[Air-l] Book review of Language and the Internet

[Ken Friedman]

Dear Collagues,

This book review of

Language and the Internet, by David Crystal

from World Wide Words, a
free email newsletter.

Details below.

Ken Friedman



Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 08:49:26 +0000
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WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 262         Saturday 10 November 2001
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3. Review: Language and the Internet, by David Crystal
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It is not entirely unknown for World Wide Words subscribers to e-
mail me, receive a reply, and then respond suggesting that my reply
was terse or rude. That false perception arises because people new
to the Internet are more familiar with the conventions of letter-
writing. They regard the comparative brevity of e-mail, its lack of
formal salutations and the inclusion of "framing" devices such as
selective quoting from their messages as indications of a lack of
courtesy. This is a good example of one way that online and offline
communications differ, and one to which David Crystal pays special
attention.

He gives a linguist's appraisal of the Net, which he points out is
not a monolithic creation, but rather a set of disparate methods of
communications that include e-mail, chatrooms (a term he uses to
cover media such as mailing lists, Internet Relay Chat and Usenet
newsgroups), World Wide Web pages, and virtual worlds such as MUDs
and MOOs. His book is aimed more to readers who are unfamiliar with
these mechanisms than to those who are, so there are detailed
explanations of the characteristics of each communication method.
As a result, much description will be obvious enough to anybody
familiar with a given technique, though few people are conversant
with all of them.

He largely dismisses the common view that online communication (he
calls it "Netspeak") is illiterate and dumbed-down language. He
agrees that much of it is non-standard, playful, highly deviant in
bending the usual rules of language, tolerant of typographic and
spelling errors, and full of new words. But he is fascinated by its
variety and innovation and devotes much space to describing its
special (and evolving) character. He takes a very positive view,
suggesting that "The phenomenon of Netspeak is going to change the
way we think about language in a fundamental way, because it is a
linguistic singularity - a genuine new medium".

He argues that the analogy of online communications with speech
rather than formal writing is too simple: chatrooms, IRC and the
like are too constrained by their response times and the slow speed
of typing to be considered as a good analogy of speech; Web pages,
e-mail and other mechanisms are too transient or easily modified to
be equivalent to the printed word. "On the whole," he says,
"Netspeak is better seen as written language which has been pulled
some way in the direction of speech than as spoken language which
has been written down." He suggests that online language is best
viewed as neither of these things, but rather as a new species of
interaction, a "third medium", which is evolving its own systematic
rules to suit new circumstances.

David Crystal writes as accessibly as ever. But by the nature of
his theme his book is academically oriented and its readers need to
know some basic linguistics. It will appeal especially to someone
with a professional or informed interest in linguistics who wants
to explore the special nature of language on the Net.

[Crystal, David; Language and the Internet; published by Cambridge
University Press; pp272; ISBN 0-521-80212-1; publisher's price
GBP13.95. Professor Crystal is editor of - amongst others - the
Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and the Cambridge Encyclopedia
of the English Language.]




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