Learn English Online and Know How the Internet Evolves Language

Nowadays, the English language has becoming a common language for users from all across the globe but in the process, the language itself is evolving.

After America came out from the Ashes of a wounding war with Britain back in 1814, the nation was way far from being united. A Webster company thought that a common language would help the people to be united and aide in creating a new identity that would make the nation truly independent from the British.

Now, in a recent edition of another Webster company, it adopted the Americanised spellings familiar these days – the er instead of re in the word centre, dropping the u from the word neighbour and making the double letter L single from the word traveller.  It likewise added new words that were uniquely American like skunk, opossum, hickory, squash and chowder.

Meanwhile, to complete an American Dictionary of the English language, it took almost a couple of decade or – 18 years to be exact and in order to research the etymology of its 70,000 entries, Webster learned 26 other languages.

In this digital time, the internet is making a similar language evolution, but at a much faster pace.

So far, there are approximately 4.5 billion web pages all across the globe. And with half the population of China now using the internet, many of those web pages are written in Chinese.

Linguist assumes that within 10 years, English will dominate the internet – but in a way far different to what we have accept and recognise it today and that is because the people who use it as their second language already outnumbered native English speakers. And mostly, they use it to communicate with other non-native speakers, specifically on the internet where user paid less attention to grammar and spelling, and it is also where speakers care less about their accent.

In her brief statement, linguistic expert, Naomi Baron, claimed that, “The internet enfranchises people who are not native speakers to use English in significant and meaningful ways,”. Baron is a professor of linguistics at the American University in Washington DC.

Facebook users already SOCIALISE in a number of different “Englishes” such as Indian English or Hinglish, Spanish English and Korean English. Although these variations have long existed within respective cultures, they are now expanding online.

“On the internet, all that matters is that people can communicate – nobody has right to tell them what the language should be,” Baron added. “If you can talk Facebook into putting up pages, you have a language that has political and social standing even if it doesn’t have much in the way of linguistic uniqueness,” he claimed.

Some words that we often use are adaptations of traditional English, such as slur in Singaporean English, which means confused or slow.

Other internet users combine English words to make something new like the word Skinship in Korean English, which means intimate physical contact such as handholding, touching or caressing.

Moreover, technology companies are turning into the new English variations with products aimed at allowing users to add words that are not already in the English dictionary.

Most large companies now see the strong need of having English websites while smaller business are beginning to understand that having an English language website is very significant in order to reach global customers.

Linguist experts claimed that modern forms of entertainment also drive the people who are not native English to aspire the language. For many, English is the language of the digital age.

In previous centuries, following the emergence of pidgin – a streamlined system of communication that has simple grammatical structure, speakers later added vocabulary and grammar to it until it eventually becomes a distinct Creole language that has different endings, more complex and systematised – and this is similar to what is happening to the English on the internet, a linguistic expert explained.

Take Hinglish OR Indian English for example, Hinglish is a blend of Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu and English and is so wide-spread that it is even being taught to British diplomats. And as such, mobile phone companies are now updating their apps to mirror its growing use.

At one point, the increasing prevalence of the internet in everyday living means that language online is not a just a zero sum game, but instead, it allows multiple languages to expand. 

Obviously, English has taken its place as the world’s lingua franca, but instead of pushing out other languages, other languages are on the other hand pushing its way into the English language, and on its way of creating something new. Now, the choice is yours, it’s either you learn English online now or never. 

Resource: BBC.com