Internet and Language

The Internet is changing the language, what Megan Garber describes as “of-the-Internet, by-the-Internet movements of language”. Like when it added a new preposition to English: the word, “because”:
“Because variety. Because Internet. Because language.”
Or take how texting via those chat apps of the smartphone world has converted the “neutral” period (full-stop) into something more aggressive. As Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics, explains:
“In the world of texting and IMing … the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all. In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like ‘This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.’”
Or take how “LOL” which used to stand for “Laugh(ing) Out Loud” is now increasingly used to denote sarcasm in text. As Lucy Ferriss wrote:
“When a laugh becomes a smirk and “out loud” is reduced to cryptic silence, lol can mean SOS, the Good Ship Sincerity lost in a storm of sarcasm.”

Changes to languages aside, turns out the Internet “may be helping the other 95 percent (of languages on the planet) to their graves”, as Caitlin Dewey put it. There’s even a term for it: Digital Language Death! The reason is that “very few of the world’s languages are developing any presence online”. Only 5% in fact. A few organizations like the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity, have tried to crowd-source the creation of encyclopedias of endangered languages to buck the trend.  Wikipedia even has an “incubator” to encourage projects in new languages. But while these attempts are being made, Dewey points out that:
“Even if you have a killer Cherokee wiki, for instance -- which, it turns out, some people do -- you’re not necessarily going to be able to Google or Facebook or tweet in that language.”
And that is why Joshua Keating says:
“It is safe to say, however, that we’re at something of a key turning point in the history of culture."

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