David crystal how is the internet changing language today

How Is The Internet Changing Language Today?

David Crystal’s four-minute video, “ How Is the Internet Changing Language Today? ” made us ponder his question. The British linguist, academic, and author says that throughout history new technology has always changed language. The printing press, telephone, and broadcasting all changed the English language.

David also points to the Internet as bringing not one set of changes but many style changes. The changes blogging brings to language are different than the changes texting brings to language, for example. David finds that English has become expressively richer because of the Internet. But the changes to spoken language are minor style changes, not significant changes.

Internet’s Introduced Many New Words And Acronyms

“Internet-speak is firmly implanted in language now, and as we continue to live our lives online, new expressions and words will continue to develop,” says Kat. “Just as languages evolved before – by interacting with other languages – we will adjust the way we use words based on what we do and see.”

This all makes iTi think about localization. Translators and interpreters must stay in touch with the culture to continue to effectively provide localization. Facebook alone has produced some new twists on words (liking, friending) that a professional translator must be aware of.

But neither David nor Kate see the Internet making huge changes in how we speak. The Internet does and will continue to offer ways to supplement English (and other languages) rather than seriously disrupt or supplant it.

Internet Affects Translators More Than Interpreters

The Internet is much more likely to impact writing (the translator’s world) than speaking (the interpreter’s world.) For example, there have been some interesting novel informalities in orthography, such as punctuation minimalism, and the arrival of emoticons, David points out.

On the Daily Dot Aja Romano goes further. In a piece he calls, “ We’re All Using Language Differently Now Because Of Internet Culture ” Aja says the Internet’s constant push for shorthand is changing the way we speak and write.

New Meaning Of The Word “Because”

“Few Web-savvy bloggers want to bore their readers with lengthy explanations. So instead of writing, ‘The student issued a Denial of Service to the website because she was a member of the infamous Hacker collective Anonymous,’ they might choose to write, ‘The student hijacked the website because Guy Fawkes,’ and move on,” Aja says. That new way of using “because” (see Megan Garber’s explanation in The Atlantic) may communicate with the younger generations but we don’t think professional translators or interpreters will be writing or speaking that way any time soon.

Most English Writers On The Internet Are Not Native Speakers

The social networking site, Facebook, has already jumped on the language bandwagon. You can use new English varieties like Spanglish (Spanish-English) and Konglish (Korean-English) on Facebook. These ‘new Englishes’ use the standard English language in a very creative way. Some words change meaning (‘blur’ in Singaporean English means ‘confused’ or ‘slow’), while others are combined to create new words.

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David Crystal – How is the Internet Changing Language Today?

Technology always changes a language. When printing came in in the 1400s, it changed the language. New styles developed, new spelling, new punctuation systems and so on. When the telephone came in in the nineteenth century, it changed the language new patterns of dialogue came into being. When broadcasting started in the 1920s, it changed the language. Think of all the styles in the broadcasting medium that we didn’t have before like sports commentary and news reading and weather forecasting and chat shows and all of that.

And when the internet came into being, it changed the language but nobody, I think, ever expected the language to be so diversified as a result of the internet, simply because nobody was able to predict exactly how many different technological variations that were going to be of electronically mediated communication. I mean just think there’s the World Wide Web, there’s email, there’s chat room, there’s virtual world, the the Dungeons & Dragons games that people play as blogging. There’s instant messaging, there’s social networking sites now like YouTube and Facebook, there’s twittering, there’s mobile phone texting and it goes on and on and on.

Now each one of these new technologies or new opportunities for communication produces a new kind of language. In the case of English, a new style of English, the language we use, when we’re blogging is not the same as the language we use when we’re instant messaging. So we can go on through all these different mediums and point to new styles of English that are emerging as a consequence. The actual language itself hasn’t changed that much. It isn’t the case that as you look through these different technological manifestations of English, you see new grammar for instance. We don’t get new patterns of grammar emerging, new types of verb ending or anything like that nor is there that much new vocabulary.

Actually, I mean a few hundred new words have come into English as a consequence of the internet, but that’s not very many considering more than a million words that there are in English. New pronunciations not really, new punctuation yes a bit though. You do certainly get new features of punctuation arriving on the internet emoticons for example being used in clever ways. People using punctuation in an exaggerated form that they never used to do before, simply because you can hold the key down.

People can say fantastic exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark and it can go on and on and on and on and on for as long as you like. So there are a few novelty features like that, but on the whole you look at a screen and what you see on the screen is the same kind of English language that you saw before the internet came into existence. Except now there are these new styles to exploit. The language has become expressively richer as a result of the Internet.

Source: Macmillan Education ELT Channel on Youtube

3 Comments

In my opinion, with the new language style changing from the impact of technology, it is very good. because it makes it easier for people to talk to each other. in my opinion the existence of a new language style can distract people when speaking seriously and not seriously. and with the changing style of new languages, surely we must use them properly and correctly.

in the video I learned that technology about learning English because it can make to know English more in depth, because many people are not too fluent in English with the existence of English habahsa translet technology can make it easier for people who are not fluent in English.

and. because in English there are different pronunciation or language for example such as British and American style. so people who do not understand English become able to know the difference in English.

and I like learning English because the English translet application can make it easier for me to learn English.

