Word usage on internet

Go back ten years and you would have found endless hand-wringing articles about how our use of the internet, MSN messenger and texting was ruining everyone’s vocabulary and we would soon be able to speak in nothing but grunts and emojis.

While these dire predictions had some, slim basis in fact (you’ve probably heard someone say “lol” aloud in place of actually laughing), for the most part they’ve failed to come true. Looking at the big picture, global literacy rates continue to rise. It’s tricky to see whether literacy rates might correlate with internet use; internet use is usually higher in wealthier countries, and wealthier countries usually have higher literacy rates.
Yes, you’ll encounter many more error-ridden articles online than you’d be likely to in print media. But on the other hand, you encounter many more articles online full stop, from a vastly more diverse range of people who in many cases, had they lived a hundred years ago, would never have learned to write at all, let alone being able to write, publish and have their thoughts read by hundreds or thousands – misplaced commas and all.
Yet the internet has wrought significant changes on our use of the English language – most of them neither good nor bad, merely different, as every major new technology also has its impact. In this article, we look at some of the key ways that the internet has changed the way we speak and write, both online and offline.

1. We’ve added thousands of words of new vocabulary

Looking at early internet vocabulary provides a fascinating insight into how quickly new words can be picked up and then abandoned. Many of these terms that sprung up and then disappeared less than ten years later have simply become outdated.

For instance, there’s the weird telegraphese of internet and text acronyms and abbreviations. Do you recognise or understand any of these: 4COL, AYSOS, GHM, N2MJCHBU, RAEBNC, SWIS or WACI? It’s the kind of thing that you might be pushed to write if each text costs you 30p to send, or you don’t want to take up too much space on a tiny mobile phone screen. But now you would just write it out: for crying out loud; are you stupid or something?; god help me; not too much just chilling how about you?; read and enjoyed but no comment; see what I’m saying; what a cool idea. Faced with a list of incomprehensible abbreviations like the one above, it’s easy to see why some people feared that human literacy was doomed and we were returning to a world of inarticulate pictograms. But as the technology improved and abbreviations began to impede communication rather than facilitate it, we abandoned the acronyms. TYL. (Thank you Lord – or text you later, depending on context).
The forward march of technology has pushed out other terms as well. We don’t talk about being “stuck in blue bar land”; Internet Explorer and its blue loading bar has been consigned to the dustbin of failed browser history. Similarly, being a “bandwidth hog” is no longer the problem it once was. The diversification of the internet killed off a few more words: feel the disdain of the nerd in terms like “meatspace” and “dead tree edition”, that couldn’t endure once the internet was just as likely to be used by someone’s grandma as any l33t h4xx0rz (that’s “elite hackers”, for anyone who doesn’t speak early-90s nerd slang).

Where old internet slang has fallen out of favour, new slang has appeared. If you’re reading this in 2016, you probably know most of the terms on this list: YOLO (the internet abbreviation is not completely dead!), rickrolling, basic, throwing shade, I can’t even, bae, fleek, hashtag, salty, catfish, selfie. But if it’s 2030 and this article is still online, you might want to google the concept of “rickrolling” and feel amazed at the kind of things your parents found amusing.
It’s important to remember that a lot of internet vocabulary belongs to the category of slang or jargon; it serves a particular purpose within an in-group, like professional slang. Hand-wringing articles appear when people from outside that in-group try to understand it, but that was never the purpose for which that vocabulary developed.

2. We’re getting to grips with dialects we otherwise wouldn’t have encountered

We’ve written before about how much the English language is changing, and one of the key drivers of that change is the number of people who speak English as a second, third or even fourth language. English has about 400 million native speakers, but vastly more non-native speakers – perhaps as many as two billion, depending on how loosely you want to define being an English speaker. It’s a harder question than you might realise: how fluent does someone have to be to count as an English speaker? Do they need to be able to string together a few sentences, or hold a decent conversation? Do dialects and creoles count? What if they are speaking something that is essentially English, but that very few native English speakers can understand? These questions ultimately extend beyond language, and start to raise political questions as well; the use of language by one speaker might be considered as an error, while another speaker might be considered to be using a dialect.
The internet means that English speakers of whichever background are encountering more varieties of English than they might ever have before. Take someone in Liverpool, who a hundred years ago might have heard Liverpudlian dialects and standard English, and nothing else. But online, that person today might encounter varieties of English from all across the world. Taking a look through Buzzfeed, for instance, might throw up some articles from Buzzfeed India in which you’ll encounter words like “funner”; incorrect in standard English, but fine in Indian English.

