Internet linguistics
Internet linguistics is another domain of linguistics advocated by the English linguist David
Crystal. It studies new language styles and forms that have arisen under the influence of the
Internet and other New Media, such as Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging.[1][2] Since
the beginning of Human-computer interaction (HCI) leading to computer-mediated
communication (CMC) and Internet-mediated communication (IMC), experts have
acknowledged that linguistics has a contributing role in it, in terms of web interface and
usability. Studying the emerging language on the Internet can help improve conceptual
organization, translation and web usability. This study is intended to benefit both linguists and
web users.[3]
The study of Internet linguistics can be effectively done through four main perspectives:
sociolinguistics, education, stylistics and applied.[1] Further dimensions have developed as a
result of further technological advancements which include the development of the Web as
Corpus and the spread and influence of the stylistic variations brought forth by the spread of the
Internet, through the Mass Media and Literary Works. In view of the increasing number of users
connected to the Internet, the linguistics future of the Internet remains to be determined as new
computer-mediated technologies continue to emerge and people adapt their languages to suit
these new media.[4] The Internet continues to play a significant role in both encouraging as well
as diverting attention away from the usage of languages.[5]
Main perspectives
David Crystal has identified four main perspectives for further investigation – the sociolinguistic
perspective, the educational perspective, the stylistic perspective and the applied perspective.[2]
The four perspectives are effectively interlinked and affect one another.
Sociolinguistic perspective
This perspective deals with how society views the impact of Internet development on languages.
The advent of the Internet has revolutionized communication in many ways; it changed the way
people communicate and created new platforms with far-reaching social impact. Significant
avenues include but are not limited to SMS Text Messaging, e-mails, chatgroups, virtual worlds
and the Web.
The evolution of these new mediums of communications has raised much concern with regards
to the way language is being used. According to Crystal (2005), these concerns are neither
without grounds nor unseen in history – it surfaces almost always when a new technology
breakthrough influences languages; as seen in the 15th century when printing was introduced, the
19th century when the telephone was invented and the 20th century when broadcasting began to
penetrate our society.
At a personal level, CMC such as SMS Text Messaging and mobile e-mailing (push mail) has
greatly enhanced instantaneous communication.[2] Some examples include the iPhone and the
BlackBerry.
In schools, it is not uncommon for educators and students to be given personalized school e-mail
accounts for communication and interaction purposes. Classroom discussions are increasingly
being brought onto the Internet in the form of discussion forums. For instance, at Nanyang
Technological University, students engage in collaborative learning at the university’s portal –
edveNTUre, where they participate in discussions on forums and online quizzes and view
streaming podcasts prepared by their course instructors among others. iTunes U in 2008 began to
collaborate with universities as they converted the Apple music service into a store that makes
available academic lectures and scholastic materials for free – they have partnered more than 600
institutions in 18 countries including Oxford, Cambridge and Yale Universities.[6]
These forms of academic social networking and media are slated to rise as educators from all
over the world continue to seek new ways to better engage students. It is commonplace for
students in New York University to interact with “guest speakers weighing in via Skype, library
staffs providing support via instant messaging, and students accessing library resources from off
campus.”[7] This will affect the way language is used as students and teachers begin to use more
of these CMC platforms.[7]
At a professional level, it is a common sight for companies to have their computers and laptops
hooked up onto the Internet (via wired and wireless Internet connection), and for employees to
have individual e-mail accounts. This greatly facilitates internal (among staffs of the company)
and external (with other parties outside of one’s organization) communication. Mobile
communications such as smart phones are increasingly making their way into the corporate
world. For instance, in 2008, Apple announced their intention to actively step up their efforts to
help companies incorporate the iPhone into their enterprise environment, facilitated by
technological developments in streamlining integrated features (push e-mail, calendar and
contact management) using ActiveSync.[6]
In general, these new CMCs that are made possible by the Internet have altered the way people
use language – there is heightened informality and consequently a growing fear of its
deterioration. However, as David Crystal puts it, these should be seen positively as it reflects the
power of the creativity of a language.[2]
Themes
The sociolinguistics of the Internet may also be examined through five interconnected themes.[8]
1. Multilingualism – It looks at the prevalence and status of various languages on the Internet.
2. Language change – From a sociolinguistic perspective, language change is influenced by the
physical constraints of technology (e.g. typed text) and the shifting social-economic priorities
such as globalization. It explores the linguistic changes over time, with emphasis on Internet
lingo.