In my opinion the new language style changing from the impact of technologi that’s very important for the development of the time’s at this time.becahse it make’s easler for people to talk to each. Other and because many people who are not to fluent in English whit English translate language technology can make it casier for people who are not fluent English.

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How has Internet changed language?

The Internet, as any sufficiently influential technology, has revolutionised both society and language. But what has it really changed?

The Internet, as any sufficiently influential technology, has revolutionised both society and language. But what has it really changed?

Txt spk: Trending and reverting

An argument is heard from all sides that the texting language frequently used is actually detrimental to users’ language skills, causing youngsters to forget how to spell and causing them to drop letters all over the place.

Interestingly, a large number of young texters are reverting to «standard» spelling in their texts because, as one interviewed youngster puts it, «I stopped abbreviating when I realised my parents were starting to do so!» In other words, abbreviating is just not cool anymore, now that our parents are doing it.

The gift of words:

The most positively regarded impact of the Internet on language is the seemingly large number of new words added to the lexicon, such as «tweet», «selfie», and «emoji». All told, there are an estimated 5,000 words in English that are a gift from the Internet.

While this may seem like a lot, in a language with over a million words, it’s just a drop in the bucket, less than half a percent of the total.

Changes in punctuation and grammar:

So, the Internet hasn’t really had much of an impact on spelling, nor has the lexicon been suffused with new vocabulary. Does that mean that we have all overestimated the impact of the Internet? Not at all.

As it turns out, the greatest change that the Internet has brought about is in punctuation. In text speak, which is no longer confined to text messages, but now used everywhere from Facebook to Tumblr, the new way to end a sentence is the line-break. The full stop now means much more than just the end of a sentence. As its name implies, it implies an air of finality and seriousness.

As the following example, used by David Crystal in his article in the May 2016 issue of Babel shows, the same sentence takes on a different meaning with a full stop at the end.

A: I can’t remember when the exam is.
B: Tuesday [=neutral]
B: Tuesday. [=I’ve told you already. You should know, stupid!]

New research by linguists at Binghamton University shows that a message that ends with a full stop is considered less sincere than the new default end, which is no punctuation at all.

In contrast to this minimalism, he also notes the emerging maximalism when it comes to punctuation. Capitalisation and a lot of exclamation marks also take on new meaning. News that is received with a «Fantastic.» is now anything but, while truly good news is «FANTASTIC. »

The frontiers of language are changing, and we can only guess as to how much more of an impact the Internet will have on language.
But one thing is for sure— THIS IS VVV EXCITING.

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Lexis

Journal in English Lexicology

Full text

1 In the preface to Language and the Internet David Crystal explains how the shifting emphasis from technology to “people and purposes” (x) contributes to making the Internet a linguistic revolution. The aim of Language and the Internet is “to find out about the role of language in the Internet and the effect of the Internet on language” (x) and this objective is pursued over nine well-balanced chapters, one more than the first edition of the same book. Chapter One provides a general introduction and distinguishes seve» different linguistic situations found on the Internet. Chapters Two and Three look at linguistic features common to all seven situations, while chapters Four to Nine focus more precisely on the specific defining characteristics of each.

3 Chapter Two The medium of Netspeak begins by mentioning two fundamental constraints on the nature of Internet language: the keyboard and the screen. «There are,» Crystal tells us, «certain traditional linguistic activities that this medium can facilitate very well, and others that it cannot handle at all […] The heart of the matter seems to be [Netspeak’s] relationship to written and spoken language» (23). Internet style manuals recommend to «write the way people talk» (27) but how far is this actually possible? The question leads Crystal to focus his attention first on the differences between spoken and written language. «Speech is typically time-bound, spontaneous, face-to-face, socially interactive, loosely structured, immediately revisable, and prosodically rich. Writing is typically space-bound, contrived, visually decontextualized, factually communicative, elaborately structured, repeatedly revisable, and graphically rich» (31). 1 Crucially, Netspeak «relies on characteristics belonging to both sides of the speech/writing divide» (31). Webpages, for example, obviously tend towards written language while virtual worlds, synchronous chatgroups or instant messaging evoke the characteristics of spoken language. Even these last varieties are still very different from genuine speech. As Crystal points out, technological constraints mean that, unlike a spoken conversation, messages cannot overlap (33), the phenomenon of lag (slow and variable transfer speeds) makes the rhythm of an Internet «chat» slower than that of normal speech and often renders standard turn-taking procedures irrelevant. Netspeak lacks prosody or paralanguage, a lack which is compensated for by a range of linguistic strategies: repeated letters ( hiiiiii, ooops … [37]), capitalization, smileys (a comprehensive table of examples is given), etc. Particularly interesting is the way how, in some Internet situations, people comment upon their own linguistic expression. Crystal gives the example of one character, Hoppy, who in the course of an exchange comments » » (38). «These features of Netspeak have evolved as a way of avoiding the ambiguities and misperceptions which come when written language is made to carry the burden of speech» (42). A table indicating the presence or absence of the seven distinguishing features of spoken and written language in the six varieties of Netspeak (both types of chatgroups are dealt with together) allows the author to conclude that «on the whole, Netspeak is better seen as written language which has been pulled some way in the direction of speech than as spoken language which has been written down» (51). He suggests that it is, however, more helpful to think of Netspeak as something different: «a genuine ‘third medium’» (52).

