The Language Revolution (10 page)

Netspeak is more than an aggregate of spoken and written features. Because it does things that neither of these other mediums does, it has to be seen as a new species of communication. It is more than just a hybrid of speech and writing, or the result of contact between two long-standing mediums. Electronic texts, of whatever kind, are simply not the same as other kinds of texts. They display fluidity, simultaneity (being available on an indefinite number of machines) and non-degradability in copying; they transcend the traditional limitations on textual dissemination; and they have permeable boundaries (because of the way one text may be integrated within others or display links to others). Several of these properties have consequences for language, and these combine with those associated with speech and writing to make Netspeak a genuine ‘new medium'.

The consequences of a new medium: within a language

The linguistic effects of the arrival of a new medium of communication are twofold: it initiates change in the
formal character of the languages which use it; and it offers new opportunities for languages to use it. Of the two, it is the first which has attracted all the publicity with respect to the kind of language encountered on the Internet and in related technology, such as mobile phones (cellphones). The apparent lack of respect for the traditional rules of the written language has horrified some observers, who see in the development an ominous sign of deterioration in standards. Text-messaging is often cited as a particular problem. Children of the future will no longer be able to spell, it is said. However, the fact that youngsters abbreviate words in text-messaging using rebus techniques (
b4, CUl8er),
initialisms (
afaik ‘
as far as I know',
imho ‘
in my humble opinion') or respelling
(thx
‘thanks') is hardly new or fundamental. People have been using initialisms for generations
(ttfn, asap, fyi),
and rebus games have long been found in word-puzzle books. Even the fullest lists of text-message abbreviations contain no more than a few hundred forms, and few of those are commonly used. And because they were devised to meet the needs of economical messaging on a screen which has a limit of 160 characters, there is little motivation to use these deviant forms elsewhere. They lose their ‘cool', group-identifying function when they are taken away from the technology, whether mobile phone or computer. The fact that a few kids might start using their abbreviations in places where they have no purpose – such as school essays – is something to be watched, of course. But that is what teaching needs to do. It has long been a principle of modern language teaching – whether foreign or mother-tongue – to inculcate in children a sense of linguistic responsibility and appropriateness. And children need to be taught, if they have failed to develop the intuition for themselves, that text-messaging abbreviations perform a useful function where space is tight and speed is critical, but not elsewhere.

The same point applies to the variations in the writing system that adults as well as children introduce into their e-mails. Many people use a severely reduced system, with virtually no typographic contrastivity at all. There are three main features. The status of
capitalization
varies greatly. Because most of the Internet is not case-sensitive, a random use of capitals has developed, or the use of no capitals at all. There is a strong tendency to use lower-case everywhere. The ‘save a keystroke' principle is widely found in e-mails, chatgroups and virtual worlds, where whole sentences can be produced without capital letters marking the beginning of the sentence or proper names.
Punctuation
also tends to be minimalist, and is completely absent in some e-mails and chat exchanges. Here too, a lot depends on personality: some e-mailers are scrupulous about maintaining traditional punctuation; others use it when they have to, to avoid ambiguity; and some do not use it at all, either as a consequence of typing speed, or through not realizing that ambiguity can be one of the consequences. And
spelling
practice is also distinctive. In English, US spelling is more common than British, partly for historical reasons (the origins of the Internet), and partly for reasons of economy, most US spellings being a character shorter than British ones (
color
vs
colour, fetus
vs
foetus,
etc.). Nonstandard spelling, heavily penalized in traditional writing (at least, since the eighteenth century), is used without sanction in conversational settings. As already suggested, spelling errors in an e-mail would be assumed to be not an indication of lack of education (though they may be) but a function of typing inaccuracy.

I interpret these developments as extending the expressive range of the languages that are now on-line. Novel conventions are being introduced. This has always happened when a revolutionary communication technology has arrived. When printing was introduced, a whole
range of new manifestations of written language emerged, including innovative layout conventions and punctuation usages, and a gradual standardization of spelling. When telephones arrived, new conventions of discourse interaction had to be devised (saying hello, specifying or confirming the number, etc.). When broadcasting arrived, spoken language diversified immensely, with results which today range from weather-forecasting style to sports commentary. And so it is now with the Internet, where the technology from the outset motivated new kinds of expression. For example, the lower-case default mentality means that any use of capitalization is a strongly marked form of communication. Messages wholly in capitals are considered to be ‘shouting', and usually avoided; words in capitals add extra emphasis (with asterisks and spacing also available):

This is a VERY important point.

This is a * very * important point.

This is a v e r y important point.

Another distinctive feature of Internet graphology is the way two capitals are used – one initial, one medial – a phenomenon sometimes called
bicapitalization (BiCaps),
seen in such names as
AltaVista, PeaceNet
and
CompuServe,
or, more complexly, with
QuarkXPress.
There is an increased use of symbols not normally part of the traditional punctuation system, such as the #. Unusual combinations of punctuation marks can occur, such as (to express pause) ellipsis dots (…) in any number, repeated hyphens (---) or the repeated use of commas („„). Emphasis and attitude can result in exaggerated or random use of punctuation, such as
!!!!!!!
or
£$£$%!.

