What is Box

The aim of this chapter is to account for linguistic strategies of breaking into a virtual speech community, particularly the community the author refers to here as the Pen community. Virtual communication necessitates accommodations not otherwise engaged in face-to-face conversation, and the Pen community is both virtual and leet. Being leet necessitates interactional behavior consisting of techie knowledge, leet speak fluency, and a shared interest in the venture of building and maintaining a leet identity online. The goal for this ongoing research is to understand virtual conversational behavior and its role in leet speech community building. With a brief discussion of the literature on sociolinguistic perspectives as well as pragmatic theories pertaining to conversational behavior (Watts, Ide, & Ehlich 2005; Culpeper, 1996), exchanges from three threads of discourse from the Pen virtual speech community are accounted for. The notable features of discourse are the strategies employed by participants in order to create, build, foster a sense of place and identity, and strengthen said communities. The Pen community’s discourse permits examples of strategies undertaken for this collective effort through attempting to enter into the community and become a member, topic shifting behavior, and flaming. The author operationalizes each of these examples via Culpeper’s Impoliteness model. Included here are a brief review of relevant literature, a discourse analytical approach to the interactional behavior found in The Pen community, and conclusions about how a leet speech community is built virtually. The Impoliteness model serves well here as a starting point for further research on virtual speech community building.