You are going to read the text about the recent linguistic changes in English brought about by the emergence of the Internet. Before you read, discuss the following questions.

1. How is English used in electronic converse?

2. What new language forms has computing already created?

3. What are the ways in which electronic communications have affected language?

WHILE YOU READ

Read the text and complete the following sentences.

1. Electronic communications have affected, and will continue to affect …….

2. Technology and science, including medicine, together account for 50-60% of …….

3. The Internet will further drive the spread of the English language, and perhaps incidentally create a large new category of users …….

4. If we invent something, we need a name for it, and at that point …….

5. The first English language dictionary to claim that the English spoken in Britain no longer counts for much around the world was …… under the aegis of …….

6. The computer industry is full of young people who think of themselves as …….

7. Not only is the vocabulary of electronic communication different from ordinary English; so is …….

8. The electronic media that bind the world together are …….

9. Electronic mail has created another novelty …….

10. So far as the Internet is concerned, its main impact is likely to be …….

11. The core feature of the Internet is …….

Language and Electronics

Сomputer words. Are you someone who practically lives in front of the computer – a ‘ mouse potato ’? Or are you nervous about new technology – a ‘ technophobe ’? In either case, if you want to master the English language, you will need to be familiar with those new computer words that seem to be popping up everywhere.

Luckily, most computer words are easy to learn. For one thing, many of these words probably already have similar forms in many languages: ‘computer’ (En), ‘Computer’ (Germ), ‘konpyuta’ (Jap). Another reason why computer words are easy to learn is that many of them are so colourful. They often make us smile when we first hear them such as ‘ snail mail ’ (traditional post rather than Internet-based mail) or ‘ wysiwyg ’ (what-you-see-is-what-you-get).

To get a feeling for computer words, it helps to understand the world that created them – ‘ cyberculture ’, as it is often called. The computer industry is full of young people who think of themselves as very different from traditional business-people in suits. It is a word that avoids heavy scientific-sounding language in favour of words that are simple, fresh and playful.

Above all, it’s a culture that promotes ‘ user-friendliness ’ in everything, including its language. This means using simple familiar words to describe technical concepts. For example, it is surely nicer to talk about ‘ mouse ’, rather than an X-Y position indicator, which is what the computer mouse was originally called. We find all types of metaphors in computing language.

One reason why computer words are so user-friendly is that many are metaphors. For example, mouse compares a pointing device to a small animal because they have similar shapes. For instance, a computer ‘menu’ offers you a list of things to choose from, just like a menu in a restaurant. A computer ‘ virus’ spreads quickly and causes harm in the same way as viruses spread disease among people. The computer ‘memory’ holds information, just like people’s memories do. Here are some common metaphorical themes, like 1) books: ‘ web page’; 2) transport: ‘information highway’; 3) traditional post: ‘mailbox’, ‘voicemail’; 4) small animals: ‘bug’, ‘snail mail’.

Computer words are easy to learn because many of them use a few affixes that occur again and again: 1) ‘- ware ’ refers to products used for running a computer software, hardware, freeware; 2) ‘ cyber -’ and ‘ e ’ or ‘(e-)’ mean ‘relating to the Internet’: ‘ cyberspace’, ‘ email’; 3) ‘ techno -’ means ‘relating to computers’: ‘ technostress’, ‘technophobe’, ‘technophobia’.

A good way to practise your English is by using it on the Internet, either in emails, or by participating in Usenet groups or mailing lists. Internet communication has a definite style of its own. It is often highly colloquial – in other words, people write the way they would speak in an informal situation.

Note that Internet users do not like to use capital letters to show emphasis, as in ‘ I STRONGLY disagree’. This practice is called shouting. Instead, use a symbol such as the asterisk, as in ‘ I *strongly* disagree’. For more information on the rules of Internet writing (and Internet behavior in general), simply do a search for netiquette on any large Internet search engine.

Language of Electronics is Becoming Weirder and Weirder. Various kinds of speech have been created by electronic communications. The answering machine, or voice-mail, has prompted new versions of the monologue. Electronic mail has created another novelty – the written conversation. Charles Evans of Chyden.Net, a company based in Virginia which retails software electronically around the world, describes the style: “There’s no social pressure to avoid the broken sentence.” The key word is ‘ bandwidth ’ – which implies that the Internet will collapse if you use flowery language, but really just means ‘Get to the point.’ A written conversation has one great advantage over the spoken word: writers can refine their words before “speaking” them. But it also lacks a key quality of speech: the tone of voice that conveys emotion.

At one point, some users solved this problem with the “ smiley ”, a use of punctuation to express delight by:-) and sorrow by:-{. Other symbols represent the basic responses. True cyberians now dismiss such typographical fancies.

Being passé (Fr. out-of-date) on the Internet is a hideous offence, as socially ghastly as speaking with the wrong accent at the Ritz. To help the parvenu (Fr. upstart) or “ newbie ” avoid “flaming” – insults and attacks – a whole collection of books offer advice on “ netiquette ”. To put it another way, if you write clearly, people will take more notice of what you say – even in cyberspace.