Ray puts the annoying electronic bell in the Christmas tree. (189-190)

9 In conclusion Crystal decides that «MUDs operate in a curious Alice-like world» (198), quoting Cherny’s remark that «understanding MUD culture requires understanding the ambivalence of MUDders toward their texts, which remain poised between the transience of speech and the persistence of documents» (199). 4

13 Instant messaging of the MSN type has seen a similar increase since 2000. Linguistically, Crystal considers instant messaging closest to chat, but with some important differences. There is, for example, more «chunking» in instant messaging: a single message is often broken up into a series of «chunks». Another distinctive feature is the increased intimacy of the participants which «promotes a greater level of informality and typographical idiosyncrasy» (255). The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the possible linguistic interest of Voice over Internet Protocol (or VoIP) in the years to come.

Bibliography

Herring S.C., «Two variants of an electronic message scheme», in Herring (ed.), 1996b: 81-106.

Notes

1 This characterisation is drawn from material in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (2003).

2 Famously stated in Grice (1975).

References

Electronic reference

About the author

Graham Ranger

Graham Ranger, Department of English, Université d’Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse, France.

The Internet: Changing the Language

It is, of course, too soon to say what permanent effect the Internet will have on languages. Electronically mediated communication (EMC) has been in routine use for only around twenty years, and this is an eyeblink in the history of a language. It takes time—a lot of time—for a change to emerge, for individuals to get used to its novelty, for them to start using it in everyday speech and writing, and for it eventually to become so widely used that it becomes a permanent feature of a language, recorded in dictionaries, grammars, and manuals of style. There are already some telltale signs of what may happen, but everything has to be tentative.

The Difficulty of Generalization

All general statements about EMC are inevitably tentative because of the nature of the medium. Its size, for a start, makes it difficult to manage: there has never been a corpus of language data as large as this one, containing more written language than all the libraries in the world combined. Then there is its diversity, which defies linguistic generalization: the stylistic range of EMC includes the vast outputs found in e-mail, chat rooms, the web, virtual worlds, blogging, instant messaging, text messaging, and Twitter, as well as the increasing amount of linguistic communication encountered in social networking forums such as Facebook, each output presenting different communicative perspectives, properties, strategies, and expectations.

The speed of change makes it difficult to keep pace. How can we generalize about the linguistic style of e-mails, for example? When it first became prevalent, in the mid-1990s, the average age of e-mailers was in the 20s, and it has steadily risen. To take one year at random: the average in the UK rose from 35.7 to 37.9 between October 2006 and October 2007 (Nielsen 2007). This means that many e-mailers, for example, are now senior citizens. The consequence is that the original colloquial and radical style of e-mails (with their deviant spelling, punctuation, and capitalization) has been supplemented by a more conservative and formal style, as older people introduce norms derived from the standard language. Similarly, the average age of a Facebook user has sharply risen in the past decade, from a predominantly young person’s medium to a medium for everyone: in 2012 it was 40.5 years (Pingdom 2013).

But it is not solely a matter of age. The pragmatic purpose of a piece of EMC can alter, sometimes overnight. A good example is Twitter which, when it arrived in 2006, used the prompt “What are you doing?” The result was a range of tweets which were inward-looking, using lots of first-person pronouns and present tenses. Then in November 2009 Twitter changed its prompt to “What’s happening?” This made the tweets outward-looking, with lots of third-person pronouns, and a wider range of tense forms. The result was a shift in the aims and linguistic character of Twitter, which took on more of the features of a news service, as well as attracting more advertising content.

EMC as Writing or Speech

EMC, for the moment, is predominantly a written medium. This will not always be so. Voice over Internet (VoI) is rapidly increasing, and already it is possible to engage in many kinds of interactions without the fingers touching the keyboard at all, using speech-to-text software. The technique is a long way from perfection: systems have recurrent problems with regional accents, speed of speech, background noise, and the interpretation of proper names. But these will reduce as time goes by.

Some people say that in 50 years’ time keyboards will be redundant, but this is unlikely because speech and writing perform very different and complementary functions. EMC relies on characteristics belonging to both sides of the speech/writing divide.

The graphic character of EMC is best illustrated by the web, which in many of its functions (e.g., databasing, reference publishing, archiving, advertising) is no different from traditional situations which use writing; indeed, most varieties of written language (legal, religious, and so on) can now be found on the web with little stylistic change other than an adaptation to the electronic medium. In contrast, the situations of e-mail, chat groups, virtual worlds, and instant messaging, though expressed through the medium of writing, display several of the core properties of speech. They are time-governed, expecting or demanding an immediate response; they are transient, in the sense that messages may be immediately deleted (as in e-mails) or be lost to attention as they scroll off the screen (as in chat groups); and their utterances display much of the urgency and energetic force which is characteristic of face-to-face conversation. The situations are not all equally spoken in character. We write e-mails, not speak them. But chat groups are for chat, and people certainly speak to each other there—as do people involved in virtual worlds and instant messaging.

