Exploring this development in English further, a search for any discussion or analysis on net English and linguistics internet yielded a result from Wikipedia:

Internet linguistics is a new subdomain of linguistics suggested by Professor David Crystal. It studies new language styles and forms that have arisen under the influence of the Internet and other new communication media, such as SMS text messaging. Weblish, netlingo, techspeak, wired style, geekspeak, and netspeak. These are all common terms, which people have used to describe language in cyberspace.

Which led into this:

‘Language Development Via The Internet’, ScienceDaily (Feb. 28, 2005) … the advent of new language styles and forms engendered by the Internet, and related communication developments such as SMS messaging, should be greeted with delight, according to … David Crystal….

Professor Crystal says that this is the greatest opportunity for the development of the English language since the advent of the printing press in the Middle Ages. The variety of applications of new technology leads to new stylistic forms and increases the expressive range of a language, especially at the informal end of the spectrum. Indeed not so long ago, people were getting ready to mourn the passing of the diary as a literary form, when hey presto! we see a renaissance in the form of the on-line diary, web log or ‘blog’.

Changes in communication technology are invariably accompanied by concerns about language…. In this instance, because people notice a growth of informality in language use, their concerns center around whether this will cause a general deterioration in the quality of the language.

The prophets of doom emerge every time a new technology influences language, of course – they gathered when printing was introduced, in the 15^th century, as well as when the telephone was introduced in the 19^th, and when broadcasting came along in the 20^th; and they gathered again when it was noticed that Internet writing broke several of the rules of formal standard English – in such areas as punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. All that has happened, in fact, is that the language’s resources for the expression of informality in writing have hugely increased – something which has not been seen in English since the Middle Ages, and which was largely lost when Standard English came to be established in the 18th century. Rather than condemning it, we should be exulting in the fact that the Internet is allowing us to once more explore the power of the written language in a creative way.

Finally, as the Internet becomes more linguistically diverse, it also extends a hand to minority languages and minority language speakers. The Internet’s accessibility aids documentation in and of minority languages and enables minority language speakers separated by space to maintain a virtual contact through email, chat and instant messaging environments. Embracing emerging ‘cool’ technologies in a minority language can also play a role in persuading the youth of an endangered language community that the language is something that has relevance to them.

Using Computer Mediated Communication (CMC – Crystal’s term) in Google, I found the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Searching for ‘weblish’ I was rewarded (?) with ‘From Statistical Panic to Moral Panic: The Metadiscursive Construction and Popular Exaggeration of New Media Language in the Print Media’. Much too difficult for this brain and after a scan, abandoned it.

In conversation with a friend who teaches English to non-English speaking university students, he likens this written form to speech. People are speaking through the keyboard when using email, Facebook, Twitter and similar media. On looking back at these Facebook entries now, I can discern the conversations.

•  aghhhhh day off and a nice cold jack daniels mm mm
•  Ph…k Philly. What about the fans in Sydney, Oz? And u can check out our health system then understand why we think the US is a nation of 2yos throwing a tantrum.
•  LOL.. i’m sleeping slightly earlier now.. just implemented a new workflow for my photos.. autotmated a few things when pulling the photos from the camera Too bad editing cant be automated too
•  Ooooooo how did you do that?

Bloglish

As Crystal has been quoted, ‘The prophets of doom emerge every time a new technology influences language…’. Geordie Williamson’s ‘When bloggers enter the literary fray’, The Australian, 3-Apr-2010 takes a critical approach to bloglish (and is an example of an opaque book review). The first six paragraphs are about filmmakers switching from film to digital and the relevance escapes me. Paragraph seven includes:

The most interesting thing about the anthology, however, is just how much blogging shares with digital film. Miscellaneous Voices alerts us to the fact, just as digital video has gone mainstream, blogging is no longer a technological curiosity but an established means of communication, with its own establishment figures and young turks, its canons of merit and critical gatekeepers, and a set of advantages over the printed word that inspire utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares in equal measure.

Why not compare blogging with advances in zoology, mushroom growing, horse whispering; all as relevant as ‘filmmaking’. Then his discussion proceeds to:

On the evidence of Miscellaneous Voices, blogging evolves unevenly, even schizophrenically. Bloggers still aspire to print publication; with its hard-to-shake promise of literary immortality, but the way they write sits uneasily within the more formal confines of paper and boards. Blogs (and, to an even greater degree, micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter) thrive on immediacy; their wit is of the moment.

Having read a poem from Miscellaneous Voices by Penni Russon, a young Australian author, I returned to the piece’s original digital context (her blog, eglantine’s cake) and read it again on the screen. Rather than the clear expanse of the anthology’s pages, the poem shared screen space with a colourful blog header, archive listings, contact details: all the necessary impedimenta of the blogosphere.

Of course, the overall effect is distracting. Poems demand total attention: blogs are sites where other texts and all manner of media, from sound to image, are only a hyperlink click away. Think of the mental space to be cleared to properly engage with a long poem, or of those endless 19th-century novels that take chapters to gather up their narrative concerns: any literature that demands an extended period of readerly monogamy will soon be betrayed by the internet’s polyamorous nature.

