We are currently in the depths of a linguistic revolution.
The English language is changing and changing fast.
Why? Because of technology, the digital age.
Words are moving from tangible print to the screen.
The internet has transformed the way we communicate as a society.
We can announce our feelings and thoughts to millions in seconds.
We are a culture obsessed with sharing our entire lives online.
The world we live in now is saturated with information.
90% of world data has been created in the last two years.
But what does this mean for the English language?
Will abbreviations, crudely spelled words and a lack of consideration for grammar become the norm?
Or are these anxieties simply great plumes of hot air manifesting out of fear?
Fear of the new.
Maybe the internet is enabling people to engage in forms of writing.
We don't have the fear of publishers looking over our shoulders and telling us we're doing it wrong.
The shackles are broken. We are free, unrestricted and unregulated.
But if we have no rules, will the language need protecting to stop it descending into disarray?
Our guidelines needed to retain some degree of formality.
The future for English in the age of the internet is unknown.
Only time will reveal the implications.
One thing's for sure. There'll be a struggle.
There'll be a fight. But English will endure.
Every time a new technology comes along people think that it's the end of the road for the English language
and indeed sometimes for languages in general.
It happened when printing arrived in the 15th century. People thought, oh, disaster.
There's going to be heresies promulgated all over the world now.
When the telephone arrived in the 19th century people thought, oh, disaster
because people won't talk to each other on the streets anymore.
They'll stay at home and society will break down.
When the BBC arrived, disaster again because we'll all be brainwashed and the internet has come along now.
So naturally people think that's going to be a disaster as well.
But the evidence is for language that every time a new technology arrives
it expands the expressive richness of the language in a way that wasn't there before.
I think people do get a little bit worried about somehow it's making a standard slip
but I don't think there's really any evidence for that at all.
I think it's actually having a much more positive influence than some people will give it credit for.
When you assess the question of the English language in its present state
you have to draw a distinction between the written and the spoken.
And in the written format, this is a golden age.
There's more reading and writing, it's more reading particularly
than ever before in iPhone, iPad, Nook, Kindle, Hardback.
You name it, people are devouring words on a colossal scale.
I really don't think it's meaningful to talk about a decline in the English language
because I think change is normal for language.
And in a way talking about decline, it lets us off the hook
because it stops us from asking what it means to use new opportunities well or badly.
I don't think blogs and online language is impoverished.
It's just another domain of writing that has its own particular terms,
it has its own particular codes of usage.
There's a story who says that the internet is an impoverishment of English
is talking through his or her respective hats.
They haven't studied the language in order to make such a claim.
What they've noticed, you see, is the occasional informal usage
which strikes them as being anomalous or irregular or a contrast
with the formal kind of language that we're used to hear it to.
And it is perfectly possible to see in blogging and on Facebook forums
and things of this kind and in emails and chat and so on,
it's perfectly possible to see a level of informality of English
that was never there before and which will upset anybody who was brought up
on a very formal correct style of English.
And they're very disturbed to see this kind of informality appearing
not just on the internet but in print on a screen looking really very posh and so on
yet the language is so informal compared to what they were expecting.
One thing that people tend to get upset about a lot is grammar.
It's the idea of bad grammar and is particularly the idea that
shortened social media forms encourage the loss of grammatical sense.
By my standards, I think a lot of what is generated on the internet
is pretty poor, shoddy stuff.
You know, it's sloppy, it's slack, it's verbose, it's tedious, bad tempered
and it lacks the kind of distinction which I would, one would hope that the best writing would have.
When you see people using what's perceived to be bad grammar on Facebook,
it can get people quite excited in a sort of negative way.
But you could argue that really grammar is just an ability to follow a set of sometimes arbitrary rules.
For example, if somebody spells accommodation with only one M
when the standard spelling is a double M, if you read that,
are you really at a loss as to what they were talking about?
Do you look at that and think, I can't possibly think what that word might be?
People think that misplaced apostrophes are exactly the same category of mistake
as a total inability to structure a sentence.
Or they think that not using capital letters in conventional places
is as great a failing as not understanding the meaning of a word.
So I think we really need to be a little bit more sophisticated about this
and partly recognize that what people are doing is bending screen-based language
to be more expressive rather than less.
When you don't have a human face there in person to convey emotional text and subtext,
you tend to go above and beyond conventional, standard English, conventional good grammar
in order to get your meaning across.
You draw smiley or sad human faces out of punctuation.
You use lots of exclamation marks.
You use, you know, irony marks and asides on Twitter.
You use hashtags.
Now, this isn't, for me, bad grammar so much as good innovation when it's done well.
So there are some sophisticated codes arising around the internet, I think.
