Authors: Sridipa Dandapat* and Priyanka Tripathi**
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna.
Introduction
Chomsky, in Language and Freedom, discusses the correlational bond between language and freedom: “Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.” Language is considered to be ever changing, transforming, reshaping and constantly developing and this change is indispensable for the sustainability of language. Human civilization, its culture and language are connected intertwined and as the human civilization progresses, its culture and language also have to progress parallel and hence shift of language becomes inevitable to match the contemporary times. In this era, nothing influences language as much as the world of internet since the introduction of digital media. According to the Global Digital Population 2020 statistics, almost 4.54 billion people were actively using internet that is to find thirty-five percent of the entire population while the number was 4.39 billion in the previous year. Hence, even in the global platform the reach of internet can easily be predicted and the ever increasing rush for more and more people accessing internet, it becomes impossible to keep language intact.
As the time period entered digital age, primarily CMC or “computer mediated communication” came into existence to serve the demand of easy, fast and rapid communication. Through emails, text messaging, instant messaging and many more, the mode of communication has opened language to the use of abbreviated terms, acronyms, emoticons. And with web 2.0, the multimodal presentation of language transcended itself from the barrier of word and image to open up to a whole new set of conventions, new words, modified vocabulary, emoji, gif, stickers and many more. This paper examines the shift of language in the digital age and explores the territories of CMC or “computer mediated communication” and web 2.0 tools and applications and how web, the hub of neologism is changing our everyday language through the portals of virtual communication. At the same time, this paper covers how digital media, sharing the common nexus with language through virtual communication mediums, is impacting and reshaping language.
Evolution of Language till Digital Age
To discuss further about the shift of language to the digital age, one must focus on how language as ‘a process of free creation’ has developed the changing times. Language, as one can say, is a ‘cognitive phenomenon’ or the physical representation of the abstract perceptions or in a more defining way it can be put as language is a set of conventions that shapes the thoughts to offer meaning among a certain group of people and serves the purpose of communication. Language, as it is considered by the most of people, originated to meet the demand of communication, primarily via gestures, signs, body language and meaningless sounds. Undoubtedly all the early cultures had a rich history of oral language since it was mostly common yet universal mode of communication. Even in the context of society, oral language offered equality to all sorts of people. As Chomsky and Pinker assert, every person, irrespective of their social circumstances, has to have a native language. The common access to language offers everyone the advances of being both the listener and the producer of words.
Even the earliest of cultures were not free from the subtle power dynamics, nor were their oral languages. In the early days, powerful people declared themselves to be the speaker person and hence limiting the authority of speaking to the higher ranks and as a result, people from lower ranks became the listener. With formation of this power division, authority’s language happen to be the official language, suppressing the common people’s voice as the marginalized language. It is only with the introduction to the written language, the authoritative power faced a threat. The layers of power hierarchy in context of language were shaken and people from all rank could be both a listener and a producer. Again, with the production of more books and introduction of print medium opened a whole new spectrum for the progress of language. Though primarily reading was secluded only for the well-off and educated people but with time it made room for laymen and hence, a prominent change was visible in the form of language.
Digital media, in this context of controlling power of language, brings a revolution by advancing most of the people to become both the reader and the writer. Digital media not only helped the people to voice their opinion irrespective of their social circumstances but also offers a gateway to explore further, to critique the ‘center’ and to form groups with common interest to speak their language. From signs and gestures came the oral language while written language came into existence around 8000 to 3000 years ago and digital media made its present felt only a few decades back. The early oral language has become obsolete and its existence has been saved as fossils while written language made its way through cities and countries and was prominently put before the world but with the introduction of internet or digital media, all the limits and boundaries of language were shattered and open to a new globalized world. The rapid growth of language and its possibilities have extended its limit unbelievably but at the same time language has been effected and affected to a certain extent.
Digital Age and Multimodality of Language
With the revolutionary invention of super computer in the time period of 1970’s and other subsequent technologies to transmit information and data more quickly and at the minimal cost, the digital age or the age of information came into existence. With time, this digitalization process has adopted and proliferated itself and as a matter of fact, lives under digitalization has highly been impacted and as language, is an indispensable part of human civilization, has been effected with it. As Georgakopoulou and Spilioti divides the generations of digital media as “first generation digital media (e.g., email, instant messaging, text-messaging, online forums) and more recent social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube)”, it becomes evident that the shift of language has been stricken mildly initially but as the digitalization progresses, new modes of communication are introduced to mass and hence, making language more open to adopt changes.
