Internet Linguistics - Linguistic Future of The Internet

Linguistic Future of The Internet

With the emergence of greater computer/Internet mediated communication systems, coupled with the readiness with which people adapt to meet the new demands of a more technologically sophisticated world, it is expected that users will continue to remain under pressure to alter their language use to suit the new dimensions of communication.

As the number of Internet users increase rapidly around the world, the cultural background, linguistic habits and language differences among users are brought into the Web at a much faster pace. These individual differences among Internet users will significantly impact the future of Internet linguistics, notably in the aspect of the multilingual web. The Internet is on its way to becoming a more diverse multilingual Web, with a wider variety of languages being used. As seen from 2000 to 2010, Internet penetration has experienced its greatest growth in non-English speaking countries such as China, India and Africa, resulting in more languages apart from English penetrating the Web.

Also, the interaction between English and other languages will be an important area of study. As global users interact with each other, possible references to different languages may continue to increase, resulting in formation of new Internet stylistics that spans across languages. Chinese and Korean languages have already experienced English language's infiltration leading to the formation of their multilingual Internet lingo.

At current state, the Internet provides a form of education and promotion for minority languages. However, similar to how cross-language interaction has resulted in English language's infiltration into Chinese and Korean languages to form new slangs, minority languages are also affected by the more common languages used on the Internet (such as English and Spanish). While language interaction can cause a loss in the authentic standard of minority languages, familiarity of the majority language can also affect the minority languages in adverse ways. For example, users attempting to learn the minority language may opt to read and understand about it in a majority language and stop there, resulting in a loss instead of gain in the potential speakers of the minority language. Also, speakers of minority languages may be encouraged to learn the more common languages that are being used on the Web in order to gain access to more resources, and in turn leading to a decline in their usage of their own language. The future of endangered minority languages in view of the spread of Internet remains to be observed.