The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language

by David Crystal

  Messages are persistent – they stay on the screen for a period of time (before the arrival of other messages replace them or make them scroll out of sight). This means that someone who enters a conversation in a chatroom a couple of turns after an utterance has been made can still see the utterance, reflect upon it, and react to it. It is thus possible in principle to browse a past conversation, or search for a particular topic in an archive or computer log, in ways that spontaneous (unrecorded) conversation does not permit. Everything you say has been taken down – and, of course, may one day be used against you (as cases of employer/ employee litigation have already demonstrated).

  Netspeak features

  Although the Internet has been part of our lives for less than a generation, a large number of words and phrases have already emerged which are needed to talk about Internet-restricted situations, operations, activities, and personnel, making this one of the most creative lexical domains in contemporary English. Many terms are associated with the software which enables people to use the Internet, and which routinely appear on screen. Some have a permanent menu-presence, in the form of the labels used to designate screen areas and functions, and to specify user options and commands: file, edit, view, insert, paste, format, tools, window, help, search, refresh, address, history, stop, contact, top, back, forward, home, send, save, open, close, select, toolbars, fonts, options. Some terms appear only at intervals on a screen, depending on circumstances – usually, when things are going wrong, in the form of error messages (there seem to be no positive messages to tell us that everything is going right!): forbidden, illegal operation, error, not found, 404 error [‘a page or site is no longer in service’]. Several terms are associated with the use of computer hardware: freeze, lock, down, hang, crash, bomb, client (the machine, not the user). And terms have emerged for the population of Internet users themselves: netizens, netters, netties, netheads, cybersurfers, nerds, bozos, newbies, surfers, digiterati, and wizards. Most of these words are everyday terms which have been given a fresh sense in an Internet context.

  A popular method of creating Internet neologisms is to combine two separate words to make a compound (p. 41).

  Some elements turn up repeatedly: mouse in such forms as mouseclick, mousepad, mouseover and also as a phrasal verb (mouse across, mouse over); click in click-and-buy, one-click, cost-per-click, double-click; ware in firmware, freeware, groupware, shareware, shovelware, wetware [‘brain’]; web in webcam, webcast, webmail, webliography, webmaster, webonomics, webster, webzine; net in netlag, netdead, netnews, hypernet, Usenet, Netspeak, EcoNet, PeaceNet, and many other organizational names; hot in hotlist, hotspot, hotlink, Hotmail, HotBot, HotJava, and other trade names; and bug [‘software error’] in bug fix, bugtracker, BugNet.

  Similar in function are the use of cyber- and hyper- as prefixes or combining forms (cyberspace, cyberculture, cyberlawyer, cybersex, cybersquatter, cyberian, cyber rights; hypertext, hyperlink, hyperfiction, hyper-zine) and the suffixal use of -bot [an artificial intelligence program, from robot], as in annoybot, chatterbot, knowbot, cancelbot, softbot, mailbot, spybot.

  The word at, often shown as @, also has an increasingly prefixal function: atcommand, atsign, @-party, @-address, @Home.

  Blends (in which part of one word is joined to part of another) are illustrated by netiquette, netizen, infonet, datagram, infobahn, Internaut, Bugzilla.

  An innovation is the replacement of a word-element by a similar sounding item, as in e-cruting [‘electronic recruiting’], e-cruiter, and e-tailing [‘electronic retailing’]. Another is the retaining of the period found in electronic addresses within certain compounds, as a kind of infix, seen in net.legend, net.abuse, net.police, and net.citizen, or sites beginning with alt., with the punctuation mark often spoken aloud as ‘dot’.

