Language and the Internet / Edition 2

Language and the Internet / Edition 2

by David Crystal
ISBN-10:
0521868599
ISBN-13:
9780521868594
Pub. Date:
08/31/2006
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
ISBN-10:
0521868599
ISBN-13:
9780521868594
Pub. Date:
08/31/2006
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Language and the Internet / Edition 2

Language and the Internet / Edition 2

by David Crystal

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Overview

In recent years, the Internet has come to dominate our lives. E-mail, instant messaging and chat are rapidly replacing conventional forms of correspondence, and the Web has become the first port of call for both information enquiry and leisure activity. How is this affecting language? There is a widespread view that as 'technospeak' comes to rule, standards will be lost. In this book, David Crystal argues the reverse: that the Internet has encouraged a dramatic expansion in the variety and creativity of language. Covering a range of Internet genres, including e-mail, chat, and the Web, this is a revealing account of how the Internet is radically changing the way we use language. This second edition has been thoroughly updated to account for more recent phenomena, with a brand new chapter on blogging and instant messaging. Engaging and accessible, it will continue to fascinate anyone who has ever used the Internet.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780521868594
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication date: 08/31/2006
Edition description: Revised
Pages: 318
Product dimensions: 5.75(w) x 8.74(h) x 0.94(d)
Lexile: 1410L (what's this?)

About the Author

Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor.

Read an Excerpt

Language and the Internet
Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-86859-4 - LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET - by David Crystal
Excerpt




1 A linguistic perspective

Will the English-dominated Internet
spell the end of other tongues?

Quite e-vil: the mobile phone whisperers

A major risk for humanity

These quotations illustrate widely held anxieties about the effect of the Internet on language and languages. The first is the subheading of a magazine article on millennial issues.1 The second is the headline of an article on the rise of new forms of impoliteness in communication among people using the short messaging service on their mobile phones.2 The third is a remark from the President of France, Jacques Chirac, commenting on the impact of the Internet on language, and especially on French.3 My collection of press clippings has dozens more in similar vein, all with a focus on language. The authors are always ready to acknowledge the immense technological achievement, communicative power, and social potential of the Internet; but within a few lines their tone changes, as they express their concerns. It is a distinctive genre of worry. But unlike sociologists, political commentators, economists, and others who draw attention to the dangers of the Internet with respect to such matters as pornography, intellectual property rights, privacy, security, libel,and crime, these authors are worried primarily about linguistic issues. For them, it is language in general, and individual languages in particular, which are going to end up as Internet casualties, and their specific questions raise a profusion of spectres. Do the relaxed standards of e-mails augur the end of literacy and spelling as we know it? Will the Internet herald a new era of technobabble? Will linguistic creativity and flexibility be lost as globalization imposes sameness?

There is of course nothing new about fears accompanying the emergence of a new communications technology. In the fifteenth century, the arrival of printing was widely perceived by the Church as an invention of Satan, the hierarchy fearing that the dissemination of uncensored ideas would lead to a breakdown of social order and put innumerable souls at risk of damnation. Steps were quickly taken to limit its potentially evil effects. Within half a century of Gutenberg’s first Bible (1455), Frankfurt had established a state censorship office to suppress unorthodox biblical translations and tracts (1486), and soon after, Pope Alexander VI extended censorship to secular books (1501). Around 400 years later, similar concerns about censorship and control were widespread when society began to cope with the political consequences of the arrival of the telegraph, the telephone, and broadcasting technology. The telegraph would destroy the family and promote crime.4 The telephone would undermine society. Broadcasting would be the voice of propaganda. In each case, the anxiety generated specifically linguistic controversy. Printing enabled vernacular translations of the Bible to be placed before thousands, adding fuel to an argument about the use of local languages in religious settings which continues to resonate today. And when broadcasting enabled selected voices to be heard by millions, there was an immediate debate over which norms to use as correct pronunciation, how to achieve clarity and intelligibility, and whether to permit local accents and dialects, which remains as lively a debate in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth.

