Internet linguistics

The study of internet linguistics can take place through four main perspectives: sociolinguistics, education, stylistics and applied linguistics. Further dimensions have developed as a result of further technological advances, 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 through 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. The Internet continues to play a significant role both in encouraging people and in diverting attention away from the usage of languages.

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. 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. 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.

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". This will affect the way language is used as students and teachers begin to use more of these CMC platforms.

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.

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.

Themes

The sociolinguistics of the Internet may also be examined through five interconnected themes.

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.

   See below: Stylistic perspective.

5. Metalanguage and folk linguistics – It involves looking at the way these linguistic forms and changes on the Internet are labelled 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. 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. 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").

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.

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. Naomi S. Baron 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. A study in 2009 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.

Though the use of the Internet resulted in stylistics that are not deemed appropriate in academic and formal language use, 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 linguistics is, most significantly, applied through the communication aspect (use of e-mails, discussion forums, chat messengers, blogs, etc.). IMC allows 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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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 280-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.

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. Authors of such novels are also able to receive feedback 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). Despite their popularity, there has also been criticism regarding the novels' "lack of diverse vocabulary" and poor grammar.

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", 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. David Crystal stated that blogs were "the beginning of a new stage in the evolution of the written language". Blogs have become so popular that they have expanded beyond written blogs, 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.

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".

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 ???!?!?!?. Symbols are also used for discourse functions, such as the asterisk as a conversational repair marker and arrows and carats as deixis and referent markers. 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".

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. E-mail is rapidly replacing traditional letter-writing because of its convenience, speed and spontaneity. 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.

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.

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. 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.

Applied perspective

The applied perspective views the linguistic exploitation of the Internet in terms of its communicative capabilities – the good and the bad. 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. 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.

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. 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 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. 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.

Hawaiian educators have been taking advantage of the Internet in their language revitalization programs. 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.

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. 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.

Exploitation of the Internet

The Internet can also be exploited for activities such as terrorism, internet fraud and internet crimes against children. 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. 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. 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.