Les procédés scripturaux des salons de clavardage (en français, en anglais et en espagnol) chez les adolescents et les adultes

One of the most sticking aspects of technological progress over the last fifteen years is computer- mediated communication (CMC): chatting, instant messaging, e-mail, discussion forums, blogs, social networking sites, etc. In addition to having significantly impacted contemporary society, these communication tools have greatly modified writing practices. The object of this study is group chatting which offers many writers the possibility of communicating simultaneous amongst themselves. This communication tool shows two important discursive and communicational characteristics. First, chatting is generally a hybrid form of communication: the code used is written, but the exchange of messages forms a dialogue structure resembling oral speech. Second, the spontaneous character of chatting imposes speed, both in encoding and decoding messages. Within the framework of a comparative study on writing practices in Francophone chatters (Tatossian and Dagenais 2008), four general categories for all writing variations in the corpus were established: abbreviatory processes, grapheme substitutions, word final neutralisations and expressive processes. Now we are interested in testing the rigueur of this classification in languages where the phonetico-graphical degree of correspondence differs. According to the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis [ODH] (Katz and Frost 1992), in which a transparent orthographic system (such as in Italian, Spanish or Serbo-Croatian) directly transpose phonemes into the orthographic system, we seek to verify whether our results for French can be generalised both to languages with a “transparent” orthographic system (Spanish) and to languages whose orthographic systems are “opaque” (French, English). For each language, two questions were asked:  1. How can attested scriptural practices be classified?  2. Are these graphic practices qualitatively and quantitatively similar amongst both adolescents and adults? The scriptural phenomena related to chatting also imply a generational identity. Adolescence is a period characterised by the quests for an identity. A study by Sebba (2003) on English shows that a relationship exists between “modified spelling” and the construction of identity in adolescents (i.e. graffiti, CMC). In addition, in these communication realms, we see the creation of a community of users based on common interests (Crystal 2006), such as in the adolescent community. A corpus was constructed from exchanges accessed through the Internet Relay Chat protocol. For each language in the study, two sociolinguistic distinct sub-corpora were defined: the first was made up of adolescent chat forums, the second, of a forum for adults. For each language, 4520 sentences, taken from various IRC channels for adolescents and adults, were analysed. First, a quantified inventory of the different scriptural phenomena collected was created and then the results were compared.

Keyphrases: computer-mediated communication, chatting, opaque and transparent orthography, writing practices, generational variable, youth language, oral / written