Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

Languages aren’t uniform: They vary from place to place. Since the 1800s, linguists have conducted surveys to learn how language varies in pronunciation, word use, and phrasing. Early surveyors rode bicycles from village to village; later researchers drove around in vans or made phone calls; in 2002, a major Harvard study was conducted via an online questionnaire.

Researchers have learned that TV and radio haven’t homogenized American speech: Different regions still use different words and accents. Phone calls and in-person interviews can capture some of the spoken nuances that online questionnaires can’t, but interviewees tend to speak more formally, and the local speech patterns—especially expressions they don’t realize that they use and that the interviewers don’t know about at all—sometimes get overlooked.

The internet contains a treasure trove of audio and video of people talking in their local argot. While the internet helps linguists, people’s posts also are resources that can be misused, especially to target them politically. In this book, the author only cites conversations about language or related topics; she avoids “deeply personal” posts.

Twitter users sometimes include their location; this helps linguists construct “a county-level map of where Americans tweet ‘pop’ versus ‘soda,’ where they switch from ‘y’all’ to ‘you guys’” (23), where different swear words are popular, and so forth. Using this and similar techniques, internet linguists have learned many facts about local lingos that were missed in earlier interviews and questionnaires. Even rarely used expressions can be searched for online to reveal thousands of examples.

In the US, swear words vary by region: “hell” is popular in the South, “asshole” in the North, “gosh” in the Midwest, and “bloody” on the West Coast. Sometimes people pronounce the same word differently in different regions, and some also spell it to match their pronunciation, which helps linguists pinpoint a word’s usage on their maps.

Small groups—families, friends, workers, hobbyists—form their own private lingos. Teens are especially prone to this, so school jocks and other in-groups will pronounce certain words differently than burnouts and other out-groups. In the Great Lakes during the 1980s, school out-groups pronounced busses as bosses and top as tap. In California, some groups of girls who self-identified as nerds pronounced friend as “frand” and used long words and puns.

Online, new words spread to similar groups rather than to nearby neighborhoods so that, for example, a new ethnic expression will suddenly jump to the same ethnic group in a distant city.

Online groups have their slang, and newer members tend to use the group’s latest words, while older members use older expressions. Thus, it’s not just teens who adopt new language: Anyone who joins a group will take on the group’s lingo.

Studies of letters written in various languages trace the evolution of those languages—in English, for example, the shift from “hath” and “doth” to “has” and “does.” Women are consistently ahead of men in adopting new linguistic patterns; also, “women tend to learn language from their peers; men learn it from their mothers” (34). Online, men tend to write to the topic, and women write more in a diary style; within specific interest groups, though, all genders communicate in much the same way, including the same amount of swearing and use of group expressions.

People with more “weak ties”—casual associations with outsiders—tend to make more changes to their language. Iceland is small and fairly isolated, with many strong family ties and few weak ties; its language hasn’t changed much in several hundred years. English, a language closely related to Icelandic, is spoken by a large, relatively mobile population with lots of weak ties; it has changed a lot over the centuries, and books written in English before Shakespeare usually must be translated for modern English speakers.

Studies show that, in general, weak ties introduce new terms and strong ties spread them. The internet introduces many weak ties, which increases the acceptance of new terms by groups with strong ties. Thus, Twitter, which encourages lots of new ties, causes more new expressions to appear than Facebook, where people tend to Friend those they already know.

Sometimes kids learn a new word but switch later to an older one. In Canada, children call the last letter of the English alphabet “zee,” as sung in the alphabet song, but when they get older, they switch back to the traditional word “zed,” which is closely connected to Canadians’ sense of identity. They do the same when spelling “color” and “center,” shifting later to the more traditional “colour” and “centre.” It’s part of claiming a space for Canadian culture, especially on the internet.

People sometimes change their pronunciation to match their perceptions of the social level of the people they encounter. Department store clerks in New York in the 1960s usually came from working-class backgrounds with an accent that drops the letter R; at fancy stores, they tended to pronounce the Rs in words like “fourth floor,” whereas at bargain stores—which working-class shoppers patronized—clerks more often dropped the Rs to say “fawth flaw.” The process is reversed in London, where dropped Rs are perceived as classy.

People who feel more connected with their localities or social groups tend to speak and pronounce in the traditional manner of those sets. Young people sometimes adopt portions of out-group lingo to make them seem more “cool” and set them apart from their parents. Once widely adopted, though, such usage quickly loses its cachet. None of this improves the status of out-groups, and the process, called “columbusing”—for the idea that Columbus “discovered” a world already well occupied—appropriates verbal styles without giving credit to their originators.

