Gaming and linguistics: investigate the linguistic context of video games

Abstract

The lexicon of video games, although it is increasingly entering colloquial forms (e.g. avatar, level up), still belongs to a closed group language, which is partly explained by the fact that different types of games have different basic vocabularies. In the light of the current findings, there appears to be a marked difference between the language choice of texts used in video games and those about them. While hungarian ingame gamers prefer English terms, in other types of texts (e.g. newspaper articles) they prefer the Hungarian version. This dichotomy can be explained by the link between video games, digital literacy and various text types. During my research, I synchronised the results of several collections from different sources and time periods into one database. In addition, several online game-related thematic articles, comments and comments were used as a basis for the terms. The aim of the study is to investigate the vocabulary of language choices of different games and game types in two communication areas, comments and articles about games.