The Internet is an association of computer networks with common standards which enable messages to be sent from any registered computer (or host) on one network to any host on any other. It developed in the 1960s in the USA as an experimental network which quickly grew to include military, federal, regional, university, business, and personal users. It is now the world’s largest computer network, with over 300 million hosts connected by the year 2005, providing an increasing range of services and enabling unprecedented numbers of people to be in touch with each other through electronic mail (e-mail), discussion groups, and the provision of digital ‘pages’ on any topic. Functional information, such as electronic shopping, business data, advertisements, and bulletins, can be found alongside creative works, such as poems and scripts, with the availability of movies, TV programmes, and other kinds of entertainment steadily growing. Some commentators have likened the Internet to an amalgam of television, telephone, and conventional publishing, and the term cyberspace has been coined to capture the notion of a world of information present or possible in digital form (the information superhighway). The potential of the Internet is currently limited by relatively slow data-transmission speeds, and by the problems of management and retrieval posed by the existence of such a vast amount of information (see chapter ); but there is no denying the unprecedented scale and significance of the Net, as a global medium. The extra significance is even reflected in the spelling, in languages which use capital letters: this is the first such technology to be conventionally identified with an initial capital. We do not give typographical enhancement to such developments as ‘Printing’, ‘Publishing’, ‘Broadcasting’, ‘Radio’, or ‘Television’, but we do write ‘Internet’ and ‘Net’.5

What is it like to be a regular citizen of the Internet, a netizen? Those who already spend appreciable amounts of time online need only self-reflect; for those who do not, the self-descriptions of a ‘day in a netizen’s life’ are informative. Here is Shawn Wilbur’s, as he describes what a ‘virtual community’ means to him:

For me it is the work of a few hours a day, carved up into minutes and carried on from before dawn until long after dark. I venture out onto the Net when I wake in the night, while coffee water boils, or bath water runs, between manuscript sections or student appointments. Or I keep a network connection open in the background while I do other work. Once or twice a day, I log on for longer periods of time, mostly to engage in more demanding realtime communication, but I find that is not enough. My friends and colleagues express similar needs for frequent connection, either in conversation or through the covetous looks they cast at occupied terminals in the office. Virtual community is this work, this immersion, and also the connections it represents. Sometimes it is realtime communication. More often it is asynchronous and mostly solitary, a sort of textual flirtation that only occasionally aims at any direct confrontation of voices or bodies.sup>6

And there are now several sites which will advise you of the symptoms to look out for if you want to know whether you are Internet-driven. Here is a short selection from various pages headed ‘addicted to the Internet’:

You wake up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom and stop to check your e-mail on the way back to bed.
You sign off and your screen says you were on for 3 days and 45 minutes.
You placed the refrigerator beside your computer.
You say ‘scroll up’ when someone asks what it was you said.
All of your friends have an @ in their names.
You tell the cab driver you live at http://123.elm.street/house/bluetrim.html
You check your mail. It says ‘no new messages’. So you check it again.
Your phone bill comes to your doorstep in a box.

It is not the aim of this book to reflect on the consequences for individuals or for society of lives that are lived largely in cyberspace. My aim is much more modest: it is to explore the ways in which the nature of the electronic medium as such, along with the Internet’s global scale and intensity of use, is having an effect on language in general, and on individual languages in particular. It seems likely that these effects will be as pervasive and momentous as in the case of the previous communication technologies, mentioned above, which gave language printed and broadcast dimensions that generated many new distinctive varieties and usages, from the telegrammatic graphic prominence of newspaper headlines to the hyperverbal sonic prominence of sports commentaries.

