Book Review: Crystal, D., Internet Linguistics: A Student Guide

I approached this book as a teacher of novices, taking seriously David Crystal’s proposition that Internet Linguistics: A Student Guide is an introduction to a nascent field for someone with no subject-matter knowledge beyond raw experience and no language research expertise beyond simple thematic analysis. From that perspective, Crystal succeeds in building an easily grasped overview of the way in which the linguistic discipline might approach the Internet as a principled research enterprise.

Generalist overviews of fields of research always encounter debates over disciplinary roots, inclusion and exclusion of fields, fairness of coverage, polemics within the field, and
incursions from and into other fields. Introductory textbooks are perhaps even more difficult, combining the problems of a generalist overview with finding the appropriate level of detail and justifying claims about what is central, medial, and peripheral. Crystal, to his credit, treats untangling some of this complexity as his primary problem to solve for the novice student of linguistics and allied language-oriented disciplines. He does so by focusing on how the broad issues of characterisation and methodology of the linguistic discipline (p.ix) have been or could be applied to Internet linguistic phenomena. Used in a class with supplementary materials of original sources to fill out details, I believe teachers and novices alike would find this a useful index to many basic Internet phenomena as well as the overall thorny question of how to define and demonstrate the value of an academic discipline.