Dimensions of speech and writing in World of Warcraft chat transcripts

Abstract: The aim of this essay was to examine chat communication in the World of Warcraft on-line interactive game in order to place the chat on the formal/informal continuum using speech and writing as extremes, as well as to examine the linguistic context of the chat situation within a broadly Hallidayian perspective and tenor of the participants. A corpus of 3675 words was gathered from the game on the realm or game server of Bloodfeather. The data was analysed by counting the frequency of a few selected linguistic features and compared with examples of speech and writing. The research showed that the chat in World of Warcraft was highly informal and would on the continuum be placed as more informal than the speech extract used for comparison. The results also indicated that context plays a small role in shaping the chat conversation and that tenor have close to no significance at all.