  The various types of abbreviation found in Netspeak have been one of its most remarked features. Acronyms are so common that they regularly receive critical comment. A tiny sample would include BBS [‘bulletin board system’], BCC [‘blind carbon copy’], DNS [‘domain name system’], FAQ [‘frequently asked question’], HTML [‘hypertext markup language’], ISP [‘Internet Service Provider’], URL [‘uniform resource locator’], and the names of many firms and sites, such as AOL, IBM, IRC. Letter-plus-number combinations are also found: W3C [‘World Wide Web Consortium’], 3Com [a data-networking organization – the Com standing for Computer, Communications, Compatibility], P3P [‘Platform for Privacy Preferences’], Go2Net. The chatgroups and virtual worlds also have their abbreviations, some of which turn up on e-mail and in personal Web pages. Newer technology, such as the WAP-phones [‘Wireless Application Protocol’] with their tiny screens, have motivated a whole new genre of abbreviated forms, as is illustrated below. The acronyms are no longer restricted to words or short phrases, but can be sentence-length: AYSOS [‘Are you stupid or something?’], CID [‘Consider it done’], CIO [‘Check it out’], GTG [‘Got to go’], WDYS [‘What did you say?’].

  Distinctive graphology is also an important feature of Netspeak. The range extends from an enhanced system (by comparison with traditional writing) with a wide range of special fonts and styles, as in the most sophisticated Web pages, to a severely reduced system, with virtually no typographic contrastivity (not even such ‘basic’ features as italics or boldface), as in many e-mails and chatgroup conversations. All orthographic features have been affected. For example, the status of capitalization varies greatly. Most of the Internet is not case-sensitive, which thus motivates the random use of capitals or no capitals at all. There is a strong tendency to use lower-case everywhere. The ‘save a keystroke’ principle is widely found in e-mails, chatgroups, and virtual worlds, where whole sentences can be produced without capitals (or punctuation):

  John i’m thinking of going to london next week

  The lower-case default mentality means that any use of capitalization is a strongly marked form of communication. Messages wholly in capitals are considered to be ‘shouting’, and usually avoided; words in capitals add extra emphasis (with asterisks and spacing also available):

  This is a VERY important point.

  There are, however, certain contexts where capitals need to be recognized. A capital letter may be obligatory in a business name (especially if trade-marked). Indeed, a distinctive feature of Internet graphology is the way two capitals are used – one initial, one medial – a phenomenon variously called bicapitalization (BiCaps), intercaps, incaps, and midcaps:

  AltaVista, RetrievalWare, ScienceDirect, ThomsonDirect, NorthernLight, PostScript, PowerBook, DreamWorks, GeoCities, EarthLink, PeaceNet, SportsZone, HotWired, CompuServe, AskJeeves.

  More complex examples include QuarkXPress and aRMadillo Online. Some of the new names cause difficulty, in that long-standing orthographic conventions are contravened: for example, sentences can begin with small letters, as in eBay is interested or iMac is the answer, a problem that faces anyone who wants to start a sentence with a lower-case username or program command.

  Spelling practice is also distinctive. In English, US spelling is more common than British, partly for historical reasons (the origins of the Internet), and partly for reasons of typing economy, most US spellings being a character shorter than British ones (color vs colour, fetus vs foetus, etc). New spelling conventions have emerged, such as the replacement of plural -s by -z to refer to pirated versions of software, as in warez, tunez, gamez, serialz, pornz, downloadz, and filez. Non-standard spelling, heavily penalized in traditional writing (at least, since the eighteenth century), is used without sanction in conversational settings. Spelling errors in an e-mail would not be assumed to be an indication of lack of education (though they may be) but purely a function of typing inaccuracy. Chatgroups and virtual worlds also make a great deal of use of non-standard spellings which reflect pronunciation, such as yep, yup, yay, nope, noooo, for yes and no. Emotional expressions of horror, shock, and the like make use of varying numbers of vowels and consonants, depending on the
ferocity of the emotion: aaaiiieee, yayyyyyyy. The dollar sign sometimes replaces S, if some sort of dig is being made about costs, as in Micro$oft, and a £ sign can replace L, as in AO£. Teenage users, in particular, have introduced several deviant spellings, such as kool [cool] and fone [phone], and the replacement of a lower-case o by a zero, as in doodz [dudes] and lOzers [losers], or percentage sign, as in c%l. There is no evidence that such usages have extended beyond the Internet situation. Youngsters are well aware that Netspeak is a variety with a distinctiveness that would be inappropriate in other linguistic settings.