This is rubbish; the three paragraphs, to my eye, are disconnected. Schizophrenically, literary immortality, polyamorous? The eye-candy on a screen is distracting but why not just copy and paste into Word, print and read? That’s what I did with his reference to James Bradley below. To continue:

… American blogger and literary critic Caleb Crain … argued, during a 2008 symposium on the internet and literary style, that “writing [online] tends to be more popular when it satisfies the reader’s wish to be connected, the wish not to miss out”.

Perhaps these feelings of “groupiness” explain a few more traits of internet style. There is a greater tolerance online for sloppy and inexact writing — not just for typos but for a generalised kludginess of thought . . . One also finds more flattery and more insults online, another hint that online readers are more interested in affiliation and in the feelings associated with including and excluding other people.

Nevertheless, Crain makes a crucial distinction between the kind of writing that thrives online and the kind that does not, and it is one that the contributors to Miscellaneous Voices reinforce. My friend and colleague James Bradley is an author and critic whose blog, City of Tongues, has two pieces reproduced in the anthology. These posts are not print material masquerading as online content, nor are they ephemeral pieces. They are essays that use the power of the web to reflect on the practice of writing in print.

I emailed Crain for a reprint or a link to his contribution. His reply:

 Hi, Ihian,

How unlike Google! Here’s a link to my talk. I don’t think the whole panel was ever put online, but Ben Kunkel’s essay was later published in an issue of n+1.

all best,

Caleb

But there was no link and the search of n+1 was fruitless. I found James Bradley’s, ‘On Novels and Place’ which was headed “The Beaumont Children, who disappeared in Glenelg on Australia Day, 1966”; nothing in the essay linked to this. And, in my reading, his writing was simply an essay, which I would have read in print without detecting the subtlety of blog-English. Methinks Williamson needs to reconnect with the larger audience reading The Australian instead of twirling his smart-arse English baton.

This item in the SMH is relevant to the bloglish thread. Susan Wyndham, ‘One click from blog to blah, blah, blah’, SMH, April 13, 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/one-click-from-blog-to-blah-blah-blah-20100412-s44d.html

Cate Kennedy . . . says she is not a Luddite but believes writers are pasting bits of other people’s work on their blogs and creating unoriginal mash-ups.

It is not fashionable to say so but Cate Kennedy fears our addiction to the internet is killing literature.

… she considers the internet’s constant flow of unprocessed information and chatter ”toxic to fiction”, which requires quiet, slow reflection by writers and readers. ”We’re decontextualising, pasting bits of other people’s work on our blogs and creating unoriginal mash-ups,” she said.

Kennedy limits herself to checking emails twice a day and saves up her internet research as if for an occasional library excursion.

As a judge of the Vogel Award for young novelists, Kennedy says she reads many manuscripts that are ”as thin as a TV episode”.

”They’re not reading or thinking about the impact of the words on the page,” she says.

Kennedy, whose novel The World Beneath is shortlisted for a NSW Premier’s Literary Award, says that if she is going to write another novel she has time only for her real-life family and friends.

She will speak at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on May 21 on the topic ”Can Literature Survive the Digital Age?”

She will be joined by John Freeman, the editor of Granta magazine and author of the book Shrinking the World, about the tyranny of email.

Freeman argues that we can all reduce the hundreds of daily emails that eat our time. ”Don’t send” is his message.

The internet is changing our writing and reading of text; an evolution that’s been underway since the eighth century when English became a language (or the sixth – Wikipedia). This is borne out by David Crystal. In Kennedy’s (or is it Wyndham’s) first sentence, I spy some of the language she decries:

• Luddite – Characterized by opposition to increased industrialization or the introduction of new technology O6. Kennedy clearly is a language Luddite.
• writers are pasting bits of other people’s work – why not use ‘plagiarism’, we all know what it means?
• Mash-ups – a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video, and animation, which recombines and modifies existing digital works to create a derivative work (Wikipedia). Again, adopting the new English she purports to dislike.
• It is not fashionable to say so … indicates ignorance of the evolving English language.

The internet is just one innovation to have been criticized for destroying our language; criticism was fashionable long before computers appeared. George Orwell wrote in 1947[1]:

 Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, … Our civilizaton is decadent, and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse.

And Whyndham’s short, breathless, single-sentence paragraphs is poor writing. The problem lies not with the internet but with English skill-development, and those authors submitting … ‘manuscripts that are ”as thin as a TV episode”’ will move on in their skill development. And I question the ‘TV episode’ example; some TV shows I have watched have been language rich.

Moving to the last two paragraphs, I am surprised that someone can write a book  about the tyranny of email. The blurb for Shrinking The World: The 4000-Year Story Of How Email Came To Rule Our Lives is exaggeration.

The first email was sent less than forty years ago; by 2011 there will be 3.2 billion users. The flood of messages is ceaseless. As the toll of email mounts, reducing our time for leisure and contemplation, and separating us from each other in the lonely battle with the inbox, Freeman enters a plea for communication that is more selective and nuanced and, above all, more sociable.