Formal writing also makes grammatical distinctions that are more about snobbery than good usage. For a time, English writers had an inferiority complex about their language when compared to the vaunted Latin of classical civilizations, and they tried to copy its ways to make themselves sound more respectable. They spelled words to appear more Latin—“debt” for “dete” and “island” for “iland,” for example—which made English much more irregular and harder to learn. Modern devices that use spell-check and auto-complete tend to perpetuate these old standards in the face of more efficient new constructions that appear online.

The author advocates English that innovates beyond the dusty formalities. To that end, she prefers to make “internet” lower case, avoids calling it “the Web,” and uses “they” as singular where appropriate (48).

English has a large influence around the world. In Arabia, the same formal writing system is used everywhere, but local languages are the currency of everyday life. When the internet began, most of it was in English, and keyboards used the Latin alphabet. Arabs developed a phonetic system of spelling Arabic using English-language keyboards; called by such names as “Arabish” and “Arabizi,” this new writing system uses Roman numerals for certain Arabic letters, placing an apostrophe—for instance, 7’ or 9’—after the number to note letters with no comparably pronounced symbol in the Latin alphabet. Arabic keyboards are now available, but the English-language phonetic writing persists, and both systems are mixed and matched to suit various users.

On Twitter, where the # signals a particular topic and @ refers to a specific person, people tend to write more formally in a topical thread and less formally and more idiomatically about a specific person, regardless of the language used. This is because topics draw a wide variety of users with different ways of speaking, while specific people belong to smaller groups that are comfortable being informal with one another. Texting, a more intimate medium, is still more informal.

Online use of abbreviations—“u” for “you” or “idk” for “I don’t know” (58)—hasn’t affected literacy. Users have to know the original words to use the shortened forms, and tests show they’re just as good at writing as anyone else. Users tend to employ abbreviations selectively, sometimes for emphasis, alongside more formal words like “shall” and “must” that they’d never say in person, and some such written constructions are longer than what they’d say aloud. It’s not about laziness or poor spelling: Young texters especially are being informal, playful, and friendly. 

Many people believe internet friendships are “a poor substitute for the real thing” (63), yet online, we meet new friends and partners and conduct much of our relationships.

Like immigrants who bring unique accents to the places they move to, internet denizens acquire ways of speech that reflect their first experiences online. Over the past few decades, five basic groups of people have joined the online world: Old Internet, Full Internet, Semi Internet, Post Internet, and Pre Internet People.

Old Internet People communicated online using systems like Usenet and Internet Relay Chat that predated the World Wide Web and required “tech adeptness.” They got started during college or at work; they often knew how to program or replace computer parts. They were a bit exclusive and proud of it. Very early users kept Jargon Files; a 1977 version shows the first use of “R U THERE?” and “BTW” (72); by 1990, emoticons like :-) and abbreviations like “LOL” were common.

By the late 1990s, with the advent of the World Wide Web, a second cohort, Full Internet People, “fully embraced the internet as a medium for their social lives” (77). They contacted others through internet messaging and MySpace and were early adopters of Facebook and Twitter. They’d go online, not so much to meet new people as to connect with those they already knew.

Around the same time, Semi Internet People moved online, mainly to do work, read the news, go shopping, and search for information. Being ambivalent about technology and less interested in internet socializing, Semis preferred email but today also feel comfortable with Facebook, Twitter, and video calls.

At a certain point, nearly everyone got online. The last groups to do so are the Post Internet and Pre Internet People (92). Post Internet joiners are those born into a world already fully connected. Pre Internet participants are older folks who resisted participating but finally gave in. However, they don’t think of the internet as an important social space. When they communicate, it’s with old-style writing—ellipses and dashes instead of emoji to separate thoughts. Post Internet users generally start in their early teens, when they’re becoming highly social, to hang out with their peers when they can’t get together in person.

Post Internet People tend to be subtle in their communications. Just as laughter ranges from nervous to cynical to guffaws, the internet term “lol” suggests multiple layers of meaning that change with every use of the term. With the Post Internet generation, though, there’s no longer any connection between social and technical savvy: Computer expertise is a random factor.

Older users tend to use formal standards acquired offline, while Post Internet People write and punctuate to the internet’s informal manner.