Non-standard Spelling Research Articles

Text Messaging as a Precursor of Linguistic Decadence for Students in Some Nigerian Tertiary Institutions

Electronic text messaging in Nigeria is an entrenched linguistic behavior which has caught the attention of an enormous youth population and it is adversely affecting the acquisition of linguistic competence. This paper investigated the use of text messages by students in some tertiary institutions in Lagos State, Nigeria in order to examine the various deviant linguistic features and degree of departure from standard variety of English usage. The study utilized extracts from two hundred text messages collected for analysis from male and female undergraduate students between July 2021 and June 2022. Our findings reveal that texting negatively impacts writing skill of students and the noticeable linguistic anomalies are: non-standard spellings, word order violations, disjunctive orthography, anomalous punctuations, vowel deletion, use of slang and colloquialisms, surface diagraphia and others. The paper concludes that since anything goes in texting and it is not regulated, it may wreck the language because it has a pernicious effect on the linguistic competence of students and on the general standard of education. It then recommends that educators should rise to the challenge and instill in students the formal writing skill they need to succeed.

PHATIC COMMUNICATION IN ONLINE ENGLISH CLASS DISCUSSIONS THROUGH FACEBOOK COMMENTS

Phatic communication refers to small talks that aim to form ties of personal union between people or the speakers. Especially in this digital age, phatic communication is somehow still used. This research aims to uncover the kinds and functions of phatic communication used by Indonesian students who have been doing online classes through Facebook, responding to their classmates‘ material presentations, and having discussions in the comment column. This current study employs the qualitative method with the document analysis technique. The data of this recent study is the phatic communication used by students during the online course through Facebook, and the data was examined through document analysis techniques from the students‘ Facebook comments activity in the form of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences related to phatic expressions. Moreover, the data was analyzed through the following steps: 1) labeling the related data; 2) classifying the data into its types and functions; 3) interpreting the data findings; and 4) drawing conclusions.The study‘s main finding is the appearance of phatic expressions, for instance, greeting, thankfulness,compliment, apology, encouragement, and wishing to each other. As the typical conversation is made online through social media platforms such as Facebook, we suggest that some language or conversation styles like abbreviations, non-standard spelling, and emojis have also appeared.

Phatic Communication in Online English Class Discussions through Facebook Comments

Phatic communication refers to small talks that aim to form ties of personal union between people or the speakers. Especially in this digital age, phatic communication is somehow still used. This research aims to uncover the kinds and functions of phatic communication used by Indonesian students who have been doing online classes through Facebook, responding to their classmates’ material presentations, and having discussions in the comment column. This current study employs the qualitative method with the document analysis technique. The data of this recent study is the phatic communication used by students during the online course through Facebook, and the data was examined through document analysis techniques from the students’ Facebook comments activity in the form of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences related to phatic expressions. Moreover, the data was analyzed through the following steps: 1) labeling the related data; 2) classifying the data into its types and functions; 3) interpreting the data findings; and 4) drawing conclusions. The study’s main finding is the appearance of phatic expressions, for instance, greeting, thankfulness, compliment, apology, encouragement, and wishing to each other. As the typical conversation is made online through social media platforms such as Facebook, we suggest that some language or conversation styles like abbreviations, non-standard spelling, and emojis have also appeared.

Email Literacy in Higher Education Institutions: A Case Study on Student-Instructor Email Communication at Dhofar University in Oman

Email is one of the means via which students in higher education institutions (HEIs) liaise with instructors to enquire about course materials, assignments, upcoming assessments and seek advice on personal or academic matters. The current study is an attempt to investigate student-instructor email communication focusing on the problematic aspects in students’ emails that affect the process of communication. The study is based on the analysis of one-hundred email messages composed and sent by undergraduate students to their instructors at Dhofar University in Oman. It is concluded that student email messages are often characterized by lack email etiquette rules, linguistic inaccuracies and traits of texting and instant messaging mediums. Several student messages, for instance, lack proper email layout and contain grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes, indicating that reviewing emails before sending them to teachers does not take place. In addition, informal features such as use of informal vocabulary, excessive use of punctuation marks, non-standard spelling, emojis and emoticons, which reflect unawareness of formality, professionalism and university setting etiquette, are noticeable in students’ email messages. Therefore, pedagogical intervention with respect to acquisition of skills required for writing and perceiving emails is recommended. Education and guidance on the conventions governing email communication can help students communicate more effectively and professionally via email in HEIs, which will promote not only decent practices but also future employability opportunities.