3. Conversation discourse – It explores the changes in patterns of social interaction and
communicative practice on the Internet.
4. Stylistic diffusion – It involves the study of the spread of Internet jargons and related linguistic
forms into common usage. As language changes, conversation discourse and stylistic diffusion
overlap with the aspect of language stylistics.
5. Metalanguage and folk linguistics – It involves looking at the way these linguistic forms and
changes on the Internet are labeled and discussed (e.g. impact of Internet lingo resulted in the
'death' of the apostrophe and loss of capitalization.)
Educational perspective
The educational perspective of internet linguistics examines the Internet's impact on formal
language use, specifically on Standard English, which in turn affects language education.[2] The
rise and rapid spread of Internet use has brought about new linguistic features specific only to the
Internet platform. These include, but are not limited to, an increase in the use of informal written
language, inconsistency in written styles and stylistics and the use of new abbreviations in
Internet chats and SMS text messaging, where constraints of technology on word count
contributed to the rise of new abbreviations.[1] Such acronyms exist primarily for practical
reasons — to reduce the time and effort required to communicate through these mediums apart
from technological limitations. Examples of common acronyms include lol (for laughing out
loud; a general expression of laughter), omg (oh my god) and gtg (got to go).[9]
The educational perspective has been considerably established in the research on the Internet's
impact on language education. It is an important and crucial aspect as it affects and involves the
education of current and future student generations in the appropriate and timely use of informal
language that arises from Internet usage. There are concerns for the growing infiltration of
informal language use and incorrect word use into academic or formal situations, such as the
usage of casual words like "guy" or the choice of the word "preclude" in place of "precede" in
academic papers by students. There are also issues with spellings and grammar occurring at a
higher frequency among students' academic works as noted by educators, with the use of
abbreviations such as "u" for "you" and "2" for "to" being the most common.[10]
Linguists and professors like Eleanor Johnson suspect that widespread mistakes in writing are
strongly connected to Internet usage, where educators have similarly reported new kinds of
spelling and grammar mistakes in student works. There is, however, no scientific evidence to
confirm the proposed connection.[11] Though there are valid concerns about Internet usage and its
impact on students' academic and formal writing, its severity is however enlarged by the
informal nature of the new media platforms. Naomi S. Baron (2008) argues in Always On that
student writings suffer little impact from the use of Internet-mediated communication (IMC)
such as internet chat, SMS text messaging and e-mail.[12] A recent study published by the British
Journal of Developmental Psychology found that students who regularly texted (sent messages
via SMS using a mobile phone) displayed a wider range of vocabulary and this may lead to a
positive impact on their reading development.[13]
Though the use of the Internet resulted in stylistics that are not deemed appropriate in academic
and formal language use, it is to be noted that Internet use may not hinder language education but
instead aid it. The Internet has proven in different ways that it can provide potential benefits in
enhancing language learning, especially in second or foreign language learning. Language
education through the Internet in relation to Internet linguisitics is, most significantly, applied
through the communication aspect (use of e-mails, discussion forums, chat messengers, blogs,
etc.).[14] IMC allows for greater interaction between language learners and native speakers of the
language, providing for greater error corrections and better learning opportunities of standard
language, in the process allowing the picking up of specific skills such as negotiation and
persuasion.[14]
Stylistic perspective
This perspective examines how the Internet and its related technologies have encouraged new
and different forms of creativity in language, especially in literature.[2] It looks at the Internet as a
medium through which new language phenomena have arisen. This new mode of language is
interesting to study because it is an amalgam of both spoken and written languages. For example,
traditional writing is static compared to the dynamic nature of the new language on the Internet
where words can appear in different colors and font sizes on the computer screen.[15] Yet, this
new mode of language also contains other elements not found in natural languages. One example
is the concept of framing found in e-mails and discussion forums. In replying to e-mails, people
generally use the sender’s e-mail message as a frame to write their own messages. They can
choose to respond to certain parts of an e-mail message while leaving other bits out. In
discussion forums, one can start a new thread and anyone regardless of their physical location
can respond to the idea or thought that was set down through the Internet. This is something that
is usually not found in written language.[15]
Future research also includes new varieties of expressions that the Internet and its various
technologies are constantly producing and their effects not only on written languages but also
