Is the internet making changes in the structure of languages?
DC: Not very much. If we look at the different levels of language structure, we find that languages post-internet are not very different from languages pre-internet. A few hundred new words and phrases have arrived, such as blogging, netiquette, twittering, and social networking, but a few hundred new lexical items are a drop in the ocean when we think of them in relation to the well over a million words in a language like English. Hardly any novel grammatical constructions have emerged – just the occasional idiosyncratic usage, such as software which presents us with expressions like one file(s). Orthography is the area where we see most structural change, in that several internet situations tolerate variations in spelling, capitalization, and punctuation which would be considered nonstandard in traditional writing – emails which leave out punctuation, for example, or which use it excessively (as when people write such things as Fantastic!!!!!!!). The abbreviations of text messaging f
