The New Sesquipedalian

Online writing is an increasingly ubiquitous mode for informal, phatic communication, but the implications of this shift for the relationship between writing and speech are still contested. While some point to the rise of a new “netspeak” dialect, quantitative analysis suggests a picture that is more complex: online writing reproduces lexical and phonetic variation from spoken language, while simultaneously hosting an impressive array of apparently novel orthographic variables. I will present computational statistical techniques for identifying variation in online writing, and will discuss the geographical, social, and linguistic properties of several types of variables. Next, I will consider the diachronic perspective, where large-scale longitudinal data enable robust inferences about patterns of linguistic influence across thousands of lexical variables. I conclude with ongoing work on whether and how orthographic variables can maintain their social and geographical distinctiveness in the face of pressure towards leveling in an ever more densely-connected online world.