their spoken forms.[2] The communicative style of Internet language is best observed in the CMC
channels below, as there are often attempts to overcome technological restraints such as
transmission time lags and to re-establish social cues that are often vague in written text.[8]
Mobile phones
Mobile phones (also called "cell phones") have an expressive potential beyond their basic
communicative functions. This can be seen in text-messaging poetry competitions such as the
one held by The Guardian.[2] The 160-character limit imposed by the cell phone has motivated
users to exercise their linguistic creativity to overcome them. A similar example of new
technology with character constraints is Twitter, which has a 140-character limit. There have
been debates as to whether these new abbreviated forms introduced in users’ Tweets are "lazy"
or whether they are creative fragments of communication. Despite the ongoing debate, there is
no doubt that Twitter has contributed to the linguistic landscape with new lingoes and also
brought about a new dimension of communication.[16]
The cell phone has also created a new literary genre – cell phone novels. A typical cell phone
novel consists of several chapters which readers download in short installments. These novels are
in their "raw" form as they do not go through editing processes like traditional novels. They are
written in short sentences, similar to text-messaging.[17] Authors of such novels are also able to
receive feedbacks and new ideas from their readers through e-mails or online feedback channels.
Unlike traditional novel writing, readers’ ideas sometimes get incorporated into the storyline or
authors may also decide to change their story’s plot according to the demand and popularity of
their novel (typically gauged by the number of download hits).[18] Despite their popularity, there
has also been criticism regarding the novels’ "lack of diverse vocabulary" and poor grammar.[19]
Blogs
Blogging has brought about new ways of writing diaries and from a linguistic perspective, the
language used in blogs is "in its most 'naked' form",[2] published for the world to see without
undergoing the formal editing process. This is what makes blogs stand out because almost all
other forms of printed language have gone through some form of editing and standardization.[20]
David Crystal stated that blogs were "the beginning of a new stage in the evolution of the written
language".[2] Blogs have become so popular that they have expanded beyond written blogs,[21]
with the emergence of photoblog, videoblog, audioblog and moblog. These developments in
interactive blogging have created new linguistic conventions and styles, with more expected to
arise in the future.[20]
Virtual worlds
Virtual worlds provide insights into how users are adapting the usage of natural language for
communication within these new mediums. The Internet language that has arisen through user
interactions in text-based chatrooms and computer-simulated worlds has led to the development
of slangs within digital communities. Examples of these include pwn and noob. Emoticons are
further examples of how users have adapted different expressions to suit the limitations of
cyberspace communication, one of which is the "loss of emotivity".[22]
Communication in niches such as role-playing games (RPG) of Multi-User domains (MUDs) and
virtual worlds is highly interactive, with emphasis on speed, brevity and spontaneity. As a result,
CMC is generally more vibrant, volatile, unstructured and open. There are often complex
organization of sequences and exchange structures evident in the connection of conversational
strands and short turns. Some of the CMC strategies used include capitalization for words such
as EMPHASIS, usage of symbols such as the asterisk to enclose words as seen in *stress* and the
creative use of punctuation like ???!?!?!?.[8] Besides contributing to these new forms in
language, virtual worlds are also being used to teach languages. Virtual world language learning
provides students with simulations of real-life environments, allowing them to find creative ways
to improve their language skills. Virtual worlds are good tools for language learning among the
younger learners because they already see such places as a "natural place to learn and play".[23]
E-mail
One of the most popular Internet-related technologies to be studied under this perspective is e-
mail, which has expanded the stylistics of languages in many ways. A study done on the
linguistic profile of e-mails has shown that there is a hybrid of speech and writing styles in terms
of format, grammar and style.[24] E-mail is rapidly replacing traditional letter-writing because of
its convenience, speed and spontaneity.[25] It is often related to informality as it feels temporary
and can be deleted easily. However, as this medium of communication matures, e-mail is no
longer confined to sending informal messages between friends and relatives. Instead, business
correspondences are increasingly being carried out through e-mails. Job seekers are also using e-
mails to send their resumes to potential employers. The result of a move towards more formal
usages will be a medium representing a range of formal and informal stylistics.[20]
While e-mail has been blamed for students’ increased usage of informal language in their written
work, David Crystal argues that e-mail is "not a threat, for language education" because e-mail
with its array of stylistic expressiveness can act as a domain for language learners to make their
own linguistic choices responsibly. Furthermore, the younger generation’s high propensity for
using e-mail may improve their writing and communication skills because of the efforts they are
