Our language is under attack from kids with mobiles and Internet "gurus" keen to stunt the growth of the Web with convoluted jargon. The alphabet has been infiltrated by @, a genetically modified super-letter. To and for have been overthrown by 2 and 4. Quotation marks have been seen off by the brothers. There's no telling where it will end.
Prof David Crystal of the University of Wales has just published a book called Language and the Internet. He has no hesitation in declaring that the effect of the latter on the former has been revolutionary. "There's been nothing quite like this ever before. It certainly is the case that the Internet will have a more rapid impact on language than any previous technology. If you invented a new word tonight and you sent it out on an e-mail or put it on a website, it'd be round the world in seconds."
Chatrooms, he explains, have facilitated 30-way conversations that would be impossible to imagine in any kind of real world format, and e-mail has merged old forms of communication to create something entirely new. Seventy five thousand years ago we had speech, 10,000 years ago we had writing, now we have Netspeak.
New web words are formed in maybe half a dozen ways. You have old words, such as spam and flame, finding new definitions. You have words formed through the addition of a prefix, such as e-mail and cyberspace. You have verbs and prepositions in various stages of hyphenation: logon, printout, dial-up. And you have the conversion of nouns to verbs and vice versa: "I messaged you earlier", "bookmark this site". As Calvin once noted to Hobbes, "Verbing weirds language." But the speed with which words are being created is a double-edged sword.
Who knows which, if any, of the neologisms cited above will survive beyond next year, or even next week. The once ubiquitous prefix "cyber" is deeply uncool, and the only living rooms through which the information superhighway now passes also boast draylon settees and a trio of flying ducks above the mantelpiece.
So though there may appear to be a whole new language with which you must become familiar, given the diminutive life expectancies of many of these new words, it's a lesson that may not be worth the learning. Moreover, David Crystal points out that the volume of new words is not as intimidating as might appear to be the case. "Don't overrate the number of new words that are coming in this way. There are only a couple of thousand of them."
"That might seem a lot, but when you consider the English language has a million words or more, a couple of thousand new words is neither here nor there."
It's a process, he points out, that has accompanied the development of every new technology. "When the BBC came along and broadcasting started, suddenly there were new varieties of language. Sports commentary hadn't existed before, weather forecasting, news reading - these are all new varieties which have added to the language, have given it extra dimensions. The Internet is doing the same thing and given us new words which people are assimilating very very rapidly indeed."
While any new technology will require a necessary (though often temporary) swelling of the dictionary, it's the way in which the Internet changes communication that suggests the greatest material impact on the language going forward. If e-mail, and its little brother, sms messaging, are to retain the immediacy that has ignited their popularity, they have to cut some corners.
"I think these two items are closely connected," says lexicographer Ramesh Krishnamurthy. "People using e-mail often use 'sms' type abbreviations: BTW (by the way), IMHO (in my humble opinion). Texting is just the most extreme form."
Will these conventions remain restricted to the medium, or is there a chance they will spill over into other means of interaction? "Not in the slightest," says Crystal. "It will continue to be a special style used on telephones."
Ramesh Krishnamurthy isn't so sure. "Younger people are not so sophisticated in modulating between one medium and another, in saying, 'this is an essay for school, so I'd better not use the language I've just been using in my texting'. I think many of them won't even realise that they're making mistakes."
Will the language be changed forever? We'll just hv 2 wait and C.