Colloquialisation describes the increasing use of speech-like features in writing, such as contractions (e.g., it’s, Mair 1997). At the same time, writers have also been avoiding certain informal devices, such as phrasal verbs (Rodríguez-Puente 2014): a seemingly opposite trend known as decolloquialisation.
Changes in the frequency of features typically linked to conversation or to formal writing provide evidence of several overlapping sociolinguistic processes that shape recent stylistic change. Some of these processes share common ground with colloquialisation, while others move in the opposite direction.
In my conference work (Abalo-Dieste 2023, 2024), I compare processes similar to colloquialisation with processes that contrast with them. For example, colloquialisation is closely related to conversationalisation, yet both contrast with monologisation.
Similar to colloquialisation
- informalisation
- (Fairclough 1992: 200)
- conversationalisation
- (Hiltunen & Loureiro-Porto 2020)
- (pseudo-)democratisation
- (Farrelly and Seoane 2012)
- stylistic levelling
- (Schützler 2020)
- (synthetic) personalisation
- (Landert 2014)
- tabloidisation
- (Lefkowitz 2018: 354)
- popularisation
- (Biber & Gray 2012)
Opposite to colloquialisation
- densification
- (Leech et al. 2009: 249)
- monologisation
- (Kruger et al. 2019)
- anti-democratisation
- (Lundberg and Laitinen 2020)
- ritualisation
- (Fairclough 2003: 66)
- commodification
- (Fairclough 1993: 207)
- marginalisation
- (Fairclough 1993: 207)
- economy
- (Biber & Gray 2012)
To reconcile the various perspectives on colloquialisation and related sociolinguistic phenomena, I adopt a more neutral view of the convergence pattern that the definition of colloquialisation suggests: register levelling. Rather than seeing change as one-directional (speech influencing writing), I consider the influence to be mutual. This points to a broader movement in which both speech and writing evolve towards a shared style: one that is more informal and oral in tone than current conversation, yet not fully conversational.
My conference work (Abalo-Dieste 2023, 2024) tests this idea by analysing 20 linguistic devices associated with colloquialisation and related processes of stylistic change in the British National Corpus (BNC1994 and BNC2014). The findings indicate that the most frequent outcome is convergence between speech and writing — a pattern consistent with register levelling. This convergence highlights how the two modes increasingly share linguistic features, narrowing traditional stylistic boundaries.