language evolution on the Internet

[David Goldstein <goldstein_david@yahoo.com.au>]

Hi all

A couple of stories on the evolution of different languuges on the
Internet from the Sydney Morning Herald.

Cheers
David

The age of small talk 
First came speech, then writing. Now Netspeak has put us on the brink
of the greatest language revolution, predicts David Crystal.

Writers on the Internet struggle to find ways of expressing its
unprecedented impact. "A force of unimaginable power - a Leviathan
... is loose in our world, and we are as yet barely aware of it. It
is already changing the way we communicate, work, trade, entertain
and learn; soon it will transform the ways we live and earn," writes
John Naughton, from A Brief History of the Future.

"Perhaps one day it will even change the way we think. It will
undermine established industries and create new ones. It challenges
traditional notions of sovereignty, makes a mockery of national
frontiers and continental barriers and ignores cultural
sensitivities." 

Language being such a sensitive index of social change, it would be
surprising indeed if such a radically innovative phenomenon did not
have a corresponding impact on the way we communicate. Language is at
the heart of the Internet, for Net activity is interactivity. The
Internet is not just a technological fact; it is a social fact, as
Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Internet, has insisted; and its
chief stock-in-trade is language.

 http://www.smh.com.au/news/0201/05/spectrum/spectrum1.html

Parlez-vous le netspeak? 

By David Crystal 

Another reason for the revolutionary status of the Internet is the
fact that it offers a home to all languages, as soon as their
communities have a functioning computer technology, of course. Its
increasingly multilingual character has been the most notable change
since it started out - not very long ago - as a totally English
medium. 

There's a story the former US vice-president Al Gore tells about the
eight-year-old son of Kyrgyzstan's President Akayev, who told his
father that he had to learn English. When asked why, the child
apparently replied: "Because, Daddy, the computer speaks English."

For many, indeed, the language of the Internet ' is English. There
was a headline in The New York Times in 1996 which said simply:
"World, Wide, Web: 3 English Words." The article, by Michael Specter,
said: "If you want to take full advantage of the Internet there is
only one real way to do it: learn English." 

 http://www.smh.com.au/news/0201/05/spectrum/spectrum2.html

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