2008 Woodie Awards
Internet: Helping or Hampering the English Language? I'll BRB With The Answer To That!
Robert S. Boyd/syndicated writer/krt campus
Issue date: 4/8/05 Section: Life & Times
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Many schoolteachers, editors and parents profess to be horrified by "Netspeak" - the distinctive language that young people are using more and more to talk with each other on the Internet.
Purists should relax, a panel of experts declared at a recent symposium on "Language on the Internet" in Washington. This rapidly spreading digital dialect of English is doing more good than harm, they contended.
"The Internet is fostering new kinds of creativity through language," said David Crystal, a historian of language at the University of Wales in the United Kingdom. "It's the beginning of a new stage in the evolution of the written language and a new motivation for child and adult literacy."
Netspeak is the language of computerized instant messages, Web logs (or "blogs"), chat rooms and other informal types of electronic communication. It also pops up in wireless jottings on hand-held devices such as BlackBerries and cell phones.
Some examples are "cu" for "see you," "bfn" for "bye for now" and "lol" for "laughing out loud." A popular feature is a colon followed by a space and a parenthesis to make a "smiley face" to brighten up a message _ like this : ) _ or a sad face like this : (. To give a hug, the writer types ((((name)))).
Critics object that Netspeak ignores or violates the usual rules of punctuation, capitalization and sentence structure. It's peppered with strange abbreviations, acronyms and visual symbols. Its spelling can be, well, different.
Professional linguists say not to worry. They claim that Netspeak has become a third way _ in addition to traditional speech and writing _ for people to communicate with one another. It brings freshness and creativity to everyday English, they say. It's even reviving the almost lost art of diary keeping.
"The Internet has permitted language to evolve a new medium of communication, different in fundamental respects from traditional conversational speech and from writing," Crystal said.
Purists should relax, a panel of experts declared at a recent symposium on "Language on the Internet" in Washington. This rapidly spreading digital dialect of English is doing more good than harm, they contended.
"The Internet is fostering new kinds of creativity through language," said David Crystal, a historian of language at the University of Wales in the United Kingdom. "It's the beginning of a new stage in the evolution of the written language and a new motivation for child and adult literacy."
Netspeak is the language of computerized instant messages, Web logs (or "blogs"), chat rooms and other informal types of electronic communication. It also pops up in wireless jottings on hand-held devices such as BlackBerries and cell phones.
Some examples are "cu" for "see you," "bfn" for "bye for now" and "lol" for "laughing out loud." A popular feature is a colon followed by a space and a parenthesis to make a "smiley face" to brighten up a message _ like this : ) _ or a sad face like this : (. To give a hug, the writer types ((((name)))).
Critics object that Netspeak ignores or violates the usual rules of punctuation, capitalization and sentence structure. It's peppered with strange abbreviations, acronyms and visual symbols. Its spelling can be, well, different.
Professional linguists say not to worry. They claim that Netspeak has become a third way _ in addition to traditional speech and writing _ for people to communicate with one another. It brings freshness and creativity to everyday English, they say. It's even reviving the almost lost art of diary keeping.
"The Internet has permitted language to evolve a new medium of communication, different in fundamental respects from traditional conversational speech and from writing," Crystal said.