The Internet Has Spawned a Language...

February 20, 1999

The Internet Has Spawned a Language of Its Own

By AMY HARMON

Consider the linguistic life of Andrew Walker, 12, a

k a Off Cpring. Like most seventh graders, he talks

quite a bit to his friends and parents. He also writes

any number of school reports and the occasional

Christmas card or thank-you note.

Then there is his fluency in the chat room, where

written and spoken language slur together. Here, a

correctly spelled word is a sign of the inarticulate and

an innovative abbreviation is prized above all else.

OFF CPRING: Wuzup?

PRETTYFLI5: n2m

OFF CPRING: well g/g c ya

Loose translation: Not too much is up with Prettyfli5,

and Off Cpring has got to go and will see Prettyfli5

later.

Once in a while, Andrew

slips, like the time he

lapsed into onlinespeak in

a social studies paper:

"Surplus is an excess," he

wrote, "But surplus can

also mean 2much." His

teacher took off 10

points.

Unfazed, Andrew, of

Woodstock, N.Y., continues to log on to America Online

three or four times a day. And no one is worrying about

whether he's going to get into college. But the protocol

of informality that marks electronic communication for

Andrew and millions of others has set off a debate about

whether the Internet invigorates language or strips it

of its expressive power.

"What the Internet has done is to create a space for

language that runs and slips over the boundary of public

and private language," said James J. O'Donnell, author

of the recently published "Avatar of the Word: From

Papyrus to Cyberspace" (Cambridge University Press,

1998). "And so people find themselves gradually using

language in public in ways they never would have

before."

O'Donnell, a classics professor at the University of

Pennsylvania, argues that the trend toward informality

points to a society moving toward less institutional

control, a less hierarchical social structure and a more

democratic marketplace of ideas. That is a trend he says

should be embraced, even if it will probably lead to the

elimination of tenured authorities like him.

The subject of how the Internet is shaping language was

discussed at the annual meeting of the Modern Language

Association last month and is a focus of several new

books and online forums.

Although judgments vary, what seems clear so far is that

the Internet has propelled the traditionally deliberate

pace of language evolution to higher speeds.

"This is a setting that is a hotbed for change," said

Susan C. Herring, an associate professor of linguistics

at the University of Texas in Arlington. Her scrutiny of

thousands of Internet e-mail messages found that

sentence complexity was not reduced, although politeness

was. "The Internet is a giant context that invites

informal communication, and there is lots of

experimentation going on."

She would get little argument from people who regularly

type e-mail all in lowercase letters or forsake standard

grammar for stream-of-consciousness or incorporate

acronym cliches into standard sentences. (Even chat room

neophytes know to use LOL to signify "laughing out

loud.") Indeed, the linguistic foibles of Internet

communication have been well documented since the early

1990s, when the computer network morphed from an

academic preserve into the general public's favored

receptacle for business memos, political rants and love

notes.

But the initial fascination with such shorthand as :-)

and :-( , used to convey tone of voice, has evolved with

the syntax itself. Sanguine e-mailers now seem to prefer

a more direct description of the implied sentiment

placed in parentheses, such as (grin) or (shrug).

Likewise, the novelty of watching old words take on new

meaning (spam, flame, surf) has worn thin.

Now linguists are studying the qualitative changes in

the construction of ideas that have brought on the

casual spelling and the multitude of parentheticals that

mark Internet exchange.

Sven Birkerts, an English professor at Bennington

College, is not so optimistic about what he agrees is

the melding of public and private communication in the

context of the Internet. Birkerts, who mourned the fate

of electronic age reading in his 1994 book, "The

Gutenberg Elegies," touches on the unraveling of

language in a new collection of essays to be published

by Greywolf Press.

"I never see a sentence with a semicolon in it anymore,"

Birkerts said in an interview. "People don't tend to

read the kind of writing that has semicolons. We tend to

read the prose of the age, and the prose of the age,

influenced by the ethos of electronic communication, is

almost overwhelmingly flat, punchy and declarative."

Nor is Birkerts consoled by the evidence that people who

would not ordinarily write letters take quickly to

e-mail, or that those who would never write a book

happily self-publish on the World Wide Web. It is

precisely the Internet's seductive instantaneousness, he

argues, that leads to the impoverishment of language.

"The fact that there are floods of five-line communiques

going back and forth between the circuits has little to

do with the health of the language," Birkerts says.

"Have we added anything to the world if a lot more

people are dashing off written things in the key of

casual conversation?"

To avoid the pitfalls of instant delivery, The Paris

Review, a leading fiction journal, refuses to take

submissions by e-mail.

"I like to encourage anything that causes writers to

slow down and think about what they're doing," said

Daniel Kunitz, its managing editor. "With e-mail, it's

too easy for them to throw anything that seems like less

than a first draft at us."

But Larry Friedlander, a professor of English at

Stanford University, where a required humanities course

for first-year students has been revamped to include

e-mail and Web site design, says the informal nature of

Internet communication has improved his students'

language skills. As students discuss readings in online

forums, he says, they are using the technology to

develop what he calls "collage text writing,"

incorporating fellow-students' responses and other

resources into their own work.

"The skills you see emerging quickly are qualitatively

different from the ones students had before,"

Friedlander said. "They are learning to quickly

formulate ideas into written language and create an

argument. What gets lost is a certain kind of polish and

formal organization. But what they're getting is a

fluency in writing that they didn't have."

The professors who organized the Stanford class also

considered how language should be defined when

technology is changing the ways people communicate,

enabling them to mix words with graphics, sound and

video. For example, Friedlander explains that by

encouraging students to design Web sites to express

their ideas, "we're trying to accept what the conceptual

cultural climate is and to move forward instead of

acting like it doesn't exist." People forget that

"language is a tool," he said. "It's a tool with which

we bring things together and create intimacy in our

lives."

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Amy Harmon at amy@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and

suggestions.

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[Sun Microsystems. We're the dot in .com.]

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