Is English becoming less formal?
Netspeak is a very informal language. It practises very few formal writing styles demonstrated in English. Compare emails to traditional written letters. Emails take less time to write as mistakes are easily corrected as opposed to perhaps re-writing the letter. Use of NetSpeak leads users to be less formal with all communications and this can be bad as certain emails still need to be written in a formal manner. These include emails to lecturers and to possible employers when applying for jobs. Some users do not recognise that emails are not always informal, as they usually communicate in an informal manner, for example playing games online, using messenger software at work and at home. Another factor might be that because email is a quick method of communication users attempt to convey their message as quickly as possible.
Has the English language become more widespread in the world as it is the standard Internet language?
More people whose first language is not English are having to use English as the majority of web pages on the Internet are in English. According to www.CyberAtlas.com 214,250,996 Web sites are in English, which is 68.39% of all Web pages (Pastore, M. 2000). English is generally also the standard language for communicating in game while playing online with many users from different countries. As these people are also using NetSpeak, the quality of their English is worse, but their use is improved. They learn how to express themselves better as the chat must be understood by people from other countries.
Is Netspeak a new medium of communication?
Language is defined as “the means of human communication, consisting of the use of spoken or written words in a structured way” but can also be defined as “the system of communication used by a particular community or country” (Soanes, C. 2002).
The new language is in fact that, a new language. It demonstrates the use of written words in a structured way by a certain community, that of the Internet community.
Could it be that the new type of communication experienced in the world today could be the start of a new medium for communication? The first medium of communication was speech which is ancient in origin. The second was writing which is believed to have developed around 10,000 years ago. With the invention of NetSpeak, plus the ability to send pictures and sounds as well as text a new medium is being invented that will allow people from around the world to communicate in a friendly and emotionally involved way as never seen before. David Crystal believes that Netspeak is a new medium and describes it as “neither spoken language nor written language nor sign language, but a new language dimension computer-mediated language” (Crystal, D. 2001)
As younger and younger people are utilising NetSpeak the future is hard to predict in terms of communication. When today’s children of as young as 7 are communicating in some form of NetSpeak through their mobile phones it is hard to imagine what form communication will take in both formal and informal settings in the future.
The popularity of CMC with particularly reference to email, instant messaging and SMS has had an effect on language. Language has changed dramatically with scrolls of shortcuts and smiley faces. Eg RGDS, 2DAY, :-) [Cellular Online, 2002]. Furthermore, this has occurred to such an extent that some of these have been added to the Oxford Dictionary as they are seen as being an integral part of the English language [Computing, 2001].
Netspeak is the name that has been given to the long list of acronyms and smiley faces that have evolved with the Internet. This can be perceived as being the language or lingo of the Internet.
Many of these acronyms have evolved over time. One of the main reasons that this has become so prolific is due to the use of SMS. SMS is a very restrictive and awkward form of communication. It is restrictive in that it is limited to 160 characters per message and it is awkward, as users have to use a keypad to formulate the message. Often each key is used to key in more than one letter. Predictive messaging, the ability to predict the word from the combination of keys that the user is using, has made the creation of messages easier. Even with predictive messaging, it is the restrictive and cumbersome nature of SMS that has been one of the major contributing factors to Netspeak, since users can reduce the number of keystrokes that are needed to form the message.
However, Netspeak has also filtered into the other CMC applications, particularly email and instant messaging since these are areas where users communicate frequently and hastily. Therefore when users want to send a message off quickly, they may add Netspeak vocabulary to it.
Netspeak is also often used as a way to add emotion to a message. Traditionally, with CMC only textual information could be exchange. CMC has many conversational characteristics, and therefore, the smiley face, :-) , could be added to convey this emotion happy. Appendix 1 has some examples of the Netspeak lingo.
The characteristics of CMC have been identified in this section. To understand the full impacts of how these characteristics may have an impact on language, it is important to identify the group of groups of people that use the Internet.
