This study began with the realisation of the current and continuing relevance of the language of the Internet in the world of today. The study itself focuses on the chatroom portion of this new form of language, sometimes called Netspeak, both because of my interest and adventures in chatrooms and because it has indeed become a new type of communication. In chatrooms, the participants often cannot know for certain whom they are talking to and most do not even attempt to ask. At the same time, people can talk with others in real-time in all parts of the world. Chatrooms also often reflect the unique features of Netspeak, one of them being the use of abbreviations. Those indeed became the focus of this study.
The aim of this study was to find out which types of abbreviations people used most frequently in chatrooms out of the seven categories for shortenings listed by Bieswanger (2007) and modified by me. Those categories were Initialisms, Clippings, Apostrophe-frees, Contractions, Letter/number-homophones, Phonetic spellings, and Word-value characters. In addition, the objective was to look at short-term changes between the two sets of data. I attempted to reach the aims of the study by
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saving chatroom conversations every day for an hour for two weeks at two different occasions and in two different seasons (winter and summer) at E-Chat. Afterwards, I made notes on how many occurrences of certain types of abbreviations could be found in the chat data logs, thus providing the results. As we can see from the results as answers to the presented research questions, according to this study, Initialisms is the most used category of abbreviations in online chatrooms, with Letter/number homophones as the second most used category. The least used category was Word-value characters. These observations applied to the two sets of data both together and separately. The two most frequently-used categories clearly dominate the data. This was generally due to using the same abbreviations belonging to certain categories multiple times. However, there were differences occurring between the two sets of data, mostly in terms of percentage regarding how much certain categories were used. Initialisms, Contractions and Word-value characters became more popular in terms of percentage increase, while the rest of the categories decreased in their percentage between the six months between the gathering of the two data. The changes were also statistically significant according to log likelihood. Many of the same abbreviation types were popular in both sets of the data, but there, too, the percentages tended to change. Most of the time, however, these changes were not statistically significant. Data 1 also included much less abbreviations than Data 2, but it still had more abbreviations occurring per turn than Data 2. This indicates that people were more active in general during the summer, but used less abbreviations when in relation to that activity than in the winter.
This study is the result of chat logs from four weeks in total and the time period between the gathering of the sets of data was relatively short, further research could be conducted on more chat logs that could also be logged under longer periods of time. Some changes have already taken place in the use of abbreviations between the two seasonal sets of data for this study. Some ideas for further study could include investigating how the results would differ if the researcher actually took part in the
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conversation, which in this case did not happen. A second option could be to compare between different chatrooms; those that focus on specific topics and those that are more general, or even chatrooms that are located in different chatroom websites. A third option could be to look at changes in longer timespans than I have, although that would naturally take more time and patience.
Nonetheless, as Netspeak is still a very lively form of communication and there are numerous things yet to be found out about it.
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