It's just that we can't apply the same kinds of rules that we apply to standard English
to internet usage because it's more relaxed.
The danger might come, of course, if we start to confuse the two media
and start to apply those kind of non-standard informal codes to standard usage.
I know that a lot of people get worried, for example,
that children's grammar and spelling is being affected by text messaging
and the sort of shortening that we have.
We have a children's corpus, which in part is made up of actual writing by children
and there's no evidence there that they are being affected by that in a negative way.
They will use abbreviations and sort of text speak, if you like,
but it's always in the context of perhaps trying to relay a mobile phone conversation
or something like that.
There's no evidence that when they then actually do more formal writing
that they're actually using those same abbreviations.
So, again, I think they know when is the appropriate time to use such things
and when might be less appropriate.
I was in a school just a couple of weeks ago.
I go into schools quite a lot to talk about the language of the internet to the kids.
Sixth formers, mainly, you know, 17, 18-year-olds.
And one of the things I do is we collect a little corpus,
a collection of their text messages, because it's a nice exercise and we look at them.
Back in 2004 or 2005, we could count up all the abbreviations that they used in their texts
and the average was about 10%.
By the way, note that only 10%. It was never the case that they filled their texts with abbreviations.
So there were things like LOL and so on in there.
I went into a school a couple of weeks ago.
We collected a pile of text messages.
There were no abbreviations at all.
I say to the kids, where have your abbreviations gone?
They look at me and they say, we used to do that once upon a time when we were kids, you know,
it's not cool anymore.
It's naff. One kid came up to me and said, tell you when I stopped using abbreviations,
when my parents started.
Lexicographers, that is the people who put together the dictionaries,
I think they're always keen to emphasize that they are trying to describe language
rather than simply prescribe it.
And so when you see initialisms like LOL, laughs out loud, going into the OED,
that is not someone sticking up a white flag and saying, well, that's it for English.
Anything goes now.
That's really people acknowledging reality, acknowledging the way language is used.
A new word is really just a word that's new to the dictionary.
It's not necessarily always going to be something that's kind of the latest slang term
or dance music term or internet phenomenon.
For our purposes, it's just new to the dictionary.
Give me another example like LOL.
O-M-G.
Give me another one.
I think a maze balls is in the dictionary now.
Give me another one.
And so on. This is the point.
Anybody who says, look at LOL and it's in the dictionary.
This is a disaster.
I'm sorry.
One new word into the dictionary is a disaster.
The English language has over a million words, probably twice as many.
Nobody's ever bothered to count them all.
One new word is in what sense, a disaster?
Take a word like digital.
That word has massively changed since it first entered the language.
In about, I think, the 1400s, it first came into the language.
And it meant relating to any number below 10.
Now, that doesn't really exist as a sense anymore,
but instead with the kind of booming computers in the 1940s,
we've had the word digital being sort of put in sharp opposition to analog,
to talk about the different ways that technology is working.
And now, of course, it's carried on.
And it really just means something.
It's got quite a loose meaning in some sense.
It's meaning anything to do with computers and the internet.
That's just the way that language works.
So it's fascinating as a lexicographer to look at that
and just to sort of chart the rise and rise,
if you like, of a word like digital.
The problem for the dictionary at the moment is that
new forms are coming into the language at such speed
and they have a very short lifespan, shelf life.
They come at tremendous speed.
They get absorbed into the online version and they get listed.
And then in 10 years' time, they'll probably be meaningless.
And there's all this detritus of language being accumulated,
but that's all it is.
It's what the English language is always done,
which is to generate a lot of material very swiftly.
Language on screen dramatizes our conversations,
almost like we are writing stage directions for a performance.
And there's a character who isn't quite us,
but who is representing us.
And so, you know, when we say, lol, when I type that,
I'm probably not actually laughing out loud.
It would be a bit weird if I only wrote it when I was cackling.
And similarly, you know, if I write face palm,
a lovely, lovely direction which sort of indicates
the idea that you are slapping your forehead with your hand
in a kind of gesture of despair.
You use that in online chat to bring it to life,
to conjure for someone a dramatic, engaging scenario
to be expressive, but you're not actually doing it.
It's notoriously difficult to learn to spell English.
Nobody ever learns to spell every single word correctly,
and many people, it's a lifelong struggle.
What the internet is doing is making incorrect spelling
much more visible.
At the moment, the spell checkers are pretty awful,
as everybody knows.
Spell checkers are quite good at identifying
a uniquely spelled word in the language.
If there's a word like indogenous or something like this,
which is not going to be confused with anything else,
or assimilation or assassination,
then if you misspell it, the spellchecker will
underline it and point it out to you.
But if you spell plain, the aeroplane, P-L-A-I-N,
no spellchecker on this earth will say you're wrong.