Another distinctive feature of EMC writing is that, apart from in audio/video interactions (such as Skype or iChat), it lacks the facial expressions, gestures, and conventions of body posture and distance which are so critical in expressing personal opinions and attitudes and in moderating social relationships. The limitation was noted early in the development of the medium, and led to the introduction of smileys or emoticons. Today there are some sixty or so emoticons offered by message exchange systems. It is plain that they are a potentially helpful way of capturing some of the basic features of facial expression, but their semantic role is limited. They can forestall a gross misperception of a speaker’s intent, but an individual emoticon still allows a large number of readings (happiness, joke, sympathy, good mood, delight, amusement, etc.) which can only be disambiguated by referring to the verbal context. Without care, moreover, they can foster misunderstanding: adding a smile to an utterance which is plainly angry can increase rather than decrease the force of the flame. So it is not surprising to see the use of emoticons falling, as time goes by. People have realized that they do not solve all communication problems in EMC, and may even add to them.

New Communicative Opportunities in EMC

When we consider EMC as a species of written language, and compare it with traditional modes of writing, certain novel properties are immediately apparent. However, these properties are nothing to do with the standard conception of writing as a combination of vocabulary, grammar, and orthography. EMC has certainly introduced a few thousand new words into English, for example, but these make up only a tiny fraction of the million+ words that exist in that language. There is nothing revolutionary here. Similarly, the grammar of written English, as seen in EMC, displays no novelty in comparison with what was used before—no radically different word orders (syntax) or word endings (morphology). And despite the way people manipulate certain features of the orthography, such as simplifying punctuation marks or using them excessively, or adding the occasional emoticon, the writing system on the whole looks very similar to what existed in pre-EMC days. The novelty of EMC writing lies elsewhere, in the opportunities it presents for fresh kinds of communicative activity, and in the development of new styles of discourse.

There is a contrast, first of all, with the space-bound character of traditional writing—the fact that a piece of text is static and permanent on the page. If something is written down, repeated reference to it will encounter an unchanged text. Putting it like this, we can see immediately that EMC is not by any means like conventional writing. A page on the web often varies from encounter to encounter (and all have the option of varying, even if page-owners choose not to take it) for several possible reasons: its factual content might have been updated, its advertising sponsor might have changed, or its graphic designer might have added new features. Nor is the writing that we see necessarily static, given the technical options available which allow text to move around the screen, disappear/reappear, change color, and so on. From a user point of view, there are opportunities to interfere with the text in all kinds of ways that are not possible in traditional writing. A page, once downloaded to the user’s screen, may have its text cut, added to, revised, annotated, even totally restructured, in ways that nonetheless retain the character of the original. The possibilities are causing not a little anxiety among those concerned about issues of ownership, copyright, and forgery.

Secondly, EMC outputs display differences from traditional writing with respect to their space-bound presence. E-mails are in principle static and permanent, but routine textual deletion is expected procedure (it is a prominent option in the management system), and it is possible to alter messages electronically with an ease and undetectability which is not possible when people try to alter a traditionally written text. Messages in asynchronic chat groups and blogs tend to be long-term in character; but those in synchronic groups, virtual worlds, and instant messaging are not. In the literature on EMC, reference is often made to the persistence of a conversational message—the fact that it stays on the screen for a period of time (before the arrival of other messages replaces it or makes it scroll out of sight).

Thirdly, we see differences between some EMC outputs and traditional writing when we ask how complex, elaborate, or contrived they are. Certain outputs are very similar to what happened before. In particular, the web allows the same range of planning and structural complexity as would be seen in writing and printing offline. But for chat groups, virtual worlds, and instant messaging, where the pressure is strong to communicate rapidly, there is much less complexity and forward planning. Blogs vary greatly in their constructional complexity: some are highly crafted; others are wildly erratic, when compared with the norms of the standard written language. E-mails also vary: some people are happy to send messages with no revision at all, not caring if typing errors, spelling mistakes, and other anomalies are included in their messages; others take as many pains to revise their messages as they would in non-EMC settings.

Fourthly, traditional writing is visually decontextualized: normally we cannot see the writers when we read their writing, and we can give them no immediate visual feedback, as we could when talking to someone in face-to-face conversation. In these respects, EMC is just like traditional writing. But web pages often provide visual aids to support text, in the form of photographs, maps, diagrams, animations, and the like; and many virtual-world settings have a visual component built in. The arrival of webcams is also altering the communicative dynamic of EMC interactions, especially in instant messaging, and some interesting situations arise. I observed an anomalous one recently, where A and B were attempting to use an audio/video link via iChat, but B’s microphone was down. As a result B could hear A but A could not hear B, who thus had to resort to her keyboard. A’s spoken stimulus was followed by B’s written response. After a somewhat chaotic start, the conversation settled down into a steady rhythm.