  Punctuation tends to be minimalist in most situations, and completely absent in some e-mails and chat exchanges. A lot depends on personality: some e-mailers are scrupulous about maintaining a traditional punctuation; others use it when they have to, to avoid ambiguity; and some do not use it at all, either as a consequence of typing speed, or through not realizing that ambiguity can be one of the consequences. On the other hand, there is an increased use of symbols not normally part of the traditional punctuation system, such as the #. Unusual combinations of punctuation marks can occur, such as (to express pause) ellipsis dots (…) in any number, repeated hyphens (- - -), or the repeated use of commas (,,,,). Emphasis and attitude can result in exaggerated or random use of punctuation, such as!!!!!!! or £$£$%!. Some odd combinations of punctuation marks can appear at the end of a sentence: Is this true of Yahoo!? (where the exclamation mark is part of the name). All of these may of course also be found in traditional informal writing.

  Language change

  It is always a sure sign that a new variety has ‘arrived’ when its usages begin to be quoted in other linguistic settings, and this has happened remarkably rapidly in the case of Netspeak. In everyday conversation, terms from the underlying computer technology are given a new application among people who want their talk to have a cool cutting-edge. Examples from recent overheard conversations include:

  It’s my turn to download now (i.e. I’ve heard all your gossip, now hear mine)

  I need more bandwidth to handle that point (i.e. I can’t take it all in at once)

  She’s multitasking (said of someone doing two things at once)

  Let’s go offline for a few minutes (i.e. let’s talk in private)

  He started flaming me for no reason at all (i.e. shouting at me)

  Are you wired? (i.e. ready to handle this)

  Programmers have long needed special vocabulary to talk about their lines of code, and some of this has now spilled over into everyday speech, especially to handle the punctuation present in an electronic address. For example, radio and television presenters commonly add e-addresses when telling listeners and viewers how they might write in to a programme, using at, dot, and forward slash to punctuate their utterance. Dot com is now a commonly heard phrase, as well as appearing ubiquitously in writing in all kinds of advertising and promotional material.

  In fact, written English shows developments well beyond the stage of the literal use of .com. Dotcom has come to be used as a general adjective (with or without the period, and sometimes hyphenated), as in dotcom organizations and dotcom crisis. It has however come to be used in a variety of ludic ways, especially in those varieties where language play is a dominant motif – such as newspaper headlines and advertising (Chapter 7). The similarity of com to come has been noticed, and doubtless there are similar links made in other languages. An offer to win a car on the Internet is headed .com and get it. A headline in the Independent Graduate on openings still available on the Web is headed: Dot.com all ye faithful. A phonetic similarity motivated a food-outlet advertisement: lunch@Boots.yum. The ‘dot’ element is now introduced into all kinds of phrases: Learnhow.to and launch.anything, are names of sites. The word un.complicated introduced an ad for personal finance. An advertisement for an Internet access site at a London railway station read: can’t www@it?

  These examples show how a similar ludic trend applies to the symbol @, now the universal link between recipient and address. It was chosen pragmatically by a computer engineer, Ray Tomlinson, who sent the first network e-mail in 1972. He needed a character which did not occur in names, and this typewriter keyboard symbol stood out, with the bonus of having an appropriate meaning (of someone being ‘at’ somewhere). A subsequent irony is that many firms and organizations have replaced the letter a or at in their name by an @: @llgood, @tractions, @cafe, @Home, @pex. And it has been seen turning up in other settings where traditionally the word at would be used: This is where it’s @ is one slogan; Bill Gates’ 1999 book is called Business @ the speed of thought. It has even been added to text where the word at would not normally appear: a postcard to my house read: Crystals @… followed by the address.

