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

Infuriating pedants

Although it may infuriate many language pedants, the reason languages drop some elements (such as illogical spellings like ‘through’) and picking up others (such as logical spellings like ‘thru’) is the drive for greater efficiency.
That’s a need that’s exacerbated in particular by the informal, passionate and immediate kind of writing that the web occasions. It’s thought a few hundred years ago even the Kings of England were illiterate: only a few clerks needed to bother with the formal business of writing, which was reserved for serious purposes and used expensive materials like calfskin.
Now written language is used by more people, more often, more quickly and more cheaply. This cannot fail to impact on how the language is used and has evolved.
Language that’s especially useful to a particular set of users gets adopted very quickly. The use of the term ‘Bae’ to refer to a romantic partner is increasingly common though not yet entirely mainstream. It’s been quickly adopted in the chat forum Reddit, where users are deliberately anonymous: the term ‘bae’ helps protect the user’s gender and is quicker to type than ‘my girlfriend’ or ‘my husband’.
The conventions of that internet environment mean there’s a strong use case for useful, informal, gender neutral and, above all, short words. Perhaps the biggest impact of the internet on language is to promote the shorter ones at the expense of the lengthy and hard to type.
Concerns have been expressed about the growing informality of language, with special horror reserved for lazy terms such as ‘Ima’ replacing the more grammatically correct ones. But those people who express concerns that the internet will create a new global creole version of the language are misunderstanding how creole languages develop.
Creole languages come about through the fusion of more than one separate languages; the fusion sometimes gets picked up as a language in its own right, such as in Haiti where Haitian Creole is an official language. But the internet isn’t ‘creolising’ the main body of the English language, despite many non-native speakers writing in their own versions of the language online.
Children are accessing the internet after learning their mother tongue, so internet’s power as a mother tongue is obviously limited in scope. Instead the impact may be that language users adapt more nimbly between the different environments in which they use different forms of language. Whilst Singaporeans might use ‘Singlish’ (a sort of English spoken locally) with each other, they usually switch to standard English when communicating with outsiders.