Lesson Plan 1 Course title: English as an International Language (Culture)

A new exchange of language

The internet also offers opportunities for speakers of different versions of languages to communicate with one another as never before, leading to an exchange of ideas.
American and British English are already being used in the same web platforms, leading to seeding of conventions such as spelling and new words across both versions of the language.
Canadian recording artist Drake tweeted using the term YOLO (an acronym of You Only Live Once) back in 2011. Twitter analytics websites noted that use of the term subsequently spread and became more common across the internet. It’s now such a commonly understood term that British broadsheet newspaper the Telegraph recently expressed surprise that Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition, hadn’t heard of it.
Whilst YOLO had cropped up before in various rap and pop tracks, it seemed to become more mainstream about this time. That’s perhaps a measure of the influence the internet can have on publicising language terms that would previously perhaps stayed within the fans of a particular genre of music. Cultures have always exchanged ideas – the internet is just assisting in that process and speeding things up.

A challenge to linguistic diversity

English continues to dominate the web; the amount of English language content far outweighs the number of mother tongue speakers in the world.
It’s thought that at least 80% of web content on the Internet is in one of ten languages, all of them fairly major ones such as Russian, Korean and German. Although this picture is changing, there are still language groups consisting of many millions of people that have little native language content available to them online.
Language diversity on the internet is likely to improve as multilingual nations and continents such as India and Africa increasingly come online and create their own content.
Sites such as Facebook are now starting to cater to other languages. But smaller languages – even those spoken by many millions of people – may not achieve the same level or variety of content as dominant web languages such as Arabic and Spanish.
The fact that language is humanity’s greatest tool may strengthen majority languages to the cost of minority ones, threatening the world’s linguistic diversity. That’s perhaps the greatest change that the internet poses to language across the globe.