Fifthly, we can compare the factual content of EMC and traditional writing. The majority of the latter is factually communicative, as is evident from the vast amount of reference material in libraries. A focus on fact is also evident on the web, and in many blogs and e-mails; but other EMC situations are less clear. Within the reality parameters established by a virtual world, factual information is certainly routinely transmitted, but there is a strong social element always present which greatly affects the kind of language used. Chat groups vary enormously: the more academic and professional they are, the more likely they are to be factual in aim (though often not in achievement, if reports of the amount of flaming are to be believed). The more social and ludic chat groups, on the other hand, routinely contain sequences which have negligible factual content. Instant message exchanges are also highly variable, sometimes containing a great deal of information, sometimes being wholly devoted to social chitchat.

Sixthly, traditional writing is graphically rich, as we can immediately see from the pages of many a fashion magazine. The web has reflected this richness, but greatly increased it, the technology putting into the hands of the ordinary user a range of typographic and color variation that far exceeds the pen, the typewriter, and the early word processor, and allowing further options not available to conventional publishing, such as animated text, hypertext links, and multimedia support (sound, video, film). On the other hand, as typographers and graphic designers have repeatedly pointed out, just because a new visual language is available to everyone does not mean that everyone can use it well. Despite the provision of a wide range of guides to Internet design and desktop publishing, examples of illegibility, visual confusion, over-ornamentation, and other inadequacies abound. They are compounded by the limitations of the medium, which cause no problem if respected, but which are often ignored, as when we encounter screenfuls of unbroken text, paragraphs which scroll downwards interminably, or text which scrolls awkwardly off the right-hand side of the screen. The problems of graphic translatability are only beginning to be appreciated—that it is not possible to take a paper-based text and put it on a screen without rethinking the graphic presentation and even, sometimes, the content of the message.

EMC, then, offers new communicative possibilities in the way people can manipulate written language. And already we can see how these opportunities are creating new kinds of electronic discourse.

New Kinds of Text

Every time a new technology arrives, we see the growth of new kinds of discourse, reflecting the aims and intentions of the users. Printing introduced us to such notions as newspapers, chapter organization, and indexes. Broadcasting brought sports commentary, news reading, and weather forecasting. EMC is no different. The content displayed on a screen presents a variety of textual spaces whose purpose varies. There is a scale of online adaptability. At one extreme, we find texts where no adaptation to EMC has been made—a PDF of an article on screen, for example, with no search or other facilities—in which case, any linguistic analysis would be identical with that of the corresponding offline text. At the other extreme, we find written texts which have no counterpart in the offline world. Here are four examples.

Texts whose aim is to defeat spam filters

We only have to look in our e-mail junk folder to discover a world of novel texts whose linguistic properties sometimes defy analysis:

supr vi-agra online now znwygghsxp
VI @ GRA 75% off regular xxp wybzz lusfg
fully stocked online pharmac^y
Great deals, prescription d[rugsIt is possible to see a linguistic rationale in the graphological variations in the word Viagra, for example, introduced to ensure that it avoids the word-matching function in a filter. We may find the letters spaced (V i a g r a), transposed (Viarga), duplicated (Viaggra), or separated by arbitrary symbols (Vi*agra). There are only so many options, and these can to a large extent be predicted. There have been huge advances here since the early days when the stupid software, having been told to ban anything containing the string S-E-X, disallowed messages about Sussex, Essex, and many other innocent terms. There is also an anti-linguistic rationale, as one might put it, in which random strings are generated (wybzz). These too can be handled, if one’s spam filter is sophisticated, by telling it to remove any message which does not respect the graphotactic norms of a language (i.e., the rules governing syllable structure, vowel sequence, and consonant clusters).

Texts whose aim is to guarantee higher rankings in web searches

How is one to ensure that one’s page appears in the first few hits in a web search? There are several techniques, some nonlinguistic, some linguistic. An example of a nonlinguistic technique is the frequency of hypertext links: the more pages link to my site, the more likely my page will move up the rankings. An example of a linguistic technique is the listing of key words or phrases which identify the semantic content of a page in the page’s metadata: these will be picked up by the search engine and given priority in a search. Neither of these techniques actually alters the linguistic character of the text on a page. Rather different is a third technique, where the text is manipulated to include keywords, especially in the heading and first paragraph, to ensure that a salient term is prioritized. The semantic difference can be seen in the following pair of texts (invented, but based on exactly what happens). Text A is an original paragraph; text B is the paragraph rewritten with ranking in mind, to ensure that the product name gets noticed:

The Crystal Knitting-Machine is the latest and most exciting product from Crystal Industries. It has an aluminum frame, comes in five exciting colors, and a wide range of accessories.

The Crystal Knitting-Machine is the latest and most exciting product from Crystal Industries.

Some search engines have got wise to this technique, and try to block it, but it is difficult, in view of the various paraphrases which can be introduced (e.g.,В Knitting-Machine from Crystal,В Crystal Machines for Knitting).