If you type in 1960s and you meant 1860s,
no spellchecker will say you're wrong.
In other words, spellcheckers are only good to a certain extent,
and anybody who relies on a spellchecker,
that is the slippery road to doom,
because eventually it will simply miss out
on some of the common words in the language
which simply have different meanings and different spellings,
and it will never spot that you've got them wrong in the first place.
People are often surprised to know that Samuel Johnson,
who's sort of held up as a great linguist rightly,
he made lots of spelling mistakes in his own private writings.
It's just that before that went to print,
it would obviously have been tidied up by copy editors,
proofreaders and printers.
Printed text historically has always gone through processes
of proofreading, copy editing,
that's meant that it's been very standardised and regularised.
But that's rather artificial, because of course,
that doesn't mean that everyone knows how to spell correctly,
it just simply means that it's gone through that lengthy
and expensive process of making it correct,
because we think text should always be entirely standardised.
The central fact of technology and language
is for me that it's ushered in an era of mass participation
in written culture.
And this is something really radical.
For the first time in human history,
the bulk of humanity through two billion internet-connected computers
through what will soon be seven billion mobile phones,
people are writing their own words,
and writing has for most of human history
been something restricted to the elite, to the priesthood,
to the sort of sacred custodians of language.
And so everybody's getting on board,
and that's bringing some very strange and very new things with it.
Along comes the internet.
What have we got?
The World Wide Web.
We've got Google Searching.
We've got Instant Messaging.
We've got Blogging.
We've got Text Messaging.
We've got Facebook, YouTube, Twitter.
Each of these new developments,
and many more I haven't mentioned have come along,
added a new genre, a new style of expression, if you like,
to what wasn't there before.
The rest of the language trundles along
as if none of this had happened.
The kind of language I'm using to you now
is exactly the same as the kind of language I would have used to you
if you'd interviewed me 20 years ago,
even though the internet has happened in the interim.
And so I see the internet as being a new dimension to language,
and not in any sense a decline.
The internet has brought us a lot of new words,
a lot of new vocabulary.
Perhaps it hasn't brought as many
what you might call brand new coinages,
so it will often take words that already exist
and give them a slightly different spin.
I mean, the word internet itself is a pretty new coinage.
It comes from two elements
that were obviously already in existence.
But language works like that anyway.
I mean, I would hazard a guess
that if you were to do some kind of analysis
on the numbers of completely new formations,
which you've never seen before,
they would be quite minuscule in comparison to words
which have been re-appropriated by analogy
from other words that already exist.
That's just the way that language works.
I don't think the language is on the decline.
I think it's certainly changing.
The internet is causing it to change.
But then change is just the natural part of any living language.
It's been changing for the last 1,500 years
while it's been in use.
The internet is causing the change to be accelerated.
And it's changing it in specific ways.
So new technology introduces new words into the language
and as those get used more widely,
so they become accepted parts of the language.
But that, again, isn't any...
it's not particularly unique to the internet.
Any technology brings along new vocabulary items, too.
The thing about the internet, you see, is it gives people novelty.
So they come along and they start inventing things all over the place.
It's cool. You see, I can invent a new abbreviation.
All my friends in the entire language will use it after a while.
Now I'm afraid not.
Most of the invented words and abbreviations and so on
that came in in the early 2000s are history now.
They've gone. Nobody uses them anymore.
Indeed, even the common abbreviations are on their way out.
More people are doing more things with words.
Words are changing faster than ever.
They are being adapted as the screen sometimes replaces the face.
Face to face, even the phone call as a method of communication.
And we are desperately trying to get more and more out of our words
to make more of them and through them.
It's becoming something bigger and bigger.
The internet is, in this sense, you know, not one thing,
not a stationary target.
It is a trend and it's a trend that will end.
And this knows where.
So one final and freestanding thought is whenever you look at language,
you have to look on a very, very big scale.
Language change is infinitesimally slow.
It's like coral.
It grows and grows and changes and changes over hundreds of years.
As long as people are communicating and people are able to understand it,
then I think we can sometimes afford to be a little bit more relaxed about the standards.
There will be a fight, undoubtedly, because this is polarized opinion.
There are people who want the old spelling system to stay the way it is.
Unsurprisingly, because they've got a vested interest in it.
I've learned it. You've learned it. You know, we've learned it.
And we spent hours sweating over English spelling.
So naturally, it's reluctant to change.
I'm not talking about us.
I'm talking about new generations of people who are reared on the internet,
not reared in the way I was reared.
To try and turn language into something static that makes you happy
and that preserves things that you care about, this is understandable.
But I think this is also futile.
And of course, it means that people won't listen to you.
Get away from me.
You
