Digital Interaction in the History of English

doi:10.1017/9781009205870.007

4 - Digital Interaction in the History of English

from Part I - The Transmission of English

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2025

Caroline Tagg and

Mel Evans

Edited by

Joan C. Beal

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Joan C. Beal: Affiliation:
University of Sheffield

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Summary

Our focus on digital interaction in the history of English foregrounds the mutually transformative relationship between language and society, with technological affordances enabling (new) forms of social interaction, whilst impeding or remediating (older) communication practices. Early internet forum users maximised meaning-making with available linguistic resources, including pre-digital typographical and respelling practices. Today, within the diversity of digital Englishes, strategies typical of early digital interaction remain, reconfigured for users’ local language ideologies and community norms and expanded to incorporate multilingual practices and new semiotic modes. This chapter explores the sociopragmatic practices of identity and belonging across the digital age, from Usenet in the 1980s and SMS in the 2000s to Twitter in the 2020s, detailing a complex interplay between new communicative opportunities and long-established sociopragmatic practices originating offline. Our analysis points to a diversification of English-using internet users and an expansion of multilingual, multimodal repertoires which prompt a revisiting of traditional sociolinguistic conceptions of English.

Keywords

multimodality identity orality SMS text messaging Twitter/X Usenet

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: The New Cambridge History of the English Language
Transmission, Change and Ideology
, pp. 107 - 136

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009205870.007 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2025

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