LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET

 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET

The aim of Language and the Internet is “to find out the role of language on the Internet and the effect of the Internet on language.”
In chapter one, A Linguistic Perspective, Crystal begins by asking whether the Internet constitutes a homogeneous electronic situation in terms of language use. The answer is that it does not, and this in turn leads him to ask how many language varieties we can actually distinguish. In order to identify a language variety, we first need to define our criteria.
Internet style manuals recommend “writing like people talk” , but to what extent is this really possible? The question leads Crystal to focus her attention first on the differences between spoken and written language. “Speech is typically temporal, spontaneous, face-to-face, socially interactive, loosely structured, immediately revisable, and prosodically rich. Writing is typically spatial, artificial, visually decontextualized, factually communicative, elaborately structured, repeatedly revisable, and graphically rich” . 1 Fundamentally, Netspeak “relies on features that pertain to both sides of the speech/writing divide” . Web pages, for example, obviously tend toward written language, while virtual worlds, synchronous chat groups, or instant messaging evoke features of spoken language. Even these latter varieties are very different from genuine speech.

Ranger, G. (2007). David Crystal, Language and the Internet. Lexis. https://doi.org/10.4000/lexis.1831