Texts whose aim is to save time, energy, or money

Text messaging (a different sense of the termВ text, note) is a good example of a genre whose linguistic characteristics have evolved partly as a response to technological limitations. The limitation to 160 characters (for Roman alphabets) has motivated an increased use of nonstandard words (of theВ c u l8rВ type), using logograms, initialisms, shortenings, and other abbreviatory conventions. The important word isВ partly. Most of these abbreviations were being used in EMC long before mobile phones became a routine part of our lives. And the motivation to use them goes well beyond the ergonomic, as their playful character provides entertainment value as an end in itself as well as increasing rapport between participants. I have developed this point in myВ Txtng: the Gr8 Db8.

Another example of a new type of text arising out of considerations of convenience is the e-mail which uses framing. We receive a message which contains, say, three different points in a single paragraph. We can, if we want, reply to each of these points by taking the paragraph, splitting it up into three parts, and then responding to each part separately, so that the message we send back then looks a bit like a play dialogue. Then, our sender can do the same thing to our responses, and when we get the message back, we see his replies to our replies. We can then send the lot on to someone else for further comments, and when it comes back, there are now three voices framed on the screen. And so it can go on—replies within replies within replies—and all unified within the same screen typography. People find this method of response extremely convenient—to an extent, for there comes a point where the nested messages make the text too complex to be easily followed.

Related to framing is intercalated response. Someone sends me a set of questions, or makes a set of critical points about something I have written. I respond to these by intercalating my responses between the points made by the sender. For clarity, I might put my responses in a different color, or include them in angle brackets or some such convention. A further response from the sender might lead to the use of an additional color; and if other people are copied in to the exchange, some graphical means of this kind, to distinguish the various participants, is essential.

Texts whose aim is to maintain a standard

Although the Internet is supposedly a medium where freedom of speech is axiomatic, controls and constraints are commonplace to avoid abuses. These range from the excising of obscene and aggressive language to the editing of pages or posts to ensure that they stay focused on a particular topic. Moderators (facilitators, managers, wizards… the terminology is various) have to deal with organizational, social, and content-related issues. From a textual point of view, what we end up with is a sanitized text, in which certain parts of language (chiefly vocabulary) are excluded. It is not clear how far such controls will evolve, as the notion of textual responsibility relating to the libel laws is still in the process of being tested.

Texts Sans FrontiГЁres

All the texts mentioned so far have one thing in common: they are easily identifiable and determinate. They have definable physical boundaries, which can be spatial (e.g., letters and books) or temporal (e.g., broadcasts and interviews). They are created at a specific point in time; and once created, they are static and permanent. Each text has a single authorial or presenting voice (even in cases of multiple authorship of books and papers), and that authorship is either known or can easily be established (except in some historical contexts). It is a stable, familiar, comfortable world. And what the Internet has done is remove the stability, familiarity, and comfort.

Written texts are defined by their physical boundaries: the edges of the page, the covers of the book, the border of the road sign… Spoken texts are defined by their temporal boundaries: the arrival and departure of participants in a conversation, the beginning and end of a broadcast, the opening and closing of a lecture… Internet texts are more problematic. Sometimes, as with a text message or an instant-message exchange, we can clearly identify the start and the finish. But with most Internet outputs there are decisions to be made, as the following examples show.

The traditional notion of text is inadequate to handle these cases. A broader, more inclusive notion is going to be needed. Clearly, what we see in all these examples are aggregates of functional elements, which interact in various ways in different Internet outputs. We need terms for both the elements and the aggregates. Dürscheid and Jucker (2011), for example, call the elements “communicative acts,” and the aggregates “communicative act sequences.” Doubtless other proposals will be forthcoming, as linguists explore these phenomena in more detail. In the meantime, here are some general observations.

Panchronicity

The above examples are not a complete list of the boundary decisions which have to be made when we are trying to identify Internet texts, but they are representative of what is out there. And they raise quite fundamental questions. In particular, Ferdinand de Saussure’s classical distinction between synchronic and diachronic does not adapt well to these kinds of communication, where everything is diachronic, time-stampable to a micro-level. Texts are classically treated as synchronic entities, by which we mean we disregard the changes that were made during the process of composition and treat the finished product as if time did not exist. But with many electronically mediated texts there is no finished product. And in many cases, time ceases to be chronological.

For example, I can in 2011 post a message to a forum discussion about a page which was created in 2004. From a linguistic point of view, we cannot say that we now have a new synchronic iteration of that page, because the language has changed in the interim. I might use in my message vocabulary that has entered the language since 2004, or show the influence of an ongoing grammatical change. Content is inevitably affected. I might refer to Twitter—something which would not have been possible in 2004, for that network did not appear until 2006. I might even—as is possible with Wiki pages—insert information into the main text of a page which could not have been available at the time of the page’s creation. In the case of my blog, I might go back to a post I wrote in 2004 and edit it to include material from 2013.

