Number of Posts: 6
Posts 1 - 6
Wege aus der Peinlichkeit
(Exit ways out of embarrassment)
Newspaper | die Weltwoche
Date | 28.9.2017
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | emojis, gender, misunderstanding, online dating, politeness, research/study, texting, youth
Summary | Emojis have entered our communication with no turning back but using them is a minefield of misunderstanding. It is especially risky in the initial stages of texting with a love interest: studies show that people tend to imitate the communication patterns of their interlocutor if they are in love with them. Because women are more communicative than men, they tend to be the ones who are imitated in such a scenario. But men, beware! Do not go overboard with your heart emojis, it's too girly. One should however also refrain from making overly abrupt changes to ones emoji habits as it can seem distanced and elitist if one stops to use emojis altogether.
Image Description | N/A
«In Japan steht für Danke, im Westen für Beten»
("In Japan it means thank you, in the West it signals praying")
Newspaper | Sonntagszeitung
Date | 20.8.2017
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | emojis, marketing, misunderstanding, research/study, texting, translation
Summary | Keith Broni, one of the first emoji translators world-wide, has been chosen from 500 applicants. He has researched the use of emojis at the University of London and he is an expert of how people from different cultures understand emojis. He works as a makerting consultant to various companies and advises them on how to use emojis as a corporation. Using emojis can be fraught with risk as hand gestures can mean very different things in different cultures. Even within the same culture emoji use can be risky. At this point, it is more risky not to use any emojis in casual texting because of the negativity effect which means that messsages without emojis seem cold or distanced.
Image Description | N/A
'Ha' Isn't a Laugh. Seriously?
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 8.7.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | abbreviations, emojis, Facebook, research/study, texting, word/writing
Summary | People express laughs in different ways when the text or otherwise communicate online. Some type a version of "haha", others write "LOL" or a similar abbreviation but none of these messages mean that one is actually laughing. Linguists who have analyzed thousands of texts claim that LOLs signal interlocutor involvement like an "uh-huh" on the phone.
Image Description | Cartoon of various people laughing with various noises.
Image Tags | male(s)
How can women build better friendships? Start with the right words.
Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 11.6.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | research/study, social media, texting, threat
Summary | Linguist Deborah Tannen has just published her latest book about how women build their friendships through language. Communicating with friends and negotiating the terms of the friendship is fraught with risks especially now that social media lets one know exactly when one is being exluded from group activities. Texting also complicates our friendships.
Image Description | N/A
Punkt: Am Ende
(Period: the end)
Newspaper | Die Zeit
Date | 31.3.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | diversity, emojis, language threat, punctuation, research/study, texting
Summary | The neutral punctuation mark "." is disappearing from our written language. The most likely reason is that with text messages we no longer need a period to tell us when a sentence is finished. Linguists are not worried about the extinction of the period. Language is ever-changing, they say. It is quite sad though, that the period is being omitted more and more and hardly anyone cares. All debates now center around emojis: can Apple just replace the gun emoji with a water pistol one? Is it racist to use a black emoji as a White person?
Image Description | The sunset over the ocean.
«Jemandem zu sagen, er solle sich ficken, ist ziemlich schlimm»
(«Telling soeone to go fuck himself is pretty bad»)
Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 5.4.2017
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | anglicisms, language threat, research/study, texting, word/writing
Summary | Linguist Elisabeth Stark is research texting communication with a corpus of 18000 text messages and even more WhatsApp messages. She says that about 2-3% of the words are anglicisms and that their amount does not seem to be rising rapidly - the word "fuck" for instance is still too strong for most German speakers. In German, sex is too taboo for taboo language. Her data also shows that Swiss people choose the local dialect rather than the standard variety when texting. Most people's langugage competencies are not compromised by this informal communication, most can adhere to conventions when a formal register is appropriate.
Image Description | Portrait of the interviewee and a Keystone image of a protest with a sign reading "fuck".
Image Tags | female(s), text
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