60 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
Internet users are evidently wanting to talk to others who belong
to their interest group (subculture, elite, niche.. .) or whom they
would like to influence so that they become part of their interest
group. Indicative is the way group members typically use such la-
bels as ‘guests’, ‘outsiders’, and ‘foreigners’ when referring to visitors
to their forum. The more light-hearted accounts go even further.
Andy Ihnatko, for example, characterizes the situation in this way:
‘the true purpose of language is to reenforce the divisions between
society’s tribes, or at least to make things difficult enough to un-
derstand so that the riff-raff keeps out. The new language of the
Internet, spoken by a great number of rather insular types who like
to keep interpersonal contact to a bare minimum to begin with,
is no exception.’^56 Sociological analysis now seems to be moving
away from the view that the kind of reduced social cues described
earlier disallow the development of comple xsocial and personal
relationships on the Net. Just because we use a restricted set of
graphic characters does not stop people constructing a new social
world, and some have argued that cyberspace in certain conditions
permits considerable levels of sophistication.^57
Interesting linguistic questions follow. If real Internet communi-
ties are relatively small-scale, they will demonstrate their solidarity
by evolving (consciously or unconsciously) measures of identity,
some of which will be nonlinguistic (e.g. shared knowledge, a par-
ticular morality) and some linguistic in character. The linguistic
features will take time to evolve, especially in a medium where
technological facilities change so quickly and where some degree of
nonconformity is commonplace among users, but eventually they
will provide the community with an occupational dialect which
newcomers will have to learn if they wish to join it. Linguistic id-
iosyncrasies belonging to individual chatgroups and MUDs have
often been noted, at least as anecdotal observations. One of the
aims of what one day might be called Internet sociolinguistics
(or dialectology) will be to determine just how systematic such
(^56) Ihnatko (1997: iii). (^57) See the review in Paccagnella (1997).