We need a new term for this curious conflation of language from different time periods. We are very familiar with texts which include language from earlier periods (archaisms). We need a way of describing features of texts which include language from later periods. The traditional term for a chronological mismatch is anachronism—when something from a particular point in time is introduced into an earlier period (before it existed) or a later period (after it ceased to exist). Anachronisms can be isolated instances—as when Shakespeare introduces striking clocks into ancient Rome (in Julius Caesar)—or a whole text can be anachronistic, as when a modern author writes a play about the seventeenth century and has everyone speak in a twenty-first-century way. But these cases don’t quite capture the EMC situation, where a chronological anomaly has been introduced into an original text. This is a new take on the grammatical notion of future in the past—or, perhaps better, back to the future. And I think we need a new term to capture what is happening. A text which contains such futurisms cannot be described as synchronic for it cannot be seen as a single état de langue (Saussure’s term for a state of the language at a particular point in time): it is a conflation of language from two or more états de langue. Nor can it be described as diachronic, for the aim is not to show language change between these different états. Such texts, whose identity is dependent on features from different time frames, I call panchronic.

Wiki pages, such as those seen on Wikipedia, are typically panchronic. They are the result of an indefinite number of interventions by an indefinite number of individuals over an indefinite number of periods of time (which become increasingly present as time goes by). We are only 20 or so years into the web, so the effect so far is limited; but think ahead 50 or 100 years, and it is obvious that panchronicity will become a dominant element of Internet presence. From a linguistic point of view, the result is pages that are temporally and stylistically heterogeneous. Already we find huge differences, such as standard and nonstandard language coexisting on the same page, often because some of the contributors are communicating in a second language in which they are not fluent. Tenses go all over the place, as this example illustrates (reproduced exactly as it appeared in Wikipedia):

Following his resignation, Mubarak did not make any media appearances. With the exception of family and a close circle of aides, he reportedly refused to talk to anyone, even his supporters. His health was speculated to be rapidly deteriorating with some reports even alleging him to be in a coma. Most sources claim that he is not longer interested in performing any duties and wants to “die in Sharm El-Sheikh.”

On 28 February 2011, the General Prosecutor of Egypt issued an order prohibiting Mubarak and his family from leaving Egypt. It was reported that the former president was in contact with his lawyer in case of possible criminal charges against him. As a result, Mubarak and his family had been under house arrest at a presidential palace in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. On Wednesday 13 April 2011 Egyptian prosecutors said they had detained former president Hosni Mubarak for 15 days, facing questioning about corruption and abuse of power, few hours after he was hospitalized in the resort of Sharm el Sheik.

Note the way for example, we move from past tense to present tense in paragraph 1, and fromВ wasВ toВ hadВ in paragraph 2. Note also the wayВ former president Hosni MubarakВ is introduced in the last sentence, as if this were a new topic in the discourse. Note the three different spellings of the Red Sea resort. And how are we to interpret such nonstandard usages asВ was speculated,В in case of, andВ few hours?

In pages like this, traditional notions of stylistic coherence, with respect to level of formality, technicality, and individuality, no longer apply, though a certain amount of accommodation is apparent, either because contributors sense the properties of each other’s style, or a piece of software alters contributions (e.g., removing obscenities), or a moderator introduces a degree of leveling. The pages are also semantically and pragmatically heterogeneous, as the intentions behind the various contributions vary greatly. Wiki articles on sensitive topics illustrate this most clearly, with judicious observations competing with contributions that range from mild through moderate to severe in the subjectivity of their opinions. And one never knows whether a change introduced in a wiki context is factual or fictitious, innocent or malicious.

The problem exists even when the person introducing the various changes is the same. The author of the original text may change it—refreshing a web page, or revising a blog posting. How are we to view the relationship between the various versions? This is not the first time we have encountered this problem. It is a familiar problem for medievalists faced with varying versions of a text. It is a routine question in the case of, say, Shakespeare: Did he (or someone else) go back and revise an earlier manuscript? It is something we see all the time in the notion of a second edition, where the two layers of text may be separated by many years. But what is happening on the Internet is hugely different from the traditional process of revision, because it is something that authors can do with unprecedented frequency and in unprecedented ways. A website page can be refreshed, either automatically or manually.

The issue is particularly relevant now that print-on-demand texts are becoming common. It is possible for me to publish a book very quickly and cheaply, printing only a handful of copies. Having produced my first print run, I then decide to print another, but make a few changes to the file before I send it to the POD company. In theory (and increasingly common in practice), I can print just one copy, make some changes, then print another copy, make some more changes, and so on. The situation is beginning to resemble medieval scribal practice, where no two manuscripts were identical, or the typesetting variations between copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio. The traditional terminology of first edition, second edition, first edition with corrections, ISBN numbering, and so on, seems totally inadequate to account for the variability we now encounter. The same problem is also present in archiving. The British Library, for example, launched its Web Archiving Consortium a few years ago. My website is included. But how do we define the relationship between the various time-stamped iterations of this site, as they accumulate in the archive?

