Understand internet-induced changes to the English language

Overview

Gain insight into the internet-induced changes shaping the English language. Explore the impact of digital communication on vocabulary, grammar, and linguistic trends. Understand how the internet has transformed the way we use and perceive English.

Language is like a house constantly under construction. A home serves a vital purpose to its occupants, who make slight modifications to it over the years. Generations go by, and these small changes accumulate. Eventually, the building may become unrecognizable to previous inhabitants.

We could appreciate the extent of the changes by comparing the existing building with its old blueprints, and the same is true for language. While English students can generally just about understand the 400-year-old plays of Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written 600 years ago, is almost indecipherable without university-level language courses. The foundations are there, but it’s an entirely new structure.

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Language is like a house constantly under construction. A home serves a vital purpose to its occupants, who make slight modifications to it over the years. Generations go by, and these small changes accumulate. Eventually, the building may become unrecognizable to previous inhabitants.

We could appreciate the extent of the changes by comparing the existing building with its old blueprints, and the same is true for language. While English students can generally just about understand the 400-year-old plays of Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written 600 years ago, is almost indecipherable without university-level language courses. The foundations are there, but it’s an entirely new structure.

Centuries might seem like a reasonable timeframe for linguistic change, but a curious thing has happened in the last few decades: English is transforming far more rapidly. Why? Because of internet.

Our new online tools for communicating have ushered in a new era of linguistic alteration, where different rules for spelling, grammar and syntax can be coined and popularized in just a few years. In this blog, we’ll dive deep into internet culture, and spell out the linguistic changes the web has birthed.

The internet precipitated an eruption of informal writing.

If we consider writing for a second, most think of books, magazines and newspapers. For most of us, these mediums were how we acquired and sharpened our reading skills. As for actually writing, we usually cut our teeth with school essays and exam papers.

There’s nothing wrong with these mediums, but they all have an important thing in common: they’re all types of formal writing.

Formal writing doesn’t just mean severe political journalism or dense academic articles – it’s any edited prose that emphasizes form, often at the expense of immediate flair and creative flow. This includes self-editing, too: you might not have had the luxury of a copy editor combing through your tenth-grade English essay, but when writing, you were conscious of following the rules of proper spelling, grammar and syntax.

For a long time, most of what anyone read was formal writing. After all, printing things with paper and ink costs money – why waste cash on misspelt words and stodgy sentences? But things changed late last century when the internet and mobile phones arrived.

Internet linguistics is a new and exciting field.

Take a road trip across the United States from East to West. In New York and Washington, you’ll overhear people referring to sugary carbonated drinks as “soda.” Keep driving west, and you’ll hear it called “pop” in the area roughly from Detroit to Utah. Then, arriving in Arizona or California, it’s back to “soda.” Why is this?

If this observation fascinates you, you’d probably make a good linguist. They’re interested in why people communicate differently.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, linguists have been explaining why language varies and what influences our expression patterns. And they’ve benefited immensely from the advent of a revolutionary new research tool: the internet.

Cyberspace transformed linguistic research in several ways. Before, linguists had to record or transcribe individual conversations for analysis; this was time-consuming, and subjects might change their speaking habits in the presence of a researcher. But today, with a vast supply of social media posts and text messages to analyze, researchers have millions of examples of people speaking informally and organically.

We can divide internet users into different groups, based on when they first came online.

Internet users are surprisingly easy to parcel up into a few categories, and being a member of one group says much about your communication habits.

The first group, Old Internet People, are the most influential in developing the Internet language. This relates to what linguist Salikoko Mufwene calls the founder effect, which states that the earliest members of a language group exert a disproportionate influence on its later development.

Old Internet People were the first ones online when the Internet was still in its infancy. A high level of computer literacy distinguishes them because getting online in those days required navigating a computer using coded commands and knowledge of a few programming languages.

Because accessing the internet required technical expertise, it only attracted those interested in technology, meaning everyone had something in common. They hung out on platforms that seem prehistoric today: sites like Usenet and software like Internet Relay Chat. Old Internet People developed acronyms like “BTW” for “by the way” and “FYI” for “for your information.” To convey emotion to each other, they also developed basic emoticons like :-) and :-(.

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