Model Answer Unit 5.6, Activity 9
This is a model answer. Your notes might be different.
Private vs public voice
Some social media users creatively manipulate the formal written system to make it more representative of who they are and how they talk. As a result, regional computer-mediated communications have sprung up across the globe. Scots is just one of these.
Twitter is a medium that sits somewhere between the private and the public
people are more likely to write in a minority language such as Scots in posts directed at a specific user (semi-private) than they do in posts that are #hashtagged for a wider audience (public)
Twitter makes it possible for a user’s content to be seen by anyone around the world. A tweet which is liked and retweeted enough can move from the semi-private sphere to the public sphere – bringing Scots to an entirely new audience.
Writing like you speak
And Scots on Twitter is a fascinating source of evidence about how aware people are of the subtle ways their speech differs from other people’s and the creative ways they find to represent this.
Depending on exactly where someone comes from, their (spoken) Scots will include different sounds, words and sentence structures. We see this represented in Scots CMC.
we see traditional Scots words represented in Scots CMC in new ways. We also see new words popping up and developments in spoken Scots playing out in Scots CMC, providing us with a new lens for understanding linguistic change
Scots CMC, we see people thinking about how their language sounds and experimenting with how it’s represented visually, and we can do so with remarkable clarity