-game Language Usage of German Speakers Playing League of Legends
11:30 - 12:00 Dom Ford: How players talk about disastrous game launches: What went wrong with Cities: Skylines II?
12:00 - 13:00 Lunch
13:00 - 13:30 Jakob Adolph: Fringe Knowledge: Analyzing the Incels Wiki as a Case of Manosphere Content Dynamics
13:30 - 14:00 Marian Flanagan: From tweets to the streets: Anti-immigrant discourse in the 2023 Dublin Riots
14:00 - 14:30 Silvia Ramirez Gelbes: Hate speech in Argentinian social media: No voices in opposition are allowed
14:30 - 15:00 Coffee and cake
15:00 - 15:30 Sofia Navarro Beck: A linguistic study of online grooming and sextortion: Ethical and methodological perspectives
15:30 - 16:00 Taylor Martinez and Kyle Rawlins: Are You Hearing What I’m Hearing: Dogwhistles in the Digital Age
16:00 - 16:30 April Day: Exploring The Language of Support and Validation in an Online Group for Australian Mothers in Japan
16:30 - 16:45 Wrapping up

 

Info

This two-day conference takes place at the Department of English, Germanic, and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen, and is a collaboration between two research groups: Norm, Variation and Language Change and the newly formed Digital Cultures and Languages.

The event will begin both days at 09:00 and last until 16:00.

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