By Malena Sánchez Moccero
Illustrations: Natalia Deganis & Ariadna Segafredo
Translation: Guy Simpson Conversations like this are everywhere on the instant messaging networks of the Internet and mobile phone technology. Children, young people and adults who chat or text messages transform words, use phonemes as short cuts, play havoc with punctuation and compress language in pursuit of communicative brevity. What are the consequences for our written language? MYRIADES 1 decided 2 find out by asking the language experts.
Is Internet creating a new language? The cybernaut's lexicon has created new words such as online, download, firewall, jpeg; and given new meaning to others such as icon, spam, Trojan, avatar, worm. Do they enrich language or debase it? David Crystal, world-renowned professor of linguistics at the University of Wales, is not worried by the Internet. He sees no threat in it for language. “ Electronic communication is a new medium, which has joined traditional oral and written language. It isn't a new language, in the way Spanish or English are languages, but a new medium which contains many variations on language,” he explained to MYRIADES 1. “Internet has expanded language; on the Web you see new forms of written language which increase its richness of expression.”
This expression assumes various forms on the Web. It depends on the site, the message and the individuals involved. In addition, the particular conditions of the medium, such as immediacy, prompt its users to devise certain codes. Naomi S. Baron of American University, Washington, and author of Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It's Heading, also recognizes the linguistic plurality that exists on Internet. “When one considers the infinity of forms that are being employed in computer-mediated communication – in text messages, chat rooms, on webpages – and the great spectrum of users – Americans, Argentinians, Indians and Israelis, Japanese and Jordanians, young and old, rich and poor – the emerging linguistic variety is impressive.”
But not everybody embraces the Internet phenomenon with open arms. There are those who believe it has given a negative turn to the development of language. Pedro Luis Barcia is President of the Argentinian Academy for the Arts. In his opinion, Internet is bringing about a deterioration of language and is far from constituting a new one, ”because that would imply a level of systemization and organization. ” For Barcia, who is also Director of Postgraduate Studies at Austral University's Communication Faculty, “Language has to be conventional, not an improvisation of personal preferences.”
Naked language: freedom or anarchy?
Anybody can have their own page. Some use it as a kind of diary, in which they write every day, saying how they feel, displaying photos. Some use them as a space to explain hacker tips, others to share music, or as a means of keeping in touch with relatives who are far away. Each person does what they want with it, and each person writes in the way that they choose fit. There is no censor, no external correction, the content is entirely the choice of the contributor. These are the famous blogs, photologs, spaces, or personal sites.
“To see this kind of speech in publication is something totally new,” says Baron, who is working on a new book to be called Beyond e-mail: language in the new millennium. “It's naked language, which is goes into the public domain by-passing editors, proof-readers, the lot.”
This “naked language” has repercussions on punctuation and grammar. The little signs which pause, end a sentence, indicate a question, or announce a new paragraph, fly around errantly in cyberspace. Teachers and parents of young cybernauts are likely to exclaim in despair when they see the abuse of punctuation. Barcia certainly does: “The semi-colon has disappeared altogether; everything has been reduced to full stops and commas. And it's a disruptive comma, because it obstructs the syntactic flow by being inserted more or less at random.” Does the change in usage or absence of such signs impede communication? Crystal doesn't believe it does. “Given the brevity of the sentences, messages lacking in much punctuation are unlikely to give rise to ambiguity. And the receiver doesn't question the credibility of a message on the basis of grammatical slips or lack of attention to punctuation, because they are aware of the pressure under which the message was written; and because they do the same things themselves.”
Grammar appears to be another victim of writing on the Internet. Again, Crystal is unconcerned, as “the mistakes don't generally blur the message's content.” He points out that the standard of grammar is not uniform on the Web: “Grammar is paid little attention to in e-mail, instant messaging and mobile text messages,” he says. “On the other hand, it is given more importance on websites.”
Why the difference? Baron thinks that the answer lies in the use that is made of the cyberservices. “E-mail is comparable to speech and grammatical error is more likely be tolerated. Readers tend to be more critical on the subject when it comes to blogs or websites.” Characters have also undergone modification during their transition to the digital network. Abbreviations, also, are common in their role as time-savers.
Crystal sees the abbreviations as evidence of human creativity at work, stimulated to adapt words to suit requirement and circumstance.
Barcia disagrees strongly with this view. “Abbreviation isn't invention, it is crossing-out. If you make up a word to express a feeling, that's inventive – making something out of nothing – or joining two words to form a third. But crossing-out is not a creative act.” The drawn smile
They started out as playful faces made of punctuation, expressing happiness :) or sadness :( and went on to greater sophistication. The faces on mobile and computer screens became animated and learned how to cry, yawn and rotate their eyes. Now there are dancing elephants, winking politicians, lips that send cyberkisses: icons for all tastes.
They are called “emoticons”, elements which were born as part of a response to the emotional coldness of the Internet and the absence of non-verbal language, explains Patricia Wallace, author of Internet Psychology. She says that the faces, happy or sad, annoyed or surprised, are a new way of adding “emotional intelligence” to the conversation.
Barcia, though, warns that the graphics can “lead to emotional impoverishment”. “If a boy writes to a girl and gets used to putting a smiling face every time he wants to say that he's happy, instead of expressing the personal nuances of how he feels, then he's reducing feeling to a code, just when he ought to be starting to develop it.”
Wallace's view is that emoticons can sometimes serve the purpose of rounding off what language falls short of saying; and Crystal agrees, while making the observation that his studies showed that the number of emoticon variations actually used was very small.
The future of language
In spite of their differences, the experts we spoke to all agreed that there was no single way of communicating on the electronic networks. There is no new language, as such. “The fact that a group of speakers uses language clumsily and disregards its rules doesn't constitute a slang, such as that which is created within the context of a trade, for example,” says Barcia. He also recognizes that while there are youngsters who fail to respect grammatical rules, there are other Internet users who write correctly.
“American teenagers tend to use a very informal style for their instant messaging, whereas the e-mail messages sent by British businessmen are more formal than many forms of traditional writing,” Baron illustrates. “There exists an extremely formal style on the web that is employed for legal, scientific, political and religious texts, as well as the informal language applied to chats and blogs,” Crystal says on an optimistic note. “Those who say that the Internet is impoverishing language are only looking at one per cent of the total language content that is currently on the Web.”
But the tendency towards incorrect usage in cyberspeech – whether from creativity or laziness – is undeniable. The Web is a dynamic phenomenon in constant expansion; how it affects language is a matter that lies predominantly in the hands of its users. In the decisions that each person takes on entering this new world of communication and on using its innovative tools. |
