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Linguistic Variation in Digital Discourse: The Case of Blogs

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Abstract

Wong offers a fascinating linguistic analysis of blogs in Hong Kong English (HKE), drawing on insights taken from the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). Using an online corpus analysis interface, Wmatrix, Wong provides a reliable account of parts-of-speech categories and semantic domains that are statistically significant in the online blog postings retrieved from the Hong Kong segment of GloWbE, highlighting the linguistic variation of the HKE blog variety of digital discourse that has not been explored before.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As described in Grieve et al. (2011, p. 304), the term blog is a shortened form of weblog, which was initially coined by Jorn Barger in 1977 to refer to the whole ensemble of web links he stored on this website Robot Wisdom.

  2. 2.

    See Kachru (1985) for the distinction between Inner and Outer Circle.

  3. 3.

    The six Inner Circle countries are the USA, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, while the 14 Outer Circle countries include India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania and Jamaica.

  4. 4.

    The first component text of GloWbE-HK contains approximately 2 million words, whereas that of the GloWbE-GB subcorpus is more than double in size, with about 5 million words.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of English, University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong

    May Wong

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  1. May Wong
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Wong, M. (2017). Linguistic Variation in Digital Discourse: The Case of Blogs. In: Hong Kong English. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51964-1_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51964-1_6

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-51963-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-51964-1

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