As already stated, the internet
is helping to create new words at an incredible rate. To prove this,
I decided to study a message board closely over a number of days in
an attempt to pick up any specialist language or interesting
features on display. I chose to look at the BBC 606 Sport message
boards. These boards are used in particular by football fans; every
team is given their own separate area but users are not confined to
their
favoured
team’s board – they are allowed to post
anywhere, creating heated debates between rival fans. I felt that
this would be likely to produce interesting results.
A common term used on this
website was the initialism ‘WUM’ which I found out stands for
‘wind-up merchant’ i.e. somebody who posts derogatory things about
an opposing team in order to get an angry reaction from their fans.
Also, it became clear that on this message board, fans of big teams
such as Manchester United and Chelsea are often termed ‘gunters’ by
fans of lower league clubs. This is an amalgamation of the term
‘glory hunter’. Terms like this can make the website difficult for
‘outsiders’ to understand. When you consider that unique words and
phrases like these are appearing on millions of websites every day,
it becomes apparent that it is almost impossible to be an expert on
internet language.
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It has been said that, while the
internet is beginning to have a noticeable impact on written
language, it is unlikely to have the same effect on spoken language.
As the internet is by nature text based, much of the jargon you use
online will not be said aloud. Online, you may well use sets of
words and codes that have only been in existence for a few weeks,
but when speaking to your friends in real life, you are unlikely to
say things like, “Rofl, brb m8” (roll on floor laughing, be right
back mate). |
If this is true, will we eventually get to the point
where we have two sets of languages – one for speaking and one for
writing? This may be a little farfetched but already young people
are learning when to use different codes in different situations
i.e. ‘text speak’ to friends in MSN, Standard English in school
presentations. Interestingly, the two codes don’t appear to be
mixing together very often. Occasionally you will hear someone say
‘lol’ in friendly conversation but this is often done out of irony,
a mocking of the fact that it is not usually acceptable to use such
a term in spoken discourse.
To conclude, new internet based
domains including message boards, chat rooms, emails and online
games are opening up a huge new world of possibility in terms of
language. The fact that young people tend to use language
differently to the way the adults of today would have used language
in their childhoods does not mean either is right or wrong – the
English language has a history of change. William Shakespeare would
scoff at what we consider to be Standard English today in the same
way that parents scoff at the way their children communicate in chat
rooms. With this in mind, it is highly likely that the internet will
gradually change the way we all use language; it is really only a
question as to what extent it’ll change. Whatever happens, the next
few decades promise to be a very interesting chapter in the history
of the English language.
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