  By now the e- prefix must have been used in hundreds of expressions. The Oxford Dictionary of New Words (1997) had already noted e-text, e-zine, e-cash, and e-money, and in 1998 the American Dialect Society named e- ‘Word [sic] of the Year’ as well as ‘Most Useful and Most Likely to Succeed’. Examples since noted include e-tailing and e-tailers [‘retailing on the Internet’], e-lance [‘electronic freelance’] and e-lancers, e-therapy and e-therapists, e-management and e-managers, e-government, e-bandwagon, e-books, e-conferences, e-voting, e-loan, e-newsletters, e-security, e-cards, e-pinions, e-shop, e-list, and e-rage. Several of these are likely to establish themselves in standard English – and, by comparison with earlier processes of language change, very quickly.

  The speed with which Internet usages are taken up is unprecedented in language change – another manifestation of the influence of the technology on English. Traditionally, a new word entering the language would take an appreciable time – typically a decade or two – before it became so widely used that it would be noted in dictionaries. But in the case of the Internet, a new usage can travel the world and receive repeated exposure within a few days. It is likely that the pace of language change will be much increased through this process. Moreover, as word-inventors all over the world now have a global audience at their disposal, it is also likely that the amount of linguistic innovation will increase. Not by any means all innovations will become a permanent feature of the English language; but the turnover of candidates for entry at any one time is certainly going to be greater than at any stage in the past. Nor is it solely a matter of new vocabulary: new spellings, grammatical constructions, patterns of discourse, and regional preferences (intranational and inter-national) can also be circulated at an unprecedented rate, with consequences that as yet cannot be anticipated.

  Texting

  A good example of the speed at which language can change these days is the remarkably rapid rise of the mobile phone short messaging service (SMS), often referred to as texting or text messaging. Within three years of its introduction a new language variety was well established and rapidly developing, with 15 billion messages being sent worldwide by the beginning of 2001. The nature of the variety also illustrates how a new technology has immediate linguistic consequences. The challenge of the small screen size and its limited character space (about 160 characters, without scrolling), as well as the small keypad, motivated the evolution of an even more abbreviated language than emerged in chatgroups and virtual worlds. Some of the same abbreviations appear, either because of their ‘obvious’ rebus-like potential (e.g. NE1, 2day, B4, and C U l8r [‘later’], Z [‘said’]) or because the generally youthful population of users were familiar with Netspeak shorthand in its other situations (e.g. Msg [‘message’], BRB [‘be right back’]). Basic smileys are also used. Capital letters can be given syllabic values, as in thN [‘then’] and nEd [‘need’].

  The medium has motivated some new forms (e.g. c%l [‘cool’]) and its own range of direct-address items, such as F2T [‘free to talk?’], Mob [‘mobile’], PCM [‘please call me’], MMYT [‘Mail me your thoughts’], and RUOK [‘are you OK?’]. Multi-word sentences and sequences of response utterances, especially of a stereotyped kind, can be reduced to a sequence of initial letters: SWDYT
[‘So what do you think?’], BCBC [‘Beggars can’t be choosers’], BTDT [‘Been there, done that’], YYSSW [‘Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, whatever’], HHOJ [‘Ha, ha, only joking’]. Users seem to be aware of the information value of consonants as opposed to vowels, judging by such vowel-less items as TXT [‘text’] and XLNT [‘excellent’]. The process saves a great deal of time and energy (given the awkwardness of selecting letters on the small keypad); in a creation such as ru2cnmel8r [‘Are you two seeing me later?’], less than half the characters of the full form of the sentence are used. Even more ingenious coded abbreviations have been devised, especially among those for whom argot is a desirable safeguard against unwelcome surveillance. The panel illustrates some of the commoner usages.

  It is impossible to say whether texting, as a language variety, is a passing phase or something permanent. Certainly it will change as the technology develops and in response to as yet unknown technologies. What is plain is that we are only beginning to sense the effects of computer-mediated technology on the English language. As the man said, ‘We ain’t seen nothing yet.’

  Some abbreviations used in Netspeak conversations (both upper- and lower-case forms are used).

  afaik as far as I know

  afk away from keyboard

  asap as soon as possible

  a/s/l age/sex/location

  atw at the weekend

  bbfn bye bye for now

  bbl be back later

  bcnu be seeing you

  b4 before

  bg big grin

  brb be right back

  btw by the way

  cm call me