Language and Communication in Computer-Mediated Contexts: A Rich and Challenging Research Field

This special issue offers an invitation to think about the first decade of the 21st century. Acknowledging that millennia boundaries are always arbitrary such that any development is likely to have started earlier and to still be ongoing, I decided to write about the advent of computer-mediated communication (CMC) as one of the linguistic areas that are topical and prominent in today's world. In recent overview articles on 'electronic discourse' (Locher 2014; Locher and Mondada 2014) and on challenges in research methodology for scholars working on computer-mediated discourse (Bolander and Locher 2014), a number of observations were made that I want to revisit in light of the aim of this special issue. Given the fact that communication through computer-mediated means is a fairly recent phenomenon and that the vast majority of research on this use of language have been published since the turn of the millennium, we can indeed state that this topic is relevant. In line with Crystal, "[t]he Internet is the largest area of language development we have seen in our lifetimes. Only two things are certain: it is not going to go away, and it is going to get larger" (2011, 149). In this chapter, I will briefly sketch the object of study, show some of the research questions and developments that have occurred and discuss some of the ways linguists have responded to language online.