Digital discourse, often referred to as computer-mediated communication, has revolutionized communication practices since the advent of the personal computer (Crystal, 2011), with ever-growing effects, as smart devices proliferate in every aspect of twenty-first-century human existence. Linguists in the francophone world first took note of these new digital interactional practices in the 1980s with the onset of conversation via Minitel (Levy, 1993), a French-born service that consisted of a computer terminal that connected via telephone lines to remote services like chatrooms, interactive games, and purchasing platforms, years before most Americans had ever heard of the world wide web (Mailland, 2017). Minitel terminals remained functional some 30 years later; the service was ultimately decommissioned in 2012 on account of outdated modems, an inability to support advancements in graphics and the earlier mass migration (in France and beyond) to the present-day internet (Mailland, 2017). But the introduction of virtual interactional spaces – in the francophone world and beyond – had marked the beginning of a new linguistic trend in which users found themselves regularly engaged in the production of written language infused with vernacular tendencies.

数字话语，通常被称为以计算机为媒介的交流，自个人电脑问世（Crystal，2011）以来已经彻底改变了交流实践，随着智能设备在 21 世纪人类生存的各个方面激增，其影响越来越大. 法语世界的语言学家在 1980 年代首次注意到这些新的数字交互实践，当时通过 Minitel (Levy, 1993) 开始了对话，Minitel 是一种法国出生的服务，由一个计算机终端组成，该终端通过电话线连接到远程服务，例如聊天室、互动游戏和购买平台，比大多数美国人听说过万维网早几年（Mailland，2017）。大约 30 年后，Minitel 终端仍然可以使用；由于调制解调器过时，该服务最终于 2012 年退役，无法支持图形的进步和早期的大规模迁移（在法国及其他地区）到当今的互联网（Mailland，2017）。但是，在法语世界及其他地区引入虚拟交互空间标志着一种新的语言趋势的开始，在这种趋势中，用户发现自己经常从事融入了白话倾向的书面语言的生产。