Apparently it may seem that with digital media, language has been shaped with various modes but as Jee and Hayes claim in their book Language and Learning in the Digital Age that “Language has always been “multimodal” (combining words, images and sounds) as are many messages conveyed via digital media and, indeed, many other media today”. Oral language, undoubtedly, has always been ‘multimodal’ in the sense that it deploys gestures, sounds, body languages while written language used to be mostly in words. As digitalization is amalgamated with the written mode of communication, the medium of writing and expressing has changed severely. Not only in the sphere of social media but also in the field of education and information multimodal approach has been applied to language with digitalization. Be it newspaper, technical information or children’s books, more images are being attached in order to break the monotony, capture the attention and to give it an enhancing look. Thus digitalization has opened a whole new sphere to language to adopt various modes and hence, a better understanding of expression. Be it a book to learn animals’ names or a scientific journal wrought with information, it is much more complex to decipher the meaning only via words or images while the multimodality of language has given a new height to meaning-making of language.
Computer Mediated Communication and Internetese
The concept of CMC or “computer mediated communication” basically implies communication that revolves round the computer mediated modes such as email communication, real time chatting, blogging, mailing list communication, text messaging, instant messaging and many more. Though the authenticity of the term “computer mediated communication” has been questioned since digitalization has offered most of the computer mediated modes of communication in mobile phones and other technological gadgets but at the same time alternative term “digital media language” offers too broad a spectrum to specify and “new media language” lacks historical perspective. Susan Herring, in her phenomenal book Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, asserts that the pragmatic approach to “computer mediated communication” focus mainly on these three parts: “1. classical core pragmatic phenomena (e.g., implicature, presupposition, relevance, speech acts, politeness) in CMC, 2.CMC-specific phenomena (e.g., emoticons, nicknames, “NET-SPEAK”), and 3. CMC genres or modes (e.g., blogs, SMS, wikis, chat etc.)”. The fluidity of language and its dynamic evolution is more commonly found in the genre of internet in comparison with spoken or written media. Internet, in the arena of “computer mediated communication”, offers multiple functions, giving way to the adaptation of language both in societal and interpersonal context. Thurlow and Poff, in regard with Herring’s faceted parameters, have pointed out how the key difference between emails, instant messages and text messages seems to get blurred as all the modes serve quite similar purpose of conveying message. Herring, Scheidt, Wright and Bonus, provide a sight on blogs as a medium of CMC influencing language in their work “weblogs as bridging genre”, asserting that there are no defined version of blog and too many subtypes of blogs make it even harder to define any certain prototype of blog but offering suggestions like travel blog, fashion blog, food blog, sports blog, fitness blog so on and so for.
Crystal, in Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 gives reference to an SMS poetry competition hold by the British newspaper The Guardian and mentions the following poem in his book:
14: a txt msg pom
his is r bunsun brnr bl%
his hair lyk fe filings
w/ac/dc going thru.
I sit by him in Kemistry,
it splits my @oms
wen he Js @me.
This poem is a great example to read how certain standard words and abbreviations are followed in text messaging format and at the same time, it uses emoticons and special typographical symbols to indicate certain letters or words or expression. “In any collection of text messages, it is the combination of standard and nonstandard features which is the most striking characteristic – and with good reason.” (Crystal, 17) Internet has influenced language so much so that Internet Linguistic came into existence with the hands of Herring and Crystal. Internet Linguistic basically deal with the rapid progress of digitalization to create a whole new space for internet language. Internet has impacted language at its base structure; spelling, grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary all of these are taking new curve of modification due to the extreme exposure to internet. Internet not only impacts the basic structure of language but also gives rise to various new terms and acronyms. For example, a group of people who are using the same online communication are known as internet citizen or “netizen” as an abbreviated term or the language that is rapidly used in internet is known as “internetese”. As “computer mediated communication” progresses further, terms related to online communication or computers seem to be more common such as file, data, modem, keyboard, monitor, mouse, email, printer among many others. Half a century back, “mouse” used to mean a small animal but with the introduction of internetese in everyday language “mouse” also implies a hand-held pointing device associated with computer. At the same time, new words have reached to our vocabulary as well as dictionary ranging from ‘selfie’ taking entry into the Oxford English Dictionary to words such as to “unfriend”, “google” or “twit” proving their existence in our everyday language.
