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Learn English online: How the internet is changing language
By Jane O'BrienBBC News Magazine
Online, English has become a common language for users from around the world. In the process, the language itself is changing.
When America emerged from the ashes of a bruising war with Britain in 1814, the nation was far from united. Noah Webster thought that a common language would bring peopletogether and help create a new identity that would make the country truly independent of the British.
Webster's dictionary, now in its 11th edition, adopted the Americanised spellings familiar today - er instead of re in theatre, dropping the u fromcolour, and losing the double l from words such as traveller. It also documented new words that were uniquely American such as skunk, opossum, hickory,squash and chowder.
An American Dictionary of the English Language took 18 years to complete and Webster learned 26 other languages in order to research the etymology of its 70,000 entries.
The internet is creating a similar language evolution, but at a much faster pace.
There are now thought to be some 4.5 billion web pages worldwide. And with half the population of China now on line, many ofthem are written in Chinese.
Still, some linguists predict that within 10 years English will dominate the internet - but in forms very different to what we accept and recognise as English today.
That's because people who speak English as a second language already outnumber native speakers. And increasingly they use it to communicate with other non-native speakers, particularly on the internet whereless attention is paid to grammar and spelling and users don't have to worry about their accent.
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Unicode: Facilitating international languages
English remains the single most commonly-used language on the web. But in 2010, for the first time ever, the majority of the world's data was in non-English text.
That's because new computer technologyhas made it easier to read and write in non-Roman languages.
"Much technology was initially unreliable in languages other than those using Roman script," he says. "But the broader adoption of standards like Unicode means that this is changing."
Unicode enables a message generated in Chinese characters in Shanghai to appear the same when it's read on a computer or mobile device in San Francisco."The internet enfranchises people who are not native speakers to use English in significant and meaningful ways," says Naomi Baron, professor of linguistics at American University in Washington DC.
Users of Facebook already socialise in a number of different "Englishes" including Indian English, or Hinglish, Spanglish (Spanish English) and Konglish (Korean English). While these variations havelong existed within individual cultures, they're now expanding and comingling online.
"On the internet, all that matters is that people can communicate - nobody has a right to tell them what the language should be," says Baron. "If you can talk Facebook into putting up pages, you have a language that has political and social standing even if it doesn't have much in the way of linguisticuniqueness."
Some words are adaptations of traditional English: In Singlish, or Singaporean English, "blur" means "confused" or "slow": "She came into the conversation late and was blur as a result."
Others combine English words to make something new. In Konglish, "skinship" means intimate physical contact: handholding, touching, caressing.
Technology companies are tapping into the new English variationswith products aimed at enabling users to add words that are not already in the English dictionary.
And most large companies have English websites, while smaller businesses are learning that they need a common language - English - to reach global customers.
"While most people don't speak English as their first language, there is a special commercial and social role for English driven by modern...