Anonymity

I mentioned five criteria above: texts have definable physical boundaries; they are created at a specific point in time; they are static and permanent; they have a single authorial or presenting voice; and—apart from in some historical contexts—authorship is either known or can easily be established. None of these criteria are necessarily present on the Internet. And in the case of the last of these, its absence presents linguists with a particularly difficult situation. When we classify texts into types we rely greatly on extralinguistic information. This is something we have learned from sociolinguistics and stylistics: the notion of a language variety (or register, or genre, or whatever) arises from a correlation of linguistic features with extralinguistic features of the situation in which it occurs, such as its formality or occupational identity. In principle we know the speaker or writer—whether male or female, old or young, upper class or lower class, scientist or journalist, and so on. And when we do research we try to take these variables into account in order to make our study comparable to others or distinguishable from others in controlled ways. In short, we know who we are dealing with.

But on the Internet, a lot of the time, we don’t. The writer is anonymous. In a wide range of Internet situations, people hide their identity, especially in chat groups, blogging, spam e-mails, avatar-based interactions (such as virtual reality games and Second Life), and social networking. These situations routinely contain individuals who are talking to each other under nicknames (nicks), which may be an assumed first name, a fantasy description (topdude, sexstar), or a mythical character or role (rockman, elfslayer). Operating behind a false persona seems to make people less inhibited: they may feel emboldened to talk more and in different ways from their real-world linguistic repertoire. They must also expect to receive messages from others who are likewise less inhibited, and be prepared for negative outcomes. There are obviously inherent risks in talking to someone we do not know, and instances of harassment, insulting or aggressive language, and subterfuge are legion. Terminology has evolved to identify them, such as flaming, spoofing, trolling, and lurking. New conventions have evolved, such as the use of CAPITALS to expressshouting.

While all of these phenomena have a history in traditional mediums, the Internet makes them present in the public domain to an extent that was not encountered before. But we do not yet have detailed linguistic accounts of the consequences of anonymity. All that is clear is that traditional theories don’t account for it. Try using Gricean maxims of conversation to the Internet (Grice 1975): our speech acts, he says, should be truthful (the maxim of quality), brief (the maxim of quantity), relevant (the maxim of relation), and clear (the maxim of manner). Take quality: do not say what you believe to be false; do not say anything for which you lack evidence. Which world was Grice living in? A pre-Internet world, evidently. Pragmatics people traditionally assume that human beings are nice. The Internet has shown that they are not. Is a pedophile going to be truthful, brief, relevant, and clear? Are the people sending us tempting offers from Nigeria—beautifully pilloried in Neil Forsyth’s recent book, Delete This at Your Peril (2010)? Are extreme-views sites (such as hate racist sites) going to follow Geoffrey Leech’s (1983) maxims of politeness (tact, generosity, approbation, modesty, agreement, sympathy)? And if brevity was the soul of the Internet, we would not have such coinages as blogorrhea and twitterrhea.

Electronically mediated communication is not the first medium to allow interaction between individuals who wish to remain anonymous, of course, as we know from the history of telephone and amateur radio; but it is certainly unprecedented in the scale and range of situations in which people can hide their identity, and exploit their anonymity in ways that would be difficult to replicate offline. And the linguist is faced with a growing corpus of data which is uninterpretable in sociolinguistic or stylistic terms. A different orientation needs to be devised, in which intention and effect become primary, and identity becomes secondary.

The Future

The biggest question marks to do with change on the Internet relate to the way EMC is developing—always difficult to predict as technology rapidly changes. Most of my observations about written language are based on what I have seen on the large screen of my computer. But it is a fact that Internet access is becoming increasingly mobile. Indeed, in some parts of the world, where a wired electricity supply is unreliable or absent (such as a great deal of Africa), the only way of reaching the Internet is via mobile phones. So what happens, in terms of legibility, when a page containing a large amount of visually encoded information is presented on a small screen? How is the information reorganized? What is lost and what is gained? If, as the mobile phone industry is predicting, the majority of Internet access will soon be through handheld devices, then how relevant will be all the generalizations about EMC character that have hitherto been based only on an analysis of large-screen displays?

Finally, this paper has largely focused on written language. The main issue for the future will be how to deal with the increased presence of spoken outputs, as a result of growth in Voice over Internet and mobile communication. There are several new kinds of speech situation here, such as the modifications which are introduced into conversation to compensate for the inevitable lag between participants, automatic speech-to-text translation (as when voicemail is turned into text messages), text-to-speech translation (as when a web page is read aloud), voice recognition interaction (as when we tell the washing machine what to do), and voice synthesis (as when we listen to GPS driving instructions). Each of these domains is going to introduce us to new kinds of output over the next twenty years. Evidently, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

References

Crystal, David.
Txtng: The Gr8 Db8. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

DГјrscheid, Christa, and Andreas H. Jucker.
“Text As Utterance: Communication in the Electronic Media.” Paper presented at the conference “Language As a Social and Cultural Practice: Advances in Linguistics,” University of Basel, 2011.

Forsyth, Neil [also known as Bob Servant].
Delete This at Your Peril. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2010.

Grice, H. Paul.
“Logic and Conversation.” In Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, eds. Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, 1975. 41–58.

Leech, Geoffrey.
Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman, 1983.