Computer mediated communication and informalization of discourse: The influence of culture and subject matter

This article compares the language used in four online written asynchronous fora in English, Spanish and Catalan about football. We pay special attention to the use of informal, conversational language in these written texts. The results are then compared to a previous analysis of online fora in the three languages about a more serious topic, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Our initial hypotheses were that the linguistic behaviour in the English fora would show more informal, conversational characteristics than the Spanish and Catalan fora and that the fora about football would be more conversational than those about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Our study largely confirms that, in the discussion groups studied, online asynchronous computer mediated communication in English displayed markedly more oral elements than in Catalan and Spanish, both in fora devoted to a serious topic and in fora devoted to sport. While the Catalan and Spanish showed more informal, conversational elements than the corresponding fora about politics, this topic related difference was not so clear in the case of the English fora. Another unforeseen finding was that the English asynchronous forum devoted to sport displayed a number of features associated with synchronous CMC.