On the Distinctions Between Spoken and Written Language in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract: Figures as diverse as Samuel Beckett and Marshall McLuhan have lauded Joyce for his unusual awareness of the distinct conventions and characteristics of language as it occurs in different forms (primarily spoken and written). Such commentary usually focuses on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake . While more formally restrained than Joyce’s two greatest works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shows Joyce forging the philosophy and aesthetic which consciously treats language in these different forms, implicitly (through, for example, the strategies he develops to represent sound) and explicitly (through, for example, ruminations on the properties of writing and speech). This is shown not least by the fact the book begins not (as is sometimes claimed) at the beginning of Stephen’s life, but at the beginning of his linguistic life, and from the outset uses a variety of print-oriented techniques (such as italicization, indentation, and ellipsis points) to represent the phonic world. This implicitly demonstrates a further distinction, also crucial to Joyce’s later work, not only between speech and writing, but between handwriting and print. The distinction also looms large in A Portrait , which at various times references the manual in a way that emphasizes the labored means of production of the yet-to-be published writer, but also is written very distinctly (as Hugh Kenner observes about Ulysses ), for “technological space” or “printed pages for which it was designed from the beginning.” It is notable in this context that Joyce rejected one strategy in particular for representing the sounds of speech within the visual medium of writing: non-standard spelling. He experimented with a more phoneticized style in Stephen Hero , but this is largely abandoned by the time it becomes A Portrait . We are left with one notable dialectal spelling: “shite.” The deployment of this word speaks volumes about Joyce’s journey from sound to print.

Non-Standard Spelling in Wattpad Comments

Non-standard spelling on social media refers to the use of unconventional spelling and grammar. This article explores the non-standars spelling used by Wattpad readers in their comments. The study employs descriptive approach. The data are comments posted by Wattpad reader in reaction to a story by Shin_an Yuki's story Haf Soul Part 17: Takdir Yang Aneh. The finding shows that Wattad readers employ spoken-like spelling, repetition of letters and punctuations, shortening, and letters deletion in their comments.

Uncovering Factors Influencing Millennials’ Use of Non-Standard Words in Twitter

Social media communication has its own language features and one aspect is modified spelling of standard words. Social media users use shortened words with full awareness of the meanings, and new non-standard words are constantly added to the repertoire of social media language. A pertinent question is whether social media users learn these non-standard words to use or whether they also contribute to the vocabulary used in social media communication. The study examined Malaysian millennials’ use of non-standard words in Twitter and their reasons for shortening words. For the non-standard words, data were collected from 200 active Twitter users whereas data on reasons for shortening words were collected from 30 users. The results showed that the Malaysian millennials frequently used non-standard spelling of words. The three top words were “ni” (this), “nak” (want), and X (negation). The main reasons for the Twitter users to shorten words were the 280-character limit per tweet, user convenience, and characteristics of words. The Twitter users felt free to create new spellings of standard words at times for fun, but most of the time, they use the common non-standard words. The Malaysian millennials reported that they were inclined to shorten long and complex words, and words with many vowels. The study suggests that Twitter users balance between speed in communication and preservation of meaning when using non-standard words. Keywords: Social media, Twitter, non-standard words, word formation processes, shortening of words.

Dialect Grapholects at the Beginning of the 21st Century as a Manifestation of the Vitality and Continuity of Dialectal Codes

The paper presents a case study on written dialectality. The material used for the research is the Eastern Aukštaitian (EA) texts published in the almanacs titled “A Waking Spring” (“Bundanti versmė”) (2013, 2014). The paper develops an approach for “reading” written dialectality, provides theoretical insights about the concept of a dialect grapholect, presents a dialectological analysis of the EA texts, assessing the vitality of the distinctive features, and also includes commentary on the non-standard spelling choices applied to reflect these features through the grapholect. In the given paper written dialectality is considered to be an indication of the vitality and continuity of dialectal codes because, unlike in oral dialectality, the informants-authors put effort into demonstrating dialect. The distinctive features of the EA and of its subdialects represented in the grapholects suggest the idea of their vitality in apparent time. The orthographic choices of the informants-authors are considered as dialect respelling. The EA grapholect is found to be fluctuating, while the orthographic choices for conveying the features of the subdialects are somewhat more stable, however, still in a stage of development as well. Therefore, it is more accurate to discuss the grapholects (plural), rather than a grapholect (singular) of the EA or the subdialect.

