Here's a link to a great website which is attempting to provide a comprehensive overview of the new words coming into the language via the web. Have a good look at it. There's some interesting stuff there.
NETLINGO
Next, if you're interested in TEXT SPEAK and the debates around whether or not it's destroying the English language, a great place to start is with Professor David Crystal's excellent book, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8.
Here are a couple of articles connected to this.
David Crystal on why texting is good for the language
And if you go here, you can see the articles David Crystal has written about the Internet and about texting.
Just click on the links there to download pdfs of whatever interests you.
Finally, here's a YouTube clip of him talking about this topic.
and here's a longer lecture where he dispels some myths around texting and Tweeting.
2 comments:
There's been a lively debate in the past years over whether or not texting is destroying a language and, in this regard, David Crystal's views on the topic are both reassuring and optimistic. Yet, while everybody' s busy quarreling over whether texting is a change for the better or the worse, nobody seems to care about yet another in a long series of alarming phenomena : the death of languages.An estimated 7,000 languages (2009 figures) are being spoken around the world but the number is expected to dwindle steadily and rapidly in the coming decades (some say that globalisation and the rapid expansion of English are to blame). What is lost when a language dies ? Far from inspiring the world to act, the issue is still on the margins, according to prominent French linguist Claude Hagège. So what if we're having the wrong debate ?
Philippe
I've never been convinced by the argument that it's an out and out tragedy when a language dies. It can only really be a disaster if you subscribe to that whole Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that the sort of language people speak changes the way they think and act. I'm far from convinced that this is true, and tend to believe people are essentially pragmatists and learn what's useful for them, and adapt and thrive accordingly.
Incidentally, the idea that it's only English that's killing out languages is also a myth. In Indonesia, many local languages are killed due to the spread of Bahasa Indonesia, the language of the relatively recently formed nation; in China, Mandarin is having a profound impact on many more localised languages, and so on.
Does this really matter?
And even if you think it does, how does one protect a language that no-one wants to use any more?
Even in the UK, in my lifetime, we've seen this debate flare with respect to Cornish, which you can read more about here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_language
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