Drawing on the research of linguists, scientists, critics and philosophers, Freeman’s history of correspondence reveals how changing methods of communication have eroded the great distances between us. He shows how the telegram, newspapers, synchronised time and railway networks have changed everything from the nature of military intelligence to the messages we write to loved ones.

From carrier pigeon to computer mouse, this fascinating and engaging history of how we communicate will make you view your inbox in a whole new light.

I browsed the Shrinking The World; a pastiche of readily available information and not impeccably researched as the dustcover exclaimed. Example: ‘… almost 50 per cent of Yahoo users surveyed…’; why not report the actual number? The final chapter on how to minimize your use of email is trivial; something like a twelve-step programme for people with severe dependencies rather than managing email. I’m surprised that an editor of Granta would publish such a vacuous text; the few Grantas I’ve read contained interesting if often unreadable essays.

This appeared the next day. ‘English mangled’, SMH, 14 April 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/national/letters/churches-have-nothing-to-fear-from-clear-thinking-20100413-s7dj.html

I agree with Cate Kennedy’s criticism of the effect of the internet on literature, but it spreads further than that, with technology affecting the entire English language (”A click too far: the internet’s toxic effect on literature”, April 13). The internet and its ease of communication has shaped English into a pseudo-speech characterised by grammatical errors and inaccuracies in syntax, punctuation and commonsense. Where is the line drawn between beneficial advancement and irreversible side effects? Will our desire for progress come at the sake of our language?

Which was followed by, ‘Loose language is not the end of civilisation’, SMH, 15 April 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/national/letters/paint-it-again-sam-fine-art-or-original-sin-20100414-sdys.html

Every so often a letter appears decrying the demise of English due either to some generation younger than that of the letter writer, or to technology such as mobile phones and the internet. When these letters appear, I read them aloud to my colleagues, always to their amusement. But on reading Anna Pavlakis’s letter (April 14), I decided it was about time we put an end to this nonsense.

English is not becoming a ”pseudo-speech”. Technology is not causing its demise. Young people who cannot accurately place an apostrophe, or who think ”should’ve” is a contraction of ”should of”, will not bring about the inevitable destruction of Anglophone civilisation. The easy way to respond to these ludicrous claims is to cite the continual evolution of living languages. Such change is neither good nor bad; it just is.

Second, most people have always had difficulty with English – ask any high school English teacher. Such difficulties were not created by technology, they are merely more visible. For most English speakers this doesn’t matter. Advanced skills in such a horrible language as English are necessary only for a small percentage of people, and only then because we arbitrarily attach prestige to a standard form of the English language that retains a plethora of irregularities and archaic forms and is therefore very difficult to master.

With this in mind, the internet is actually the great democratiser, allowing many more people than ever before to gain access to privilege by removing the arbitrary barrier of English linguistic mastery.

Aidan Wilson Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney

Hear, hear! Back before I understood it was a dialect, I sympathized with Kennedy’s Luddistic sentiments. But now, with knowledge gained from studying the decline of written English, I agree; the internet has brought writing to the masses. My Bogan relative has never sent me a letter but we communicate through Facebook. And bloglish has almost gone mainstream; Monica Wojcik’s[2] 2007 creative nonfiction piece, ‘The Woot Files’ offers a translation of ‘gamespeak’ which sheds some historical light on this dialect which I now learn has been developing for decades.

English

While lunching over a vegetable soup stir-fry medley, I opened Garner’s, A Dictionary of Modern American Usage at random and came across “Making Peace in the Language Wars”, an elegant discourse on prescriptivism versus descriptivism in English usage. ‘Prescribers seek to guide users of a language – on how to handle words as effectively as possible. Describers seek to discover the facts of how native speakers actually use the language’. Tapping into Wikipedia once more:

… prescription can refer both to the codification and the enforcement of rules governing how a language should be used. These rules can cover such topics as standards for spelling and grammar or syntax, or rules for what is deemed socially or politically correct or proper. It includes the mechanisms for … a standardized spelling system. It can also include declarations of what particular groups consider to be good taste. If these tastes are conservative, prescription may be (or appear to be) resistant to language change.

… descriptive linguistics, is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is spoken (or how it was spoken in the past) by a group of people in a speech community. All scholarly research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other sciences, its aim is to observe the linguistic world as it is, without the bias of preconceived ideas about how it ought to be. … Descriptivism is the belief that description is more significant or important to teach, study, and practice than prescription.

Summary; no one agrees. We have the ‘English usage is in chaos’ proscriptivists versus the ‘English is evolving’, linguistic descriptivists. In my opinion, people should write and explore and get the satisfaction (and often the dissatisfaction) that comes from communicating. I felt a twitch of freedom when reading DFW’s essay and have shed some of my AE-anality. If  Kennedy, Freeman, et al. want to preach their prescriptive sermon at the Sydney Writer’s Festival it will be a message that has been plugged for centuries, and to no avail. More would be gained if George Orwell’s suggestions were followed:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech, which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Let The Australian lead by example:

The Prime Minister put the hot-button issue of funding on the backburner until today,

“We are looking for an inter-governmental agreement and I’ve been very clear about that. Let’s not shilly shally around this. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. We want an inter-governmental agreement,” he said.

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