To foster such clarity “Wired”, a magazine much read by the digerati, recently produced its own style guide, grandly called “Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age ”.

The lead that English has already established is probably too great to be challenged. Without a serious competitor, linguistic or mechanical, English may now be impregnably established as the world standard language: an intrinsic part of the global communications revolution. If so, what are the consequences for other languages – and for their users?

So far as the Internet is concerned, its main impact is likely to be to protect subsidiary languages, rather than to kill them. In that sense, it is unlike radio and television. For one thing, the limitless space on the Internet means that languages do not compete in the head-on way they do in other media. Increasingly, people will have two languages: one for doing the shopping and talking to their friends, the other for communicating with the formal world. That language will be English.

The Geekicon Language. Why does a language change? Sometimes the reason is obvious. If we invent something, we need a name for it, and at that point a new word comes into a language. Think of some of the words that have become widely used in English to talk about new developments during the early years of this century. Many of them are to do with the Internet: ‘ Google’, ‘blogging’, ‘texting’, ‘SMS’, ‘iPhone’, ‘instant message’, ‘Facebook’, ‘Twitter’.

The “Hacker’s Dictionary” or “Jargon File” is an electronic compendium as fluid and variable as the language it records. It has many authors and sits in many editions on different Internet sites. The latest issue contains over 2,000 entries of the Geekicon language.

Many are the Geekicon language starting from the 1970s or earlier, and many are rarely used logical puns, of which geeks are fond, on the illogicality of English. (The plural of “mongoose”, states the dictionary, is widely agreed to be “polygoose”) A few, though, are terms that have made their way to the wider Net community and even the outside world. Oddly, the Hacker’s Dictionary does not give the origin of geek. A couple of mouse-clicks, however, lead to the online site of a more traditional source: Webster’s, which has “a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake.”

Abbreviations in e-mail (no one now says “electronic” mail) are also a favourite. Their original purpose, speed, has been supplanted: it is the convention that matters. A contentious statement may be prefixed by IMHO, in my humble opinion. Often this is ironic, since no humility is intended; some users dispense with the irony, preferring IMAO – in one’s arrogant opinion.

For a while the smiley,:-), like a face on its side, seemed to be a metalinguistic breakthrough for expressing emotion on the cold face of a computer screen. An industry in emoticons was briefly spawned, including:-((sad),:-0 (shocked) and -%) (punched in the face),;) (wink, used for showing that you are making a joke). Few, though, are used. Over-use now is the mark not of the true geek but of the newbie.

Examples of “Geekon English” in the New Microsoft Dictionary include such words as ‘digerati’ (the Internet cultural elite), ‘yadda yadda yadda’ (‘boring’ about e-activities). The first English language dictionary to claim that the English spoken in Britain no longer counts for much around the world was published in 1999 under the aegis of Bill Gates’s giant Microsoft corporation. The exercise has raised suspicions that it is an attempt by Mr Gates, the founder of Microsoft, to start a dictionary war and to dominate the English language by defining his own version of an easily digestible global lingua franca.

The Coming Global Tongue. It is, as Jacques Chirac once said, a “major risk for humanity”. AIDS? The bomb? Over-eating? No: what frightened the late president of France was what the Internet may do to language, not least his own country’s language.

The spectre that was haunting the late president of France is not new. In 1898, when Otto von Bismarck was an old man, a journalist asked him what he saw as the decisive factor in modern history. He replied: “The fact that the North Americans speak English”.

For the electronic media that bind the world together are essentially carriers of language. To work efficiently, they need a common standard. The personal computer (PC) has one: Microsoft’s operating system, Windows. The Internet has another: TCP/IP, its Esperanto or transmission protocol, which allows computers anywhere in the world to hook into it, whether they are PCs or rival Apple Macs. The English language is now the operating standard for global communication.

In fact, electronic communications have affected, and will continue to affect, language in three distinct ways. First, they change the way language is used. Secondly, they have created a need for a global language – and English will fill that slot. Third, they will influence the future of other languages which people will (perhaps perversely) continue to speak.

Start with the simplest sort of change: the way English is used in electronic converse. The language of electronic chat is splattered with abbreviations that make it not just faster to type but also impenetrable to the novice. Technology is, after all, fertile ground for vocabulary. Technology and science, including medicine, together account for 50-60% of the new words. The test of cyberjargon will be its durability to be included into “Webster’s Third New International Dictionary”.

Not only is the vocabulary of electronic communication different from ordinary English; so is the way in which it is used. In his magisterial “Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language”, David Crystal, a world-known linguist, argues that computing has already created some new language forms.

The big question is: as the proportion of Internet users who are not native English-speakers rises, will they make disproportionate use of English? If so, then the Internet will further drive the spread of the English language, and perhaps incidentally create a large new category of users: those who can write the language colloquially, but not necessarily speak it.

 

AFTER YOU READ