Tertiary Orality?

Positioning digital linguistic practice at the intersection of orality and scripturality has been somewhat of a consensus in much of the research into digital linguistic practice for almost three decades now. By contrast, there is an additional aspect to the study of digital communication which appears, by comparison, to have flown under the radar. Specifically, there is evidence that mobile linguistic practice is becoming increasingly spoken in a medium-based sense. Today, orality permeates digital genres – from video platforms such as YouTube, to gaming environments such as Twitch, to video calling applications such as Zoom. And in recent years, such oral practices have moved beyond traditional communication settings and into the posthumanist (Pennycook 2018) realm of human-machine-interaction. Through technologies such as speech-to-text and textto-speech recognition, and through the rise of digital assistants and artefacts, we are increasingly talking not just through, but with machines. This paper will give an overview of some of the linguistic implications of these new oralities. I will reexamine Walter Ong's notion of secondary orality as a form of technologized orality "which depends on writing and print for its existence" (1982, 3). Based on this theoretical concept, I will discuss whether current forms of spoken digital practice, in particular where they involve a posthuman element, can be understood as an emerging form of orality. Such a "tertiary orality," which goes beyond technically mediated forms of speaking, may dissolve assumed distinctions between speaking and writing, between humanand machine-made discourse. I close with a brief look into casework on a specific community of practice on YouTube, namely the Reborn community, to illustrate how tertiary orality may operate in intensely mediated environments.