Reflections of the French nasal vowel shift in orthography on Twitter

AbstractNon-standard orthography on social media provides a useful supplementary data source for sociophonetic research. Regarding an ongoing chain shift in Northern Metropolitan French nasal vowels, spellings reflecting shifted vowel targets are observed on Twitter. These non-standard spellings, e.g. avont [avɔ̃] for avant /avɑ̃/ ‘before’, provide insight into speakers’ awareness of this change and its lexical distribution. Tweets with shifted and standard spellings of 306 word forms containing the phonemes /ɛ̃/, /œ̃/, /ɑ̃/ and /ɔ̃/ were collected from an 870-million word Internet Archive corpus of French tweets from 2011–2017. Shifted spellings were found for all four vowels and 168 words. The shifted spelling rate is lower than that of comparable variables in English and is not conditioned by stress, grammatical category, frequency, or phonological context, which affect the distribution of shifted nasal vowels in speech. However, frequent words show more indications of intentional misspelling, such as repetition and capitalization of the target vowel, suggesting that some speakers are conscious of the variation and comment on it using salient words. The results also contribute to an ongoing debate about a possible merger between /ɛ̃/ and /œ̃/, supporting the hypothesis of an incomplete merger where /ɛ̃/ shifts towards [ɑ̃] but /œ̃/ does not.

The Problem of the Explanatory: Linguistic Variation in Twenty-First-Century Spanish Retranslations of Huckleberry Finn

Starting with an overview of the complex notion of “retranslation,” this essay examines the six different translations of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that have been published in Spain in the early twenty-first century. Specifically, this paper ponders how the newer Spanish versions of Twain’s novel tend to contradict the retranslation hypothesis, as they do not often portray the seven literary dialects announced by the Explanatory that opens Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The linguistic varieties included in the source text seem problematic for Spanish translators, whose strategies entail paratextual additions, depicting regional target dialects to recreate an interplay of voices, playing with nonstandard spelling, omitting the introductory note, and suppressing any trace of literary dialects in the target text. The analysis leads the author to observe how publishing norms—particularly publishers’ tendency to reprint previous translations, publishers’s commercial interests, and their predilection for unmarked texts in standard Spanish—have led to translations that ignore the diversity of voices portrayed by Twain’s novel.

Ta as an emergent language practice of audience design in CMC

Abstract This study examines the use of ungendered third person Chinese pronoun ta in digital first-and-third person voiced discourses (i.e. small stories). The study asks what implications the script choice ta, as opposed to gendered 他 ta ‘he’ and 她 ta ‘she’, has for audience design and the facilitation of character empathy. The study draws on 131 digital texts from celebrity verified accounts on social media platform Sina Weibo in October 2015. From a Discourse Analytical perspective focused on deixis relative to the notion of empathy in storytelling, the study investigates emergent practices which involve the orthographic manipulation of gender. The study proposes that ta is an interpersonal resource whose deictic properties as a non-standard spelling are exploited as a property of audience design to facilitate an appeal to empathy. This facilitation is advanced by the script choice which offers a wider scope of reference, and thus targets a wider audience.

