'Blogspeak: the blogalization of English in the global village

Technology is enabling new patterns of communication in ways which have implications for language patterns. Weblogs (blogs) are among the genres of Internet communication to have attained widespread popularity, and to attract the attention of commentators, yet their linguistic characteristics have not so far been systematically described. Assuming that the most widely used language for Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) is English, and that recent years have seen the rapid rise of the blog as a communicative medium on the Web, the paper investigates the Anglophone “blogosphere” in terms of linguistic features, style and domain, analysing “blogspeak” as a kind of language which is more private and personal than traditional journalism but more public than diaries, the analysis confirming that it expresses a form of writing between oral conversation and writing, formality and informality,one which rationalises the human need to communicate within the constraints of the medium. Evidence of the difficulty in defining weblogs in terms of genre is given: although there are simple and evident features that are universally shared, there are also major differences which make a more unambiguous identification of the complex communicative and linguistic patterns within ‘blogal’ English particulary complex