Orthography development on the Internet: Romani on YouTube

Orthography Development on the Internet This chapter investigates the role of new communication technologies as an alternative to the nation-state approach to language standardization. We examine the emergence of written forms of Romani among video networks on YouTube, giving consideration to the choice of dialectal forms and orthographies in users’ interactions. The ‘multilingual Internet’ has been the subject of growing attention (Danet and Herring 2007; Wright 2004a), prompted not only by the presence of many languages on the Internet but also by multilingual practices such as code-switching in chat room messages and forum posts. The position of online interaction as a blend between spoken and written discourse has allowed languages that have so far lacked a written form to expand into the public domain. Earlier limitations on orthographic choices imposed by the constraints of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (hereafter, ASCII) character set have in the meantime been removed, by and large, through the availability of Unicode conventions. The Internet has thus transformed the process of domain expansion of smaller and endangered languages (cf. Casquite and Young, this volume). Whereas in the pre-Internet age support for such languages depended on ‘top-down’ and centralized language planning efforts (Kaplan and Baldauf 1997; Wright 2004b) - with choices of variety, script, and orthography being determined by a small circle of individuals in authority positions (cf. Cahill and Karan 2008; Lüpke 2011) - the Internet offers opportunities for organic, ‘bottom-up’ processes of domain expansion. In such processes, plurality of forms is often embraced by users, and a unified standard seems redundant (Rajah-Carrim 2009:504). Shared writing norms may even emerge spontaneously and - as reported for Nigerian Pidgin, Jamaican (Deuber and Hinrichs 2007), and Haitian Creoles (Schieffelin and Doucet 1994) - they often differ from the conventions proposed by language planning experts. Moreover, the choice of scripts and orthographies shows innovative solutions. For example, speakers of dialectal Greek (Themistocleous 2010; Tseliga 2007) and Arabic (Palfreyman and Al Khalil 2007) use the Roman alphabet but avoid phonetic transcriptions. Instead they favour visual patterns in which Roman letters and numbers are employed based on their visual similarity to Greek or Arabic characters (on a similar point, see Moseley, this volume).