RASSLE: Return Address Stack based Side-channel LEakage

Microarchitectural attacks on computing systems often stem from simple artefacts in the underlying architecture. In this paper, we focus on the Return Address Stack (RAS), a small hardware stack present in modern processors to reduce the branch miss penalty by storing the return addresses of each function call. The RAS is useful to handle specifically the branch predictions for the RET instructions which are not accurately predicted by the typical branch prediction units. In particular, we envisage a spy process who crafts an overflow condition in the RAS by filling it with arbitrary return addresses, and wrestles with a concurrent process to establish a timing side channel between them. We call this attack principle, RASSLE 1 (Return Address Stack based Side-channel Leakage), which an adversary can launch on modern processors by first reverse engineering the RAS using a generic methodology exploiting the established timing channel. Subsequently, we show three concrete attack scenarios: i) How a spy can establish a covert channel with another co-residing process? ii) How RASSLE can be utilized to determine the secret key of the P-384 curves in OpenSSL (v1.1.1 library)? iii) How an Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) secret key on P-256 curve of OpenSSL can be revealed using Lattice Attack on partially leaked nonces with the aid of RASSLE? In this attack, we show that the OpenSSL implementation of scalar multiplication on this curve has varying number of add-and-sub function calls, which depends on the secret scalar bits. We demonstrate through several experiments that the number of add-and-sub function calls can be used to template the secret bit, which can be picked up by the spy using the principles of RASSLE. Finally, we demonstrate a full end-to-end attack on OpenSSL ECDSA using curve parameters of curve P-256. In this part of our experiments with RASSLE, we abuse the deadline scheduler policy to attain perfect synchronization between the spy and victim, without any aid of induced synchronization from the victim code. This synchronization and timing leakage through RASSLE is sufficient to retrieve the Most Significant Bits (MSB) of the ephemeral nonces used while signature generation, from which we subsequently retrieve the secret signing key of the sender applying the Hidden Number Problem.
 1RASSLE is a non-standard spelling for wrestle.

Visualising pre-standard spelling practice: Understanding the interchange of ‹ch(t)› and ‹th(t)› in Older Scots

Alphabetic spelling systems rarely display perfectly consistent one-to-one relationships between graphic marks and speech sounds. This is particularly true for languages without a standard written form. Nevertheless, such non-standard spelling systems are far from being anarchic, as they take on a conventional structure resulting from shared communities and histories of practice. Elucidating said structure can be a substantial challenge for researchers presented with textual evidence alone, since attested variation may represent differences in sound structure as well as differences in the graphophonological mapping itself. In order to tease apart these factors, we present a tool-Medusa-that allows users to create visual representations of the relationship between sounds and spellings (sound substitution sets and spelling substitution sets). Our case study for the tool deals with a longstanding issue in the historical record of mediaeval Scots, where word-final <cht>, <ch>, <tht> and <th> appear to be interchangeable, despite representing reflexes of distinct pre-Scots sounds: [x], [xt] and [θ]. Focusing on the documentary record in the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots ([LAOS, 2013]), our exploration surveys key graphemic categories, mapping their lexical distributions and taking us through evidence from etymology, phonological typology, palaeography and historical orthograpy. The result is a novel reconstruction of the underlying sound values for each one of the target items in the record, alongside a series of sound and spelling changes that account for the data.

Study of Language Change by the Promotion of Informal Language, Orthography and Words with Multiple Meanings on Facebook

Facebook has promoted the use of informal language among both teens and adults. This social website has resulted in the deterioration of orthographic knowledge of both age groups due to the use of non-standard spellings. This social media engine has also contributed to the destruction of the word knowledge of users. Most of the users are aware of the context in which the English words are employed on Facebook but are unaware of their standard dictionary meanings. All these factors combine in effecting the formal academic writing and social interaction of these users. This research aims at finding out the language change due to the use of informal language, orthography, and words with multiple meanings on Facebook. The study has investigated the corrosion of the formal language of Facebook users. The current study was conducted by following the mixed-method approach in a way that twenty Facebook public pages, administrated by teens and adults were analyzed and also survey questionnaire filled by Intermediate and Graduate students. The results showed that teens are an easy victim of this up-thrust of technology as compared to adults. The results of the study gave a visual display of the effect of orthography by the use of informal language and the words with multiple meanings on social interactions and formal writing of both teens and adults.

Нестандартная орфография титула xntj-S на египетских частных памятниках Древнего царства

Нестандартная орфография титула xntj-S на египетских частных памятниках Древнего царства

Spelling errors in English derivational suffixes reflect morphological boundary strength

AbstractTo what extent do speakers decompose morphologically complex words, such assegmentable, into their morphological constituents? In this article, we argue that spelling errors in English affixes reflect morphological boundary strength and degrees of segmentability. In support of this argument, we present a case study examining the spelling of the suffixes -able/-ible, -ence/-ance, and -mentin an online resource (Tweets), in forms such as <availible>, <invisable>, <eloquance>, and <bettermint>. Based on previous research on morphological productivity and boundary strength (Hay, 2002;Hay & Baayen, 2002,2005), we hypothesized that morphological segmentability should affect the choice between <able> vs. <ible>, <ance> vs. <ence>, and <ment> vs. <-mint>. An analysis of roughly 23,000 non-standard spellings is consistent with that hypothesis, underscoring the usefulness of spelling variation as a source of evidence for morphological segmentability and for the role of morphological representations in language production and comprehension.