making to formulate their thoughts and ideas, albeit through a digital medium.[25]
Instant messaging
Like other forms of online communication, instant messaging has also developed its own
acronyms and short forms. However, instant messaging is quite different from e-mail and
chatgroups because it allows participants to interact with one another in real-time while
conversing in private.[26] With instant messaging, there is an added dimension of familiarity
among participants. This increased degree of intimacy allows greater informality in language and
"typographical idiosyncrasies". There are also greater occurrences of stylistic variation because
there can be a very wide age gap between participants. For example, a granddaughter can catch
up with her grandmother through instant messaging. Unlike chatgroups where participants come
together with shared interests, there is no pressure to conform in language here.[20]
Applied perspective
Source: Internet World Stats
The applied perspective views the linguistic exploitation of the Internet in terms of its
communicative capabilities – the good and the bad.[1] The Internet provides a platform where
users can experience multilingualism. Although English is still the dominant language used on
the Internet, other languages are gradually increasing in their number of users.[8] The Global
Internet usage page provides some information on the number of users of the Internet by
language, nationality and geography. This multilingual environment continues to increase in
diversity as more language communities become connected to the Internet. The Internet is thus a
platform where minority and endangered languages can seek to revive their language use and/or
create awareness. This can be seen in two instances where it provides these languages
opportunities for progress in two important regards - language documentation and language
revitalization.[1]
Language documentation
Firstly, the Internet facilitates language documentation. Digital archives of media such as audio
and video recordings not only help to preserve language documentation, but also allows for
global dissemination through the Internet.[27] Publicity about endangered languages, such as
Webster (2003) has helped to spur a worldwide interest in linguistic documentation.
Foundations such as the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (HRELP), funded by
Arcadia also help to develop the interest in linguistic documentation. The HRELP is a project
that seeks to document endangered languages, preserve and disseminate documentation materials
among others. The materials gathered are made available online under its Endangered Languages
Archive (ELAR) program.
Other online materials that support language documentation include the Language Archive
Newsletter which provides news and articles about topics in endangered languages. The web
version of Ethnologue also provides brief information of all of the world’s known living
languages. By making resources and information of endangered languages and language
documentation available on the Internet, it allows researchers to build on these materials and
hence preserve endangered languages.
Language revitalization
Secondly, the Internet facilitates language revitalization. Throughout the years, the digital
environment has developed in various sophisticated ways that allow for virtual contact. From e-
mails, chats to instant messaging, these virtual environments have helped to bridge the spatial
distance between communicators. The use of e-mails has been adopted in language courses to
encourage students to communicate in various styles such as conference-type formats and also to
generate discussions.[28] Similarly, the use of e-mails facilitates language revitalization in the
sense that speakers of a minority language who moved to a location where their native language
is not being spoken can take advantage of the Internet to communicate with their family and
friends, thus maintaining the use of their native language. With the development and increasing
use of telephone broadband communication such as Skype, language revitalization through the
internet is no longer restricted to literate users.[1]
Hawaiian educators have been taking advantage of the Internet in their language revitalization
programs.[29] The graphical bulletin board system, Leoki (Powerful Voice), was established in
1994. The content, interface and menus of the system are entirely in the Hawaiian language. It is
installed throughout the immersion school system and includes components for e-mails, chat,
dictionary and online newspaper among others. In higher institutions such as colleges and
universities where the Leoki system is not yet installed, the educators make use of other software
and Internet tools such as Daedalus Interchange, e-mails and the Web to connect students of
Hawaiian language with the broader community.[30]
Another use of the Internet includes having students of minority languages write about their
native cultures in their native languages for distant audiences. Also, in an attempt to preserve
their language and culture, Occitan speakers have been taking advantage of the Internet to reach
out to other Occitan speakers from around the world. These methods provide reasons for using
the minority languages by communicating in it.[31][32] In addition, the use of digital technologies,
which the young generation think of as ‘cool’, will appeal to them and in turn maintain their
interest and usage of their native languages.[1]
Exploitation of the Internet
The Internet can also be exploited for activities such as terrorism, internet fraud and pedophilia.