Language and the Internet
Terms such as 'global village', which became ubiquitous during the 1990s, were reinforced in that decade by the third component of my revolution, which I have dealt with in Language and the Internet (2001). Although the Internet as a technology has been around for several decades, very few of the people reading this paper would have had access to it ten years ago. Most people came on-line for e-mails and chat during the 1990s, and mostly since the mid-90s. The World Wide Web itself only came into existence in 1991. And what we now have is a new medium - computer-mediated communication - which is undeniably a revolution technologically and socially, and which I argue is just as much a revolution linguistically. Netspeak - my term for the features of language on the Internet unique to that medium - is remarkable not just because it has introduced new vocabulary and jargon, or because of the speed at which innovation in language can be circulated worldwide (though this latter point is itself an important revolutionary feature), but because it has provided us with new alternatives to the way in which human communication can take place. It is neither speech nor writing. The absence of immediate feedback distances Netspeak from face-to-face conversation, and demands new ways of expressing rapport and anticipating reaction (the invention of emoticons, or smileys, are an early primitive attempt at solving this problem). The process of e-mail framing (in which we routinely cut-and-paste bits of messages and add comments to produce new messages indistinguishable in form from their originals) is without precedent in written and spoken language. Netspeak is unlike writing in its impermanence: pages on screen can change as we watch (through animation, text movement, and so on), and be refreshed in ways that written language, with its stability, cannot match. Chatroom conversations are unlike speech in that they enable us to participate in many conversations simultaneously. Netspeak is neither spoken language nor written language: it has adapted features of speech and of writing to suit the new medium, and added other features that neither speech nor writing could ever convey. This if nothing else confers on it revolutionary status in the history of human communication.
But for languages - and especially for minority and endangered languages - its effect is also nothing short of revolutionary. The Internet began as an exclusively English-language medium, for obvious reasons to do with its point of origin in the USA; but by the mid-1990s it had already attracted a significant other-language use.
‘The potential is present for great things to happen. But as always with revolutions, it is up to individuals to capitalise on them’
The statistic most often cited at that time was that up to twenty per cent of the Internet - by which people generally meant web pages - were in languages other than English. By 2000 this figure had risen to thirty per cent, and some service providers were already anticipating an increase to fifty per cent by the middle of the decade.
Much of this increase was the result of the larger languages coming increasingly on-line - German and Japanese, for example - but the opportunity the Net provides for minority and endangered languages had also not gone unnoticed. The number of languages present on the Internet now must be in the region of 1,500.
Many of these languages have only a few sites, but the more resourceful (and resources-available) minority languages are represented by thousands of sites. Moreover, the arrival of chatroom technology has meant the emergence of virtual speech communities, in which people who had previously found it impossible to use a language because separated by distance can now join a chat-group in that language, and experience the immediate benefits that routine interaction can bring. The convenience, economy, and reach of the medium makes it a godsend to language communities which previously would have found the public expression of their language (through broadcasting or the press) beyond their resources. And it is the sudden availability of this language-reinforcing technology which yields the third element in my revolutionary decade. It should perhaps be added that the medium is one which intrinsically privileges diversity, because of its lack of centralised ownership. Although standards of expression, presentation, and design are emerging, the overriding impression of the Net is its variety of language and style. The Net holds a mirror up to our linguistic natures, and all aspects of our traditional linguistic expression may be found there, as well as several new styles
Has there been any effect to the English language at all?
It is possible that NetSpeak will have no impact on the English language. Both languages could co-exist with traditional English continuing to be used as it has been for years and NetSpeak only being used on the Internet, with a few individuals integrating NetSpeak into daily life, formally and informally.
Conclusion
The Internet has affected the English language through the creation of the new Internet language. The repeated use of this new language might result in people losing ability with the English language with regards to spelling and grammar. Also it appears that communicating using the Internet has led some people to become a lot less formal when communicating.
However, the Internet has increased the use of the English language, in its NetSpeak form, throughout the world due to the vast majority of Web pages and chat being done in English.
Whether the new language has become a new medium for communication remains to be seen. It will not be possible to answer that question for many years to come when we have the benefit of retrospect
Previous early changes to the English language came about due to invasion by the Vikings, conquest by the Romans and Normans, French influence (leading to Latin influence). These changes were influenced by the dominant power in the area at certain times forcing their language to be used by the locals/natives. Only aspects of each language were adopted into English which allowed it to evolve from old-English through middle-English to modern-English (Merriam-Webster. 2000). And the next phase, NetEnglish, which has not been brought about by confrontation but instead by the necessity to communicate quickly and meaningfully by people from around the world.
The Internet could possibly not affect the English language, the new language could co-exist with it and keep the boundaries between English and NetSpeak. Is this in fact not an evolution of the English language but actually the next phase of “our rapidly evolving, hyper-expressive and quite-expansive human language” (Lain, R. O. 2002)
References
Crystal, D. (2001). Language and the Internet. Cambridge University Press
Lain, R. O. (2002). Short Take: See? The Internet Is NOT Making Us Illiterate. Retrieved
November 11th, 2002 from
