Internet: next leg of a linguistic revolution?

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave

The Internet has proven itself to be the next leg of a linguistic
revolution that began with the slow, steady spread of English and the
death of other languages.

by David Crystal


Linguistics used to be a much simpler affair: There was American English
and there was the Queens English. There was speech and there was writing.
There were thousands of languages, none of them global in stature. There
were certainly no smileys.

Those days are gone. Now, with a sequence of characters on the computer
keyboard, we can tack happy little faces onto the end of our sentences (a
colon represents the eyes, a dash the nose, and the right parenthesis the
mouth:-). We can cut and paste by taking words from one place in an e-mail
and adding them somewhere else. Web pages change in front of our eyes:
Words appear and disappear in varying colors, sentences slide onto the
screen and off again, letters dance around.

Its revolutionary, the Internet. Any linguists worth their salt cant help
but be impressed. If nothing else, the Internet deserves great credit for
granting us a mode of communication more dynamic than traditional writing
and more permanent than traditional speech. In fact, electronic
communication is neither writing nor speech per se. Rather, it allows us
to take features from each medium and adapt them to suit a new form of
expression. The way we use language is changing at breakneck speed.

It has often been said that the Internet is a social revolution. Indeed it
is, but it is a linguistic revolution as well. Consider traditional
writing, which has always been permanent; you open a book at page six,
close the book, then open it at page six again, and you expect to see the
same thing. You would be more than a little surprised if the books page
had changed in the interim. But on Web pages, this kind of impermanence is
perfectly normal.

Then there are the hypertext links, the basic functional unit of the Web.
These are the links you click on in order to go from one part of a page to
another, from one page to another, or from one site to another. The
nearest thing we have in writingthe footnote or the cross-referenceis
always an optional extra, and there is nothing like this in speech.

Real-time Internet discussion groups, or chat rooms, allow a user to see
messages coming in from all over the world. If there are thirty people in
the chat room, its possible to see thirty different messages, all making
various contributions to a theme. In a unique way, you can listen to
thirty people at once, or have a conversation with them all at the same
time; you can monitor what each one of those people is saying, and respond
to as many of them as your mental powers and typing speed permit. This too
is a revolutionary state of affairs, as far as speech is concerned.

What so many people now understand is that there are very specific ways in
which the Internet is changing our linguistic experience. There are
symbolic ways as well. The Internet is part of a larger revolution, with
two other major trends working in tandem. For one, English has emerged as
a global language. For another, we are in the midst of a creeping crisis:
Thousands of languages are dying out.

When the World Wide Web came along, it offered a home to all languagesas
soon as their communities had functioning computer technology, of course.
While the Internet started out as a totally English medium, its
increasingly multilingual character has been its most notable change.

To get a sense of just how radical this change has been, consider the fact
that in the mid-1990s, it was widely quoted that eighty percent of
Internet pages were in English. By 1998, however, the number of newly
created Web sites not in English was greater than the total number of
newly created sites that were in English. Since then, estimates for how
much information on the Web is in English have fallen steadily. Already,
some have put the amount at less than fifty percent.

On the other hand, the presence of other languages has steadily increased.
Its estimated that about one-quarter of the worlds languages have some
sort of cyber existence now, and as communications infrastructure expands
in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America, the Internet as a whole will
soon be significantly non-English.

The Internet has turned out to be the ideal medium for minority languages.
If you are a speaker or supporter of an endangered languagean aboriginal
language, say, or one of the Celtic languagesyoure keen to give the
language some publicity, to draw the worlds attention to its plight.
Previously, this was very difficult to do. It was hard to attract a
newspaper article on the subject, and the cost of a newspaper
advertisement was prohibitive. It was virtually impossible to get a radio
or television program devoted to it. Surely, by the time someone wrote a
book about one of these languages, got it published, and everyone read it,
the language might well be uttering its last words.

But now, with Web pages and e-mail, you can get your message out in next
to no time, in your own languagewith a translation as well, if you want.
Chat rooms are a boon to speakers of minority languages who live in
isolation from each other, as they can now belong to a virtual speech
community. The Web offers a World Wide Welcome for global linguistic
diversity. And in an era when so many languages of the world are dying,
such optimism is truly revolutionary.

It is a real art to be able to make sense of a revolution as its
happening, to not leave it up to the historians to later analyze its
impact and effects. Revolutions are fast and dynamic by nature, radical
shifts that take place in a short period of time. We are now at a
transformative step in the evolution of human language.

The linguistic originality and novelty of the Internet should make our
hearts beat faster. It is offering us a future of communication radically
different from that of the past. It is presenting us with styles of
expression that are fundamentally unlike anything we have seen before. It
is revising our cherished concepts of the way we think about the life of a
language. Electronic communication has brought us to the brink of the
biggest language revolution ever, and it is exciting to be in at its
beginning.

http://www.science-spirit.org/articles/