Language in English Blogs (MS THAO NGUYEN)

Since the Internet (the Net) was officially launched worldwide in the years 1990s, the chance for people all over the world to interact and connect with others has been increasing faster, more easily and conveniently than ever. The need to communicate, to share knowledge and to benefit from people in every corner of the world has been satisfactorily fulfilled thanks to state-of-the-art computing accessories, the ever-updated networking technologies, and the friendly-user softwares.

            People worldwide in general and from Vietnam in particular are increasingly online for professional and private purposes, of which the latter may recently consist of posting, viewing and commenting weblogs.

Weblogs (blogs) have been defined as ‘frequently modified web pages containing dated entries listed in reverse chronological sequence’ [21, p.1]. A more specific definition is that given by Todd Stuffer in his book Blog on: The Essential Guide to Building Dynamic Weblogs

A weblog or blog is a website that’s designed to be updated with items in a linear, time-based fashion, similar to a personal journal or diary, except that the contents are meant specifically for public consumption. Often implemented using special software, weblogs content articles or entries that are grouped primarily by the date and time they are posted. (2002:4)

In the past several years, weblogs have gone from relatively obscurity to immense popularity. Blogging as an online activity has been increasing exponentially since mid-1999 and the number of bloggers continues to increase day by day (in May 2007, the blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 71 million blogs). One of the reasons for blogging is the popularity it brings. Here are some of the reasons why weblogs have been increasingly popular:

• Because of ‘the release of the first free blogging software’ [7, p.1].
• Their ability to respond to the world around them. After the events of 9/11, traditional media outlets could not keep up with the original reporting and man-on-the-street commentary found in blogs [22, p.1]. Blog posting increased in amount and frequency in the week after 9/11, as did the number of comments per post and the number of posts per individual blogger [25, p.1].
• Weblogs possess a socially-transformative, democratizing potential. Journalists see blogs as alternative sources of news and public opinion [28, p.1]. Educators and business people see them as environments for knowledge sharing [15, p.1]. Private individuals create blogs as a vehicle for self-expression and self-empowerment [7, p.1].
• Blogging makes people more thoughtful and articulate observers of the world around them [7, p.1].
• ‘Blogs enable easy, inexpensive self-publication of content for a potentially vast audience on the World Wide Web, while being more flexible and interactive than previous publication formats, print or digital’ [21, p.1].

            There are various types of blogs, and each differs in the way which the content is delivered or written. Blood [7] distinguishes three basic types of weblogs: filters, personal journals/ diary weblogs, and notebooks. The content of filters is external to the blogger (world events, online happenings, etc.), while the content of personal journals is about the blogger (the blogger’s activities and internal states); notebooks may contain either external or personal content, and are distinguished by longer, focused essays.

            Among the aforementioned types of weblogs, diary weblogs bear a resemblance to their paper-based antecedents in that they are usually written by a single author in first person. They tell an episodic story that may be fragmentary and is always in process. The continuation is open-ended and terminates when the writer ceases to make entries. As the largest genre of weblogs (Herring et al. [20] found in a study of a random sample of publicly available English language weblogs that 70.4% of the sample met the definition of diary blogs), diary weblogs by American people are my choice to do this research for the following reasons:    

            Firstly, as ‘new forms of computer-mediated communication - unrestricted as to content and form guidelines - allow users total freedom for individual expression. This makes weblogs the perfect choice for exploring linguistic expression of individual differences’ [38, p.1], it has given a rise to a concern with its linguistic features, as Susan C. Herring and John C. Paolillo state in their ‘Gender and Genre Variation in Weblogs’ [20]

‘Weblogs (blogs) were not included in the original machine learning research, perhaps because they have only recently emerged as a recognized genre of computer-mediated communication (CMC), Yet as the fastest-growing CMC genre, weblogs deserve linguistic study, especially if (as the Gender Genie assumes) language use differs in blogs compared to other genres of writing (2006:2)

            Secondly, ‘as the dominant influence during the twentieth century was from the U.S. to the U.K., the American spelling was increasingly found in British publications’ [14, p.63] and American English is overweighing British English in the computer-mediated communication (CMC) [70], which has a great effect on the English learners in Vietnam particularly nowadays, a linguistic study on diary weblogs by American people is preferred to bring about their basic linguistic features so as to help (Vietnamese) English learners, especially those who are increasingly online for writing, posting and viewing blogs.

Thirdly, as for an English learner, it is necessary that there should be a study of this novel linguistic case to bring about its basic characteristics, as Mirko Tavosani, in his ‘Linguistic features of Italian blogs: literary language’ [42] writes

… It is therefore to determine specific linguistic features of blogs. Even occasional surveys however show that blogs are not limited to ‘a language reminiscent of brief notes, spoken asides, or short letters, rather than of essays or newsprint’. Such language plays an important role in blogs, but accounts for only a small part of them. Many individual blogs aim instead at a true ‘literary’ status and have a correspondingly high standard for word selection. Therefore, the linguistic equilibrium of this medium could be higher than expected [42, p.1]