[Air-l] Sociolinguistics in virtual communities

[Nancy Baym]

>Hi,
>
>I've suddenly discovered that my thesis needs a huge injection of
>sociolinguistics to pull it together.   Can anybody recommend
>(a) an accessible overview of the field, prefereably written in the
>last 5 years, and

Susan Herring has a piece on discourse analysis of online interaction 
in the Handbook of Discourse Analysis (edited I think by Debra 
Schifrin, which I have just mis-spelled) that is a must-read 
overview. There's probably other good sociolinguistics overviews that 
aren't about online interaction in there too.


>(b) anything that's a "must read" on linguistic communities?

Lynn Cherny's book _Conversation and Community_

and, immodestly, my own book _Tune In, Log On_, is not without 
relevance. Both Lynn and I rely on the concept of "speech community" 
and its associated methodologies. Lynn's is more explicitly 
'linguistics.'

For some non-internet deep background on sociolinguistics, Dell Hymes 
and John Gumperz have one classic anthology, and Richard Baumann and 
Joel Sherzer co-edited the other. Their titles escape me.


>
>I've been doing a part/obs case study of an internet community,
>so anything with specific reference to linguistic sommunities in
>that kind of context would be particularly useful.
>
>Thanks
>--
>Urban Theology Unit, Sheffield
><http://cybertheology.org.uk>http://cybertheology.org.uk
>Views expressed in this email are my own and are not
>necessarily those of the University of Sheffield or UTU.
>
>
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-- 
Nancy Baym	http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym
Communication Studies, University of Kansas
102 Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA
Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org