Insight into computer-mediated communication

Útdráttur

During the last years in Iceland as in many other parts of the world, a virtual reality has developed which interacts with the real one. The Internet, in its opportunities to connect and communicate, increasingly influences the lives of Iceland’s inhabitants. The constantly increasing importance of communication “online” is a new testing ground for the use of the Icelandic language. Computer-mediated communication (CMC), that is (interactive) communication through (digital) electronic devices, has been claimed to differ from standard writing norms as language adjusts to new possibilities and limitations. This paper therefore aims to provide an initial insight into Icelandic CMC. Based on a corpus of an active Facebook group, examples will be presented to show significant features of Icelandic CMC including elements associated with spoken language, such as English borrowings and interjections, compensation strategies for visual and prosodic elements of communication, as for example written prosody and emoticons, as well as spelling facilitations such as writing without diacritics. As these features deviate from previous writing outside the digital medium, this paper argues for CMC as a new variety of written Icelandic.