Abu Sa’aleek in his article has analysed 340 messages from 160 undergraduate students to probe into the linguistic features of e-discourse and found out that the features include abbreviation, shortening, contaction, emoticons, unconventional spelling, word-letter replacement, clipping, initialism, word-digit replacement. At the same time, dropping the capital letter was another observation of the e-discourse study. Instant messaging, is undoubtedly one of the most convenient way of communication now-a-days and hence, it possesses the power to mould and curve the formal and vernacular version of language. Internet has not only changed and given rise to new words but also impacted language greatly by making language more playful, easy, tolerant to misspell and typographical errors. Crystal, in this context, points out “it should be exulting that the Internet is allowing us to once more explore the power of the written language in a creative way”.
Web 2.0 and Transition of Language
The introduction to computer and computer mediated communication sets off the sails what later on extends its reach to the evolution of web 2.0 tools and apps. Web 2.0 basically encompasses its range from applications like YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype and many more. The accessibility of web 2.0 tools and applications to the maximum amount of people made it even more powerful to mould language. As per the recent entry in Oxford English Dictionary, COVID-19 is supposed to be one example of neologism making its way to the dictionary. Along with that, 550 new words, sub-entries and senses has been added. Words such as: safe space, awesomesauce, shticky, new sense of UFO or Jewish penicillin has recently been updated. Digital age not only give scopes to update new coinages and hybrids every now and then but also offers sundry virtual sign systems ranging from emoji, emoticon, gifs and many more. As The Guardian takes the load to differentiate between emoji and emoticon and subtly indicating how typographical symbols making expression (emoticon) has evolved to tiny images of expression (emoji). Along with it, Kamaoji, Stickers and Gifs have also been introduced in these web 2.0 applications making the multimodal presentation of language like never before.
Vyvyan Evan in his news article proffers that the frequent use of hashtag undermines that the users below 13s are at the verge of a linguistic revolution in the platform of digital media. The twitter tendency of using hashtag to emphasize the expression in limited words has taken it to a whole new level to make it children’s word of the year 2015. As the article reads hashtag as an essential to bring the change in linguistic: “Hashtag has also moved across discourse genres: as a linguistic marker of emphasis it is evolving a new life, punctuating and so nuancing the meaning of language in written narratives. And this raises interesting questions about the nature and role of digital communication for language and human communication more generally.” Apart from symbols and signs, internet is also remarked for creating cyberslang or internet slangs. The range of cyberslang varies from OMG (Oh My God), ROFL (Rolling On Floor Laughing), LOL (Laughing Out Loud), 10x (thanks), 4 (for), 2 (too or to) and many more; it transcends the transition of meaning as “woke” does not only mean to waking up from sleep but being consciously aware of issues or the word “queen” does not only imply wife of the king anymore but a female monarch. Internet has transfigured the standardized form of language and given it a new variety. The new introduction to internet language has also given rise to new usages and opened a gateway for a new globalized language including internetese and textese.
Conclusion
The paper has discussed how language has shifted under various factors of digitalization. Internet or Web, the hub of neologism has not only effected the vernacular or oral language but also impacted greatly the written language and the formal language. The standardization of language making dialects marginalized is at the verge of becoming history since the swift progress of digitalization and the world of internet is creating its own set of conventions, vocabulary, grammar, words, in short a completely different globalized language, internetese. As societal flux, political uprising or downfall, economic catastrophe influence both language and literature, there is no point of argument that language would not be affected by digitalized mode of communication. Internet age or the digital age has drastically shifted language from “bricks to clicks” ranging from the time when people used to write in brick-walls to the recent times when thousands of information and fast communication is made possible through a few clicks. The influence, thus, gets manifested through the early use of symbols to modern day emoticons or gestures turning into gifs. As per the demand of the digital age and to keep up with its fast pace, language has also become short and symbolic as Crystal mentions it “textese”, “slanguage”, “new hi-tech lingo”, “hybrid shorthand”, “digital virus” to describe it as “foreign, alien and outlandish”.
As Jee and Hayes arise the question whether “digital media ‘power up’ or enhance the powers of language, oral or written, just as written language ‘powered up’ or enhanced the powers of oral language”, it becomes evident that the digital age and its communication mediums are influencing and transfiguring language. As the dynamic world of internet and rapid growth of digitalization have brought both good and evil to the human race, so has been done with language. The impact of digital media on language makes the point more valid that language can never be stagnant but always dynamic and evolving in order to sustain as Chomsky compares the evolution of language with living beings and the progress of homo sapiens.
References:
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Crystal, D. 2008. Txtng: The Gr8 Db8. New York: Oxford University Press.
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