The electronic medium, to begin with, presents us with a channel which facilitates and constrains our ability to communicate in ways that are fundamentally different from those found in other semiotic situations. Many of the expectations and practices which we associate with spoken and written language, as we shall see (chapter 2), no longer obtain. The first task is therefore to investigate the linguistic properties of the so-called ‘electronic revolution’, and to take a view on whether the way in which we use language on the Internet is becoming so different from our previous linguistic behaviour that it might genuinely be described as revolutionary.

The linguistic consequences of evolving a medium in which the whole world participates – at least in principle, once their countries’ infrastructure and internal economy allow them to gain access – are also bound to be far-reaching. We must not overstate the global nature of the Internet: it is still largely in the hands of the better-off citizens of the developed countries. But it is the principle which matters. What happens, linguistically, when the members of the human race use a technology enabling any of them to be in routine contact with anyone else? There has been much talk of the notion of a ‘global village’, which is at first sight a persuasive metaphor. Yet such a concept raises all kinds of linguistic questions. A village is a close-knit community, traditionally identified by a local dialect or language which distinguishes its members from those elsewhere: ‘That’s not how we say things round here.’ If there is to be a genuine global village,7 then we need to ask ‘What is its dialect?’, ‘What are the shared features of language which give the world community of users their sense of identity?’ And, if we cannot discern any unifying dialect or language, or a trend towards such a unity, we need to ask ourselves if this ‘global village’ is anything more than a media fiction. Similar questions might be asked of related notions, such as ‘digital citizens’, ‘the virtual community’, and the ‘Net generation’. The linguistic perspective is a critical part of this debate. As Derek Foster puts it, reflecting on the notion of a virtual community, ‘the fullest understanding of the term is gained by grounding it in the communicative act itself’.8 So the second task is to investigate whether the Internet is emerging as a homogenous linguistic medium, whether it is a collection of distinct dialects, reflecting the different backgrounds, needs, purposes, and attitudes of its users, or whether it is an aggregation of trends and idiosyncratic usages which as yet defy classification.

Internet situations

In a setting where linguistic differences are likely to loom large, the concept of a language variety will be helpful. A variety of language is a system of linguistic expression whose use is governed by situational factors.9 In its broadest sense, the notion includes speech and writing, regional and class dialects, occupational genres (such as legal and scientific language), creative linguistic expression (as in literature), and a wide range of other styles of expression. Varieties are, in principle, systematic and predictable. It is possible to say, with some degree of certainty in a given language, how people from a particular region will speak, how lawyers will write, or how television commentators will present a type of sport. Notions such as ‘British English’ or ‘Liverpool English’, ‘legal French’, and ‘sports commentary’ are the result. To change an important element in any situation is to motivate a change in the language people use there, if they wish to behave conventionally – whether the change is from one region to another, from law court to the street, from home to pub, from one listener to many, or from face-to-face to distant conversation. Sometimes the features of a variety are highly constrained by the situation: there are strict rules governing the kind of language we may use in court, for example, and if we break them we are likely to be criticized or even charged with contempt. In other situations there may be an element of choice in what we say or write, as when we choose to adopt a formal or an informal tone in an after-dinner speech, or a combination of the two. But all language-using situations present us with constraints which we must be aware of and must obey if our contribution is to be judged acceptable. Factors such as politeness, interest, and intelligibility govern what we dare to introduce into an after-dinner speech, and such criteria apply in all situations. ‘Anything goes’ is never an option – or, at least, if people do decide to speak or write without paying any attention to the sociolinguistic expectations and mores of their interlocutors, and of the community as a whole, they must expect to be judged accordingly.10

The distinctive features of a language variety are of several kinds. Many stylistic approaches recognize five main types, for written language:11