In recent years, there has been an increase in crimes that involved the use of the Internet such as
e-mails and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), as it is relatively easy to remain anonymous.[33] These
conspiracies carry concerns for security and protection. From a forensic linguistic point of view,
there are many potential areas to explore. While developing a chat room child protection
procedure based on search terms filtering is effective, there is still minimal linguistically
orientated literature to facilitate the task.[1] In other areas, it is observed that the Semantic Web
has been involved in tasks such as personal data protection, which helps to prevent fraud.[34]
Dimensions of Internet linguistics
The dimensions covered in this section include looking at the Web as a corpus and issues of
language identification and normalization. The impacts of internet linguistics on everyday life
are examined under the spread and influence of Internet stylistics, trends of language change on
the Internet and conversation discourse.
The Web as a corpus
With the Web being a huge reservoir of data and resources, language scientists and technologists
are increasingly turning to the web for language data.[4] Corpora were first formally mentioned in
the field of computational linguistics at the 1989 ACL meeting in Vancouver. It was met with
much controversy as they lacked theoretical integrity leading to much skepticism of their role in
the field,[4] until the publication of the journal ‘Using Large Corpora’ in 1993[35] that the
relationship between computational linguistics and corpora became widely accepted.[4]
To establish whether the Web is a corpus, it is worthwhile to turn to the definition established by
McEnery and Wilson (1996, pp 21).[36]
In principle, any collection of more than one text can be called a corpus. . . . But the term
“corpus” when used in the context of modern linguistics tends most frequently to have more
specific connotations than this simple definition provides for. These may be considered under
four main headings: sampling and representativeness, finite size, machine-readable form, a
standard reference.
— Tony McEnery and Andrew Wilson, Corpus Linguistics
Relating closer to the Web as a Corpus, Manning and Schütze (1999, pp 120)[37] further
streamlines the definition:
In Statistical NLP [Natural Language Processing], one commonly receives as a corpus a certain
amount of data from a certain domain of interest, without having any say in how it is
constructed. In such cases, having more training data is normally more useful than any concerns
of balance, and one should simply use all the text that is available.
— Christopher Manning and Hinrich Schütze, Foundations of Statistical Language Processing
Hit counts were used for carefully constructed search engine queries to identify rank orders for
word sense frequencies, as an input to a word sense disambiguation engine.[38] This method was
further explored with the introduction of the concept of a parallel corpora where the existing
Web pages that exist in parallel in local and major languages be brought together.[39] It was
demonstrated that it is possible to build a language-specific corpus from a single document in
that specific language.[40]
Themes
There has been much discussion about the possible developments in the arena of the Web as a
corpus. The development of using the web as a data source for word sense disambiguation was
brought forward in The EU MEANING project in 2002.[41] It used the assumption that within a
domain, words often have a single meaning, and that domains are identifiable on the Web. This
was further explored by using Web technology to gather manual word sense annotations on the
Word Expert Web site.
In areas of language modeling, the Web has been used to address data sparseness. Lexical
statistics have been gathered for resolving prepositional phrase attachments,[42] while Web
document were used to seek a balance in the corpus.[43]
In areas of information retrieval, a Web track was integrated as a component in the community’s
TREC evaluation initiative. The sample of the Web used for this exercise amount to around
100GB, compromising of largely documents in the .gov top level domain.[44]
British National Corpus
The British National Corpus contains ample information on the dominant meanings and usage
patterns for the 10,000 words that forms the core of English.
The number of words in the British National Corpus (ca 100 million) is sufficient for many
empirical strategies for learning about language for linguists and lexicographers,[4][45] and is
satisfactory for technologies that utilize quantitative information about the behavior of words as
input (parsing).[46][47]
However, for some other purposes, it is insufficient, as an outcome of the Zipfian nature of word
frequencies. Because the bulk of the lexical stock occurs less than 50 times in the British
National Corpus, it is insufficient for statistically stable conclusions about such words.
