Question

David Crystal's "Language and the internet" in chapter 1, What are Crystal's ideas about language and the internet? Explain in your own words!

Answer 1

"Language and the Internet" David Crystal explains how the shifting emphasis from technology to “people and purposes”.

1. Contributes to making the Internet a linguistic revolution.The aim of Language and the Internet is “to find out about the role of language in the Internet and the effect of the Internet on language”.

2. The objective is pursued over nine well-balanced chapters. Chapter One provides a general introduction and distinguishes seve" different linguistic situations found on the Internet.

3. In Chapter One A Linguistic Perspective Crystal begins by asking whether the Internet constitutes a homogeneous language-using electronic situation. The answer is that it does not, and this in turn leads him to ask how many linguistic varieties we can in fact distinguish. In order to identify a variety of language, we first need to define our criteria. Crystal lists five important stylistic features of written language:

A. Graphic (visual presentation),

B. Orthographic.

C. Grammatical.

D. Lexical.

E. Discursive.

4. The structural organization of a text to these he adds the phonetic and phonological features of spoken language. The Internet is essentially text-based at present, but, Crystal suggests, we can easily imagine speech becoming progressively more important as speech production and recognition techniques progress. These features help us to distinguish "seven broad Internet-using situations whose language is "significantly distinctive" :

A. Email, chatgroups (which exist in two varieties: synchronous and asynchronous).

B. Virtual worlds (or MUDs for Multi-User Domains), the World Wide Web, instant messaging and blogging (a recent appearance which has justified an additional chapter). In each of these situations things are still very much in development: "the only thing that is clear is that people are unclear about what is going to happen".

5. This transitory state makes the Internet a particularly fascinating linguistic arena for the linguist as "people are still getting to grips with the communicative potential made available to them".

6. The chapter continues by looking at how the language of Netspeak is spilling over into non-Internet situations. My own favourites are "He’s 404" used to mean that someone is not around or Crystal’s comments on the exponential increase in the use of Internet-inspired prefixes, suffixes and infixes.