WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW

 

BECAUSE, INTERNET

Language is like a house constantly under construction. A home serves a vital purpose to its occupants, who make slight modifications to it over the years. Generations go by and these small changes accumulate. Eventually, the building may become unrecognizable to previous inhabitants.

We could appreciate the extent of the changes by comparing the existing building with its old blueprints, and the same is true for language. While English students can generally just about understand the 400-year-old plays of Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written 600 years ago, is almost indecipherable without university-level language courses. The foundations are there, but it’s an entirely new structure. 

Centuries might seem like a reasonable timeframe for linguistic change, but a curious thing has happened in the last few decades: English is transforming far more rapidly. Why? Because internet. 

The internet precipitated an eruption of informal writing.

If we consider writing for a second, most of us think of books, magazines and newspapers. For the vast majority of us, these mediums were how we acquired and sharpened our reading skills. As for actually writing, we usually cut our teeth with school essays and exam papers. 

Now, there’s nothing wrong with these mediums, but they all have an important thing in common: they’re all types of formal writing.  

Formal writing doesn’t just mean serious political journalism or dense academic articles – it’s any kind of edited prose that emphasizes form, often at the expense of immediate flair and creative flow. This includes self-editing, too: you might not have had the luxury of a copy editor combing through your tenth-grade English essay, but when writing, you were conscious of following the rules of proper spelling, grammar and syntax. 

For a long time, the vast majority of what anyone read was formal writing. After all, it costs money to print things with paper and ink – why waste cash on misspelled words and stodgy sentences? But things changed late last century, when the internet and mobile phones arrived.

These technologies dramatically expanded the amount of writing in everyday life, making it a day-to-day necessity for ordinary people. Phone calls gradually lost ground to emails and text messages. To reach an audience of thousands, you didn’t need to make it past the scrutiny of an editor anymore – you just needed to start a blog. 

And to compose these new daily messages, we used a different style of language: informal writing. This is immediate and unselfconscious writing, untouched by either newspaper editors or our own internal ones. When we text, or converse in internet chat rooms, it’s raw and conversational – just as if we were speaking. 

This explosion in informal writing began to change the nature of communication, and even language itself. 

Acronyms, for example, are common ways to save space in formal writing – think NAFDAC or WHO. And since the informal writing explosion, acronyms have been repurposed by the masses for the same reason, but with very different results. Today, most people know that “BTW” stands for “by the way,” and “OMG” is shorthand for “oh my god.”

In this way, the rules of language are no longer handed down to us from figures of authority, like teachers and dictionary editors. With the internet, we’ve all become involved in crafting new forms of expression.

Internet linguistics is a new and exciting field.

Take a road trip across the Lagos from island to mainland. In Obalende and Washington, you’ll overhear people referring to sugary carbonated drinks as “mineral.” Keep driving, and you’ll hear it called “soda” in the area roughly from Lekki to Ajah. Then, arriving in Yaba or Surulere, it’s back to “soft drink.” Why is this?

If this observation fascinates you, you’d probably make a good linguist. They’re interested in why people communicate differently.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, linguists have been coming up with explanations for why language varies and what influences our patterns of expression. And they’ve benefited immensely from the advent of a revolutionary new research tool: the internet.

Cyberspace transformed linguistic research in several ways. Before, linguists had to record or transcribe individual conversations for analysis; this was time-consuming, and subjects might change their speaking habits in the presence of a researcher. But today, with a vast supply of social media posts and text messages to analyze, researchers have millions of examples of people speaking informally and organically. 

Let’s look at a couple of established linguistic theories for why we speak differently, and then consider how internet linguistics helped strengthen their impact.

First, there’s the influence of networks. People pick up language habits from the social groups that surround them, like family or workplace networks. In one study in 1970s Northern Ireland, linguist Lesley Milroy investigated the changing pronunciation of the word “car” into something more like “care.” In one Belfast community still in transition, Milroy found that certain young women were leading this change. These women all worked in the same store out of town, where customers and staff alike were already using the new pronunciation.

Milroy’s study raises another important point: the influence of strong and weak ties. These are social science terms designating your relationship to other people – strong for close friends and family members, weak for casual acquaintances. Milroy concluded that having many weak ties led to more linguistic change, because this exposes the speaker to different ways of talking. Strong ties, on the other hand, tend to share much in common linguistically. 

In this way, it’s easy to see how the internet supercharges language changes. The web is a bundle of weak ties, with social networks, forums and chat rooms all facilitating contact with people outside your core networks. Twitter, for example, is a primary driver of linguistic change because it encourages you to follow people you don’t already know.

To be concluded next week.

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Have a fruitful day!

Olusola Bodunrin is a graduate of Philosophy from the University of Ado-Ekiti. He is a professional writer, he writes articles for publication and he anchors – ‘What You Should Know’ on SHEGZSABLEZS’ blog.

‘What You Should Know’ is a column that offers to educate and enlighten the public on general falsehood and myths.