From English to Twenglish: A New Language Variety?

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on language behaviour in Computer Mediated Communication, and on Twitter in particular, from the linguistic point of view, so as to account for possible linguistic changes the new technologies aiding interpersonal communication (may) have brought about. More specifically, we intend to investigate (a) if and to what extent the twitterer’s linguistic choices are affected by the character limitation of the medium, and, most importantly, (b) if anything like Twenglish, that is, the English of Twitter, actually exists, as one might expect from a technological setting that is likely to motivate users to write in a particular way. To this aim, a corpus has been specifically compiled, which will be analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively, so as to draw attention on linguistic traits that may be qualified as potentially distinctive of the messages produced on the Twitter platform.