Ngn som oxå känner att d e så ball med språk? 's' : - En kvalitativ studie om språket i gästböcker på communities på Internet

Sammanfattning: Someone that also feels language is fun? 'lol' - A qualitative study about the language used in community guest books on the Internet Lisa Ringberg and Jennie Roman This is a study about the written language used in two different internet community guestbooks were there is an age difference of 11,2 years between the registered users of the two communitiess. The two communities chosen for the study were LunarStorm, with an average age of 18 years and Familjeliv, with an average age of 29,2 years. During 4 weeks, from 071106-071201, 50 randomly selected guestbook posts were collected from each community. Out of these posts, 25 were written by women and 25 were written by men. We have chosen to concentrate our study on the use of expression symbols – by this we mean the images that can be created with symbols that sometimes go under the name of smilies. We also looked at the use of symbol combinations – by this we mean a combination of characters and letters that go together to create some sort of symbol. We studied the use of shortenings, alternative spellings and the use of sound imitating words. Since we were not able to find much earlier research in this specific subject area, much of this study is based on our own pre comprehension. The earlier research we managed to acquire is more concerned with how the language is used on the Internet in general and is not specifically aimed at internet communities and guestbooks. It’s aimed at what a conversation is and how it’s built, since much of the written language used on the Internet resembles our own spoken language. The written language on the Internet generally contains uses of shortenings, expression symbols, alternative spellings, sound imitating words and symbol combinations and also ungdomsspråk. The method we implemented in this study was a qualitative approach and we especially focused on a text - and contents analysis. We chose this method mainly because we wanted to see what is unique in each community and the writing in the guestbook posts and not what is general. We want to highlight the unique and the qualitative aspects from the guestbook posts and not for example the number of expression symbols. The study has been tested for its validity and reliability to ensure the accuracy of its results. The results we got didn’t agree with what we believed before the study. We thought that the younger community members of LunarStorm would use the categories we studied far more often than those of Familjeliv, but instead it showed that the members of LunarStorm and the members of Familjeliv used about the same expression symbols and symbol combinations. When it came to shortenings the members of Familjeliv used more correct shortenings than the members of LunarStorm. The alternative spellings differed, since one word had a number of different alternative spellings. When it came to the last category, sound imitating words, these were more frequently used by the members of LunarStorm than the members of Familjeliv. The younger target group used many different variations of these, but the most common was the sound imitating words for a laugh for example 'hehe'. Keywords: Internet, communities, guestbooks, expression symbols, symbol combinations, alternative spellings, shortenings, sound imitating words