  • graphic features: the general presentation and organization of the written language, defined in terms of such factors as distinctive typography, page design, spacing, use of illustrations, and colour; for example, the variety of newspaper English would be chiefly identified at this level through the use of such notions as headlines, columns, and captions.
  • orthographic (or graphological) features: the writing system of an individual language, defined in terms of such factors as distinctive use of the alphabet, capital letters, spelling, punctuation, and ways of expressing emphasis (italics, boldface, etc.); for example, American and British English are distinguished by many spelling differences (e.g. colour vs. color), and advertising English allows spelling modifications that would be excluded from most other varieties (e.g. Beanz Meanz Heinz).
  • grammatical features: the many possibilities of syntax and morphology, defined in terms of such factors as the distinctive use of sentence structure, word order, and word inflections; for example, religious English makes use of an unusual vocative construction (O God, who knows …) and allows a second-person singular set of pronouns (thou, thee, thine).
  • lexical features: the vocabulary of a language, defined in terms of the set of words and idioms given distinctive use within a variety; for example, legal English employs such expressions as heretofore, easement, and alleged, as well as such phrases as signed sealed and delivered and Latin expressions such as ex post facto.
  • discourse features: the structural organization of a text, defined in terms of such factors as coherence, relevance, paragraph structure, and the logical progression of ideas; for example, a journal paper within scientific English typically consists of a fixed sequence of sections including the abstract, introduction, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusion.

‘Whatever else Internet culture may be, it is still largely a text-based affair.’12 Spoken language currently has only a limited presence on the Internet, through the use of sound clips, songs, films, and video; but the use of speech will undoubtedly grow as technology develops, and it will not be long before we see the routine use of interactive voice (and video) dialogues, speech synthesis to provide a spoken representation of what is on a screen or to give vocal support to a graphic presentation, and automatic speech recognition to enable users to interact verbally with sites (see further, chapter ). In addition to the above five types, therefore, we need to recognize two more:

  • phonetic features: the general auditory characteristics of spoken language, defined in terms of such factors as the distinctive use of voice quality, vocal register (e.g. tenor vs. bass), and voice modality (e.g. speaking, singing, chanting); for example, in TV commentary, different sports make use of different vocal norms (e.g. the loud enthusiastic crescendos of football vs. the hushed monastic tones of snooker).
  • phonological features: the sound system of an individual language, defined in terms of such factors as the distinctive use of vowels, consonants, intonation, stress, and pause; for example, regional accents are defined by the way they make different use of sounds, and distinctive pronunciation is also a notable feature of such varieties as newsreading, preaching, and television advertising.

Grammatical, lexical, and discourse features of course play a distinctive role in all spoken varieties of a language, as they do in the written. A television commentary is not distinctive solely in its pronunciation, but in its use of grammar, vocabulary, and general organization as well.

So the initial question for the person interested in Internet linguistics to ask is: is the Net a homogenous language-using electronic situation, likely to generate a single variety of language, defined using such variables as those listed above? Will all users of the Internet present themselves, through their messages, contributions, and pages, with the same kind of graphic, orthographic, grammatical, lexical, and discourse features? To answer these questions we need first to establish how many different situations the Internet contains. We then need to describe the salient linguistic features of each situation, and to identify variations in the way they are used. This will help us talk more precisely about the strategies that people employ and the linguistic attitudes they hold, and thus enable us to begin evaluating their beliefs and concerns about Internet language. Some of these situations are easy to identify, because they have been around a relatively long time and have begun to settle down. Some are still in their infancy, with their situational status totally bound up with emerging technology, and therefore subject to rapid change: an example is the linking of the Internet to mobile phone technology, where the small screen size immediately motivated a fresh range of linguistic expression (see p. 262). Given the speed of technological change, doubtless new situational variables will emerge which will make any attempt at classification quickly outdated. But, as of the beginning of 2006, it is possible to identify seven broad Internet-using situations which are sufficiently different to mean that the language they contain is likely to be significantly distinctive. Two of these were hardly in evidence when the first edition of this book was being written. A lot can happen in five years.



© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

1. A linguistic perspective; 2. The medium of netspeak; 3. Finding an identity; 4. The language of email; 5. The language of chatgroups; 6. The language of virtual worlds; 7. The language of the web; 8. New varieties.
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