Internet Sociolects

The aim of the research is to confirm Internet forum’s sociolect validity among other co-existing sociolects. In order to provide the full spectrum of the sociolect’s potential, particular hypotheses must be made. Should be established
Hypothesis 1: Music-oriented Internet forum sociolect uses international English language.
Graphic evidences provided in chapter two inform, that ‘afterhours.fm’ forum members use English language to express their opinions in music threads. Comparison to a larger scale (Internet as a whole) can confirm this hypothesis. According to Internet World Stats, 872.9 millions of Internet users (data estimated in November 2015) use English language; this amount is on top of the competition between all languages in the …show more content…
Almost all of the most frequently used expressions in their sociolect are derived from English, despite the fact, that not all of the members are native speakers of English language.

Hypothesis 2: Sociolect does not have to be limited to physically existing environments only.

Theory of sociolinguistics mentions about the differences between registers, which are counted into the whole study. Dialects are associated with geographical regions, which are an example of a physically existing environment, meanwhile sociolects concern social groups. Chapter 1 discusses the theory of sociolinguistics, chapter 2 says about the virtually existing environment, the Internet (forum in particular).
3.2. Methodological research of data sources
In order to investigate a forum, public threads and its posts are not enough to state the forum’s potential. Data and listing other valuable statistics might be useful to study the sociolinguistic approach of an Internet forum. The data sources (apart from public threads) are:

• Forum database (for instance, most frequently used words),
• List of amount of forum members and their countries,
• Languages used by forum members,
• Statistics (amountnumber of users, page views,