What is Orthography

Chats, blogs, mailing lists, personal e-mails or texts that can be found on homepages, in short all kinds of computer-mediated communication, offer a very good opportunity to observe ongoing forms of language change as well as language awareness on the part of the?users. The new medium makes it possible to watch the emergence of new rules at the same time as they are being formed, and to observe current processes of linguistic reanalysis by the language users. Observations of this kind are possible on all levels of the language system, with regard to phonetics and the phonological system as well as to morphology, morpho-syntax and syntax. This chapter will give a short résumé of the research that has been done so far in this field and outline the many further possibilities of exploration that have not yet been followed up.