“Mah 3 favrits”: The Use of Netspeak Language in a Selection of Literary Texts

Abstract

This paper tackles the use of netspeak language features in three texts of different literary genres: “Give Me Women, Wine, and Snuff,” a poem by John Keats; Hamlet, a play by William Shakespeare; and Yellow Dog, a novel by Martin Amis. The first two works are rewritten by contemporary bloggers and satirists in netspeak as an attempt to make these classics better suit the spirit of the current age. The third example is a novel that comprises formal and standard English on the one hand and informal and netspeak language on the other. Thus, this research examines the literary effects of netspeak language features in the selected texts and investigates the main reasons behind the authors’ reliance on such a language style. To further discuss the origin and emergence of certain netspeak terms, this paper deploys some website tools such as Google Search Trends and the Corpus of Contemporary American English.