Combining a context aware neural network with a denoising autoencoder for measuring string similarities

Measuring similarities between strings is central for many established and fast-growing research areas, including information retrieval, biology, and natural-language processing. The traditional approach to string similarity measurements is to define a metric with respect to a word space that quantifies and sums up the differences between characters in two strings; surprisingly, these metrics have not evolved a great deal over the past few decades. Indeed, the majority of them are still based on making a simple comparison between character and character distributions without considering the words context. This paper proposes a string metric that encompasses similarities between strings based on (1) the character similarities between the words, including non-standard and standard spellings of the same words, and (2) the context of these words. We propose a neural network composed of a denoising autoencoder and what we call a context encoder, both specifically designed to find similarities between the words based on their context. Experimental results show that the resulting metrics have succeeded in 85.4% of the cases in finding the correct version of a non-standard spelling among the closest words, compared to 63.2% using the established Normalised-Levenshtein distance. We also show that by employing our approach, the words used in similar context are calculated to be more similar than words with different contexts, which is a desirable property lacking in established string metrics.

“That spelling tho”: A sociolinguistic study of the nonstandard form of though in a corpus of Reddit comments

AbstractTho, the nonstandard spelling of though which was proposed by American spelling reformers in the 19th century, is making a comeback. In 2013, internet memes such as that backflip tho gave a boost to the shortened form. This sociolinguistic study investigates the use of tho in RedditGender, a 19 million-word corpus of comments posted by 1044 Reddit users. First, concordance lines generated from the whole corpus were analyzed in order to compare the use of tho with the meme and the standard spelling. Then, regression analysis was conducted with a sample of the corpus, containing only complete cases. Results show that tho is rarely used in the meme construction that contributed to popularize it, and that it appears more often as an adverb than as a conjunction. They also seem to indicate that the use of tho is correlated with gender and race. Most frequent users are black males. This suggests that the shortened spelling is not simply a way to save time when typing, and that it is not semantically equivalent to though. It seems to be a marker of affiliation with a social group and of familiarity with internet subcultures.

Efficient Use of Resources for Statistical Machine Translation

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>Machine translation has great potential to expand the audience for ever increasing digital collections. Success of data driven machine translation systems is governed by the volume of parallel data on which these systems are being modelled. The languages which do not have such resources in huge quantity, the optimum utilisation of them can only be assured through their quality. Morphologically rich language like Hindi poses further challenge, due to </span><span>having more number of orthographic inflections for a given word and presence of non-standard word spellings in </span><span>the corpus. This increases the chances of getting more number of words which are unseen in the training corpus. In this paper, the objective is to reduce redundancy of available corpus and utilise the other resources as well, to make best use of resources. Reduction in number of words unseen to the translation model is achieved through text noise removal, spell normalisation and utilising English WordNet (EWN). The test case presented here is for English-Hindi language pair. The results achieved are promising and set example for other morphological rich languages to optimise the resources to improve the performance of the translation system. </span></p></div></div></div>

Efficient Use of Resources for Statistical Machine Translation

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>Machine translation has great potential to expand the audience for ever increasing digital collections. Success of data driven machine translation systems is governed by the volume of parallel data on which these systems are being modelled. The languages which do not have such resources in huge quantity, the optimum utilisation of them can only be assured through their quality. Morphologically rich language like Hindi poses further challenge, due to </span><span>having more number of orthographic inflections for a given word and presence of non-standard word spellings in </span><span>the corpus. This increases the chances of getting more number of words which are unseen in the training corpus. In this paper, the objective is to reduce redundancy of available corpus and utilise the other resources as well, to make best use of resources. Reduction in number of words unseen to the translation model is achieved through text noise removal, spell normalisation and utilising English WordNet (EWN). The test case presented here is for English-Hindi language pair. The results achieved are promising and set example for other morphological rich languages to optimise the resources to improve the performance of the translation system. </span></p></div></div></div>