Linguistics Out Loud: The Uses of Jargon in Outline Communities

Jargon is community-specific language that is often criticized for being confusing and exclusionary. But it serves a useful social function as well, enabling easy identification of group members, conveying community values, and streamlining internal communication. Past research on jargon has focused on face-to-face communities, especially on occupational groups such as the military and on spatially concentrated populations such as prison inmates. This paper seeks to understand how online communication has affected the development and distribution of jargon, and how various online communities use jargon. New technologies are a common source of linguistic change. The New Oxford American Dictionary even named unfriend (a word associated with online social networking sites like Facebook) as their 2009 Word of the Year. Much of the interaction in social networking sites is explicitly textual; therefore, these communities often develop linguistic resources, including jargon, to facilitate communication among members. This study uses discourse analysis to examine the public circulation of jargon on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Analysis reveals distinct differences in jargon use among these communities based on a sophisticated awareness of audience. These differences emerge from the design of the online sites themselves, from the differences in the composition and purposes of these communities, and from the rhetorical affordances of,jargon