“NEW LITERACY”, “NEW ILLITERACY” AND THE GENRES OF SPEECH

In this article, the two co-authors reflect on the linguistic and technical influences on the emerging speech genre, “The Lighthouse”. They describe its purpose and its communicative objectives, its environment and its register. The paper offers a general classification of quasi-written messages of the “Lighthouse”:  textual and non-textual content, personal and loan content. The paper looks at the changes in the linguistic standards and the arrival of the “new literacy”, from the language economy of the SMS to the use of emoji as a graphic dictionary. The authors also turn to the idea of the “new illiteracy” and identify four types: receptive (passive) illiteracy, productive (active) illiteracy, functional illiteracy and pseudo-illiteracy.