Language and social interaction in the virtual space of World of Warcraft

Virtual worlds such as the online multiplayer game World of Warcraft have become popular spaces for people all over the world to socialize and interact. As on the rest of the Internet, language, specifically text chat, is the essential mode of social discourse in these worlds. Despite these types of virtual social spaces becoming more and more common, few studies have been done on the linguistic practices of these online communities. This paper offers a descriptive analysis of the sociolinguistic practices of a group of adult World of Warcraft players, and focuses especially on how discourse strategies identified in more traditional language interactions are applied by the players in the artificial environment and linguistic medium of the game