New vocabulary has also come into languages which are on-line, much of it deriving from the global use of English.
A large number of words and phrases have emerged which are needed to talk about Internet-restricted situations, operations, activities and personnel, making this one of the most creative lexical domains in contemporary English, and analogous developments are taking place in other languages, as they increase their on-line presence. Many terms are associated with the software which enables people to use the Internet, and which routinely appear on screen. Some have a permanent presence (albeit in hidden menus), in the form of the labels used to designate screen areas and functions, and to specify user options and commands:
file, edit, view, insert
,
paste, format, tools, window, help, search, refresh, address, history, stop, contact, top, back, forward, home, send, save, open, close, select, toolbars, fonts, options.
Some terms appear only at intervals on a screen, depending on circumstances – usually, when things are going wrong, in the form of error messages (there seem to be no positive messages to tell us that everything is going right):
forbidden, illegal operation, error, not found, 404 error
[‘a page or site is no longer in service']. Several terms are associated with the use of computer hardware:
freeze, lock, down, hang, crash, bomb, client
(the machine, not the user). And terms have emerged for the population of Internet users themselves:
netizens, netters, netties, netheads, cybersurfers, nerds, newbies, surfers, digiterati.
Many of these words are everyday terms which have been given a fresh sense in an Internet context.

A popular method of creating Internet neologisms is to combine two separate words to make a new word, or
compound.
Some elements turn up repeatedly – for example,
click
in
click-and-buy, one-click, cost-per-click, double-click, clickthrough rate,
and so on. Similar in function are the use of
cyber-
and
hyper-
in such words as
cyberspace, cyberculture, cyberlawyer, cybersex, cybersquatter, cyberian, cyber rights; hypertext, hyperlink, hyperfiction
and
hyperzine.
Blends (in which part of one word is joined to part of another) are illustrated by
netiquette, infonet, datagram, infobahn
and
Internaut.
An innovation is the retaining of the period found in electronic addresses within certain compounds, as a kind of infix, seen in
net. legend, net. abuse
and
net.citizen,
or sites beginning with
alt.
(with the punctuation mark often spoken aloud as ‘dot'). Acronyms are very common: a tiny sample would include
BBS
[‘bulletin board system'],
BCC
[‘blind carbon copy'],
DNS
[‘domain name system'],
FAQ
[‘frequently asked questions'],
HTML
[‘hypertext markup language'],
ISP
[‘Internet Service Provider'],
URL
[‘uniform resource locator'], and the names of many firms and sites, such as
AOL, IBM
and
IRC.
Letter-plus-number combinations are also found:
W3C
[‘World Wide Web Consortium'],
P3P
[‘Platform for Privacy Preferences'] and
Go2Net.

It is always a sure sign that a new variety has ‘arrived' when people in other linguistic situations start alluding to it in speech. It is therefore of considerable interest to note the way in which features of Netspeak have already begun to be used outside of the situation of computer-mediated communication, even though the medium has become available to most people only in the past decade or so. In everyday conversation, terms from the underlying computer technology are given a new application among people who want their talk to have a cool cutting-edge. Examples from recent overheard conversations include
It's my turn to download now
(‘I've heard all your gossip, now hear mine'),
I
need more bandwidth to handle that point
(‘I can't take it all in at once'),
Get with the programme
(‘Keep up') and
She's multi-tasking
(‘She's doing several things at once'). Resonances are now routine on radio and television: presenters commonly add e-addresses when telling listeners and viewers how they might contact a
programme, using
at, dot
and
forward slash
to punctuate their utterance.
Dot com
is now a commonly heard phrase, as well as appearing ubiquitously in writing in all kinds of advertising and promotional material. And the
e-
prefix is now encountered in thousands of expressions, such as
e-text, e-zine, e-cash, e-government, e-bandwagon, e-books, e-conferences
and
e-voting.
In 1998 the American Dialect Society named
e- ‘
Word [
sic
]
of the Year' as well as ‘Most Useful and Most Likely to Succeed'.

How many of these developments will become a permanent feature of English in the twenty-first century it is impossible to say. The same point applies to the impact of the Internet on other languages. We can never predict language change, only recognize it once it has happened. But it is already evident that, since the 1990s, a notion of Netspeak has begun to evolve which is rapidly becoming a part of popular linguistic consciousness, and evoking strong language attitudes. This is bound to grow as the century proceeds.

The consequences of a new medium: for all languages

There is a further reason for the revolutionary status of the Internet – the fact that it offers a home to
all
languages – as soon as their communities have a functioning computer technology, of course. Its increasingly multilingual character has been the most notable change since it started out, not very long ago, as a totally English medium. There is a story that the 8-year-old son of Kyrgyzstan's President Akayev told his father that he had to learn English. When asked why, the child apparently replied: ‘Because, daddy, the computer speaks English.'

For many, indeed, the language of the Internet
is
English. There was a headline in
The New York Times
in 1996 which said simply: ‘World, Wide, Web: 3 English Words'. The article went on to say: ‘if you want to take full advantage of the Internet there is only one real way to do it: learn English.'
⁷
This view is no longer valid. With the Internet's globalization, the presence of other languages has steadily risen. By 1998, a widely quoted figure was that about 80 per cent of the Net was in English. This figure derived from the first major study of language distribution on the Internet, carried out in the previous year by Babel, a joint initiative of the Internet Society and Alis Technologies. This showed English well ahead, but with several other languages entering the ring – notably German, Japanese, French and Spanish. Since then, the estimates for English have been steadily falling. A recent Global Reach survey estimated that people with Internet access in non-English-speaking countries increased between 1995 and 2000 from 7 million to 136 million. In 1998, there was another surprise: the number of newly created Web sites
not
in English passed the total for newly created sites that
were
in English. And at a conference on Search Engine Strategies in London in 2000, a representative of AltaVista was predicting that by the end of 2002 less than 50 per cent of the Web would be in English. This has turned out to be the case. In certain parts of the world, the local language is already dominant. According to one Japanese Internet author, Yoshi Mikami, 90 per cent of Web pages in Japan are already in Japanese.