Furthermore, for some rarer words, rare meanings of common words, and combinations of
words, no data has been found. Researchers find that probabilistic models of language based on
very large quantities of data are better than ones based on estimates from smaller, cleaner data
sets.[4]
The multilingual Web
The Web is clearly a multilingual corpus.[48] It is estimated that 71% of the pages (453 million
out of 634 million Web pages indexed by the Excite engine) were written in English, followed
by Japanese (6.8%), German (5.1%), French (1.8%), Chinese (1.5%), Spanish (1.1%), Italian
(0.9%), and Swedish (0.7%).[49]
A test to find contiguous words like ‘deep breath’ revealed 868,631 Web pages containing the
terms in AlltheWeb. The number found through the search engines are more than three times the
counts generated by the British National Corpus, indicating the significant size of the English
corpus available on the Web.
The massive size of text available on the Web can be seen in the analysis of controlled data in
which corpora of different languages were mixed in various proportions. The estimated Web size
in words by AltaVista saw English at the top of the list with 76,598,718,000 words. The next is
German, with 7,035,850,000 words along with 6 other languages with over a billion hits. Even
languages with fewer hits on the Web such as Slovenian, Croatian, Malay, and Turkish have
more than one hundred million words on the Web.[50] This reveals the potential strength and
accuracy of using the Web as a Corpus given its significant size, which warrants much additional
research such as the project currently being carried out by the British National Corpus to exploit
its scale.[4]
Challenges
In areas of language modeling, there are limitations on the applicability of any language model
as the statistics for different types of text will be different.[51] When a language technology
application is put into use (applied to a new text type), it is not certain that the language model
will fare in the same way as how it would when applied to the training corpus. It is found that
there are substantial variations in model performance when the training corpus changes.[52] This
lack of theory types limits the assessment of the usefulness of language-modeling work.
As Web texts are easily produced (in terms of cost and time) and with many different authors
working on them, it often results in little concern for accuracy. Grammatical and typographical
errors are regarded as “erroneous” forms that cause the Web to be a dirty corpus. Nonetheless, it
may still be useful even with some noise.[4]
The issue of whether sublanguages should be included remains unsettled. Proponents of it argue
that with all sublanguages removed, it will result in an impoverished view of language. Since
language is made up of lexicons, grammar and a wide array of different sublanguages, they
should be included. However, it is not until recently that it became a viable option. Striking a
middle ground by including some sublanguages is contentious because it’s an arbitrary issue of
which to include and which not.[4]
The decision of what to include in a corpus lies with corpus developers, and it has been done so
with pragmatism.[4] The desiderata and criteria used for the British National Corpus serves as a
good model for a general-purpose, general-language corpus[53] with the focus of being
representative replaced with being balanced.[4]
Search engines such as Google serves as a default means of access to the Web and its wide array
of linguistics resources. However, for linguists working in the field of corpora, there presents a
number of challenges. This includes the limited instances that are presented by the search
engines (1,000 or 5,000 maximum); insufficient context for each instance (Google provides a
fragment of around ten words); results selected according to criteria that are distorted (from a
linguistic point of view) as search term in titles and headings often occupy the top results slots;
inability to allow searches to be specified according to linguistic criteria, such as the citation
form for a word, or word class; unreliability of statistics, with results varying according to search
engine load and many other factors. At present, in view of the conflicts of priorities among the
different stakeholders, the best solution is for linguists to attempt to correct these problems by
themselves. This will then lead to a large number of possibilities opening in the area of
harnessing the rich potential of the Web.[4]
Representation
Despite the sheer size of the Web, it may still not be representative of all the languages and
domains in the world, and neither are other corpora. However, the huge quantities of text, in
numerous languages and language types on a huge range of topics makes it a good starting point
that opens up to a large number of possibilities in the study of corpora.[4]
Impact of its spread and influence
Stylistics arising from Internet usage has spread beyond the new media into other areas and
platforms, including but not limited to, films, music and literary works. The infiltration of
Internet stylistics is important as mass audiences are exposed to the works, reinforcing certain
Internet specific language styles which may not be acceptable in standard or more formal forms
of language.
Apart from internet slang, grammatical errors and typographical errors are features of writing on
the Internet and other CMC channels. As users of the Internet gets accustomed to these errors, it
progressively infiltrates into everyday language use, in both written and spoken forms.[1] It is also
common to witness such errors in mass media works, from typographical errors in news articles
to grammatical errors in advertisements and even internet slang in drama dialogues.
