Linguistics of Social Media

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue brings together current research grounded within a linguistics perspective (theoretical or variationist) and analysing language data from a variety of social media platforms with the goal of increasing understanding of how communication takes place in online social spaces.

Although some argue that social media has roots which date as far back as the 1970s (Hines, 2022), it is really over the past decade or two that social media has become deeply embedded in our day-to-day lives, increasingly turning into an indispensable channel of communication. With this shift, the language we use on various platforms has also begun to capture the attention of linguists and language scholars. Applied linguistics topics, such as social media as an extension of the language classroom, particularly the English-language classroom, have seen ample attention. However, more recently, work grounded in theoretical aspects of language analysis (Calude, 2023) have begun to emerge. Topics include, for example, word formation (Caleffi 2015), dialectology (Zsombok 2022), grammar (Burnette & Calude, 2022), analyses of vernacular forms (Ilbury 2019) and non-standard grammar (Calude et. al, to appear), loanwords (Trye et. al, 2020), and narrative and stylistic analyses (Clarke & Grieve 2019, Page 2018).

This Special Issue welcomes empirical contributions which draw on social media language data, both qualitative and quantitative, analysing these data by drawing specifically on linguistics approaches. The contributions may include but are not limited to the following research topics:

1. Morphological processes and lexical innovation operating in social media;
2. Grammatical or syntactic analyses of social media language;
3. Semantic analyses of social media language;
4. Investigations of how social media users leverage phonetic qualities for meaning making;
5. Application of pragmatics methods or theories to online posts;
6. Analysis of sociolinguistic variation on social media;
7. Dialectology studies of social media language;
8. Language contact, loanword use, or codeswitching research on social media.

The contributions included in this Special Issue will be primarily research papers, but a small number of position papers and review articles may also be considered (for instance, related to ethical considerations, e.g., Tagg & Spillioti 2022). Authors are asked to ensure their contributions are original and not submitted elsewhere, are written in English, and meet ethical considerations. All submissions will be peer-reviewed and acceptance is subject to successful review.

It is hoped that the collection of papers in this Special Issue will popularise the field of social media communication and bring together scholars who work on similar data but perhaps from different linguistics perspectives and use different methodologies. The insights gained from this body of work will showcase how concepts and theories from linguistics can be used to fruitfully increase our knowledge of this dynamic and ever-changing communication environment, while also challenging some of the prescriptive assumptions circulating in relation to it.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400–600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editor ([email protected]) or to Languages editorial office ([email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

References

Burnette, J. & Calude, A (2022). Wake up New Zealand! Directives, politeness and stance in Twitter #Covid19 NZ posts. Journal of Pragmatics, 196, 6-23.

Caleffi, P. M. (2015). The 'hashtag': A new word or a new rule?. SKASE journal of theoretical linguistics, 12(2), 1 –24.

Calude, A, Anderson, A. & Trye, D. (To appear). Intensifying expletive constructions and their use on social media: Innovative functions of the hashtag #wokeAF in English tweets. Discourse, Context & Media.

Calude, A. (2023). The linguistics of social media: An introduction. Routledge.

Clarke, I., & Grieve, J. (2019). Stylistic variation on the Donald Trump Twitter account: A linguistic analysis of tweets posted between 2009 and 2018. PloS one, 14(9), e0222062.

Hines, K. (2022). The History of Social Media.  Search Engine Journal, https://www.searchenginejournal.com/social-media-history/462643/ [Accessed on 9 Aug, 2023]

Ilbury, C. (2019). “Sassy Queens”: Stylistic orthographic variation in Twitter and the enregisterment of AAVE. Journal of sociolinguistics, 24(2), 245-264.

Page, R. (2018). Narratives online: Shared stories in social media. Cambridge University Press.

Tagg, C., & Spillioti, T. (2022). Research ethics. Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis, 91-114.

Trye, D., Calude, A., Bravo-Marquez, F. & Keegan, T.T. (2020) Hybrid Hashtags - #YouKnowYoureAKiwiWhen your Tweet contains Māori and English. Frontiers Special Issue on Computational Sociolinguistics. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2020.00015.

Zappavigna, M. (2018). Searchable talk: Hashtags and social media metadiscourse. Bloomsbury.

Zsombok, G. (2022). Official new terms in the age of social media: the story of hashtag on French Twitter. Journal of French Language Studies, 32(2), 145-164.

Dr. Andreea S. Calude
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.