The more the internet is incorporated into daily life, the greater the impact it has on formal
language. This is especially true in modern Language Arts classes through the use of smart
phones, tablets, and social media. Students are exposed to the language of the internet more than
ever, and as such, the grammatical structure and slang of the internet are bleeding into their
formal writing. Full immersion into a language is always the best way to learn it. Mark Lester in
his book Teaching Grammar and Usage states, “The biggest single problem that basic writers
have in developing successful strategies for coping with errors is simply their lack of exposure to
formal written English...We would think it absurd to expect a student to master a foreign
language without extensive exposure to it.”[54] Since students are immersed in internet language,
that is the form and structure they are mirroring.
Mass media
There has been instances of television advertisements using Internet slang, reinforcing the
penetration of Internet stylistics in everyday language use. For example, in the Cingular
commercial in the United States, acronyms such as "BFF Jill" (which means "Best Friend
Forever, Jill") were used. More businesses have adopted the use of Internet slang in their
advertisements as the more people are growing up using the Internet and other CMC platforms,
in an attempt to relate and connect to them better.[55] Such commercials have received relatively
enthusiastic feedback from its audiences.[55]
The use of Internet lingo has also spread into the arena of music, significantly seen in popular
music. A recent example is Trey Songz's lyrics for "LOL :-)", which incorporated many Internet
lingo and mentions of Twitter and texting.[56]
The spread of Internet linguistics is also present in films made by both commercial and
independent filmmakers. Though primarily screened at film festivals, DVDs of independent
films are often available for purchase over the internet including paid-live-streamings, making
access to films more easily available for the public.[57] The very nature of commercial films being
screened at public cinemas allows for the wide exposure to the mainstream mass audience,
resulting in a faster and wider spread of Internet slangs. The latest commercial film is titled
"LOL" (acronym for Laugh Out Loud or Laughing Out Loud), starring Miley Cyrus and Demi
Moore.[58] This movie is a 2011 remake of the Lisa Azuelos' 2008 popular French film similarly
titled "LOL (Laughing Out Loud)".[59]
The use of internet slangs is not limited to the English language but extends to other languages as
well. The Korean language has incorporated the English alphabet in the formation of its slang,
while others were formed from common misspellings arising from fast typing. The new Korean
slang is further reinforced and brought into everyday language use by television shows such as
soap operas or comedy dramas like “High Kick Through the Roof” released in 2009.[60]
Linguistic future of the Internet
With the emergence of greater computer/Internet mediated communication systems, coupled
with the readiness with which people adapt to meet the new demands of a more technologically
sophisticated world, it is expected[by whom?] that users will continue to remain under pressure to
alter their language use to suit the new dimensions of communication.[4]
Global Internet Users. - Internet World Stats
As the number of Internet users increase rapidly around the world, the cultural background,
linguistic habits and language differences among users are brought into the Web at a much faster
pace. These individual differences among Internet users are predicted[by whom?] to significantly
impact the future of Internet linguistics, notably in the aspect of the multilingual web. As seen
from 2000 to 2010, Internet penetration has experienced its greatest growth in non-English
speaking countries such as China, India and Africa,[61] resulting in more languages apart from
English penetrating the Web.
Also, the interaction between English and other languages is predicted[by whom?] to be an important
area of study.[62] As global users interact with each other, possible references to different
languages may continue to increase, resulting in formation of new Internet stylistics that spans
across languages. Chinese and Korean languages have already experienced English language's
infiltration leading to the formation of their multilingual Internet lingo.[63]
At current state, the Internet provides a form of education and promotion for minority languages.
However, similar to how cross-language interaction has resulted in English language's
infiltration into Chinese and Korean languages to form new slangs,[63] minority languages are
also affected by the more common languages used on the Internet (such as English and Spanish).
While language interaction can cause a loss in the authentic standard of minority languages,
familiarity of the majority language can also affect the minority languages in adverse ways.[5] For
example, users attempting to learn the minority language may opt to read and understand about it
in a majority language and stop there, resulting in a loss instead of gain in the potential speakers
of the minority language.[64] Also, speakers of minority languages may be encouraged to learn the
more common languages that are being used on the Web in order to gain access to more
resources, and in turn leading to a decline in their usage of their own language.[65] The future of
endangered minority languages in view of the spread of Internet remains to be observed.