Another dialect that you might encounter online is African-American Vernacular English (usually shortened to AAVE). A lot of the internet buzzwords of 2016 derive directly from AAVE. Here’s a short list: lit (e.g. “the party is lit” – it’s great), bae (boyfriend/girlfriend etc.), woke (aware of political realities), on fleek (flawlessly styled), shade (specifically “throwing shade” – delivering a put-down, usually to someone who deserves it), squad (your friends), realness (as the word implies, being authentic), slay (to succeed in something really difficult) and basic (enjoying unsophisticated things).
Some of these words have entered if not standard English, then the slang of standard English speakers, through other forms of popular culture; for instance, Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’ is in considerable part responsible for non-AAVE speakers using “slay”. But many of these words have appeared through their usage on the internet by AAVE speakers, where they have been borrowed by people who may otherwise have had no experience of AAVE. In particular, people who are effectively bilingual in AAVE and standard English might borrow AAVE vocabulary if it seems to fit their meaning better when speaking standard English. Standard English has always been inclined to borrow from other languages and dialects, and their use on the internet makes the whole process quicker and easier.

3. We’re creating brand-new dialects for online communities

For people who are not routinely on Tumblr, having a quick browse of it can be profoundly confusing. Of all online communities, Tumblr is possibly the one that has gone furthest towards having its own dialect that is incomprehensible to outsiders. There are even online guides into “how to speak Tumblr”. Here’s a Tumblr paragraph:
I CANT EVEN what is this life ruiner. having ALL THE FEELS akdfhakdghoghsgds what is air
Or in other words, the writer is extremely excited by someone. What’s fascinating about this is that none of the phrases above are borrowed from other dialects, except perhaps the keyboard smash – akdfhakdghoghsgds – but that can denote anger elsewhere, while on Tumblr it usually means wild, flailing excitement. Some of the terms might have come from pre-Tumblr online communities (especially LiveJournal) but what you can effectively see is the migration of a single online tribe, from a variety of forums to LiveJournal to Tumblr, taking their language with them and adapting it along the way.

Tumblr’s dialect is among the most distinctive, but it’s not the only online dialect. There’s the snippy, to-the-point use of language on Twitter, where users have honed the art of getting to the point in 140 characters. Reddit also has its own vocabulary, though there much of it is borrowed from previous forums, and it shows: the use of abbreviations still thrives on Reddit despite being gone from most of the rest of the internet, as its users tell each other TL;DR (too long; didn’t read), TIL (today I learned), FTFY (fixed that for you) and all the other forum-specific terms of cross-posting, upvoting, downvoting and so on and so forth.
Of course, not all of these users stick solely to one community. While there are differences of demographics (for instance, Tumblr is female-dominated, while more men use Reddit), there is considerable overlap between members of different communities, and that means that there are a good few people out there who are effectively bilingual in different online dialects: switching effortlessly from Tumblrese to Reddit-speak as required. This means that the people on Tumblr who write as if they don’t entirely understand how the shift key works and the people who Reddit who think it’s still 1996 can presumably also switch into standard English without borrowing anything from their online usage of language unless it feels appropriate. In other words, standard English ends up not damaged, but where need be, enhanced.

4. We’re learning new grammar rather than losing our ability to speak English

How do cats and dogs speak? If you ask a toddler, you’ll probably get a conventional answer along the lines of “cats go miaow, dogs go woof” or something similar. If, however, you ask an internet user, you’ll naturally know that cats (or at least lolcatz) are “in ur article and speakz lyk dis”. And you’ll know that dogs (or at least doge), as we’ve discussed before, speak “much words, very English, so article. Wow.”
The thing about writing these so that they sound ‘correct’ within the rules of the meme is that it takes a reasonably advanced knowledge of English spelling and grammar. Both are deliberately incorrect along different lines, and you can’t be deliberately incorrect unless you already know what the correct formulation is.

Lolcatz use old-school internet abbreviations and misspellings such as “ur” for “your”, replace “s” with “z” and confuse the third-person singular with the first-person singular (so “I has” not the correct “I have). Doge, on the other hand, take adjectives and adverbs and get them the wrong way around. “Much” is a measure of uncountable quantity (“too much milk”) that in writing doge is used as a measure of countable quantities (“much words”, which should correctly be “many words”).
What’s fascinating about this is that the difference between countable and uncountable nouns is a famously tricky aspect of the English language. Very few supermarket checkouts, for instance, are labelled correctly as “five items or fewer” (because the items are clearly countable, and fewer refers to countable quantities) but instead as “five items or less” (which is as incorrect as saying “much items”; it’s using an uncountable term for a countable quantity). In other words, in order to construct a doge meme, you have to understand English at a higher level than many native speakers have achieved, even if you don’t realise that’s what you’re doing.

When people are bilingual – especially when they speak the standard variation of a language and then a dialect, creole or a language that is seen as inferior – there have long been concerns that the second language or dialect needs to be suppressed, or they’ll never learn the first one properly. Much the same instinct can be seen with the concerns about what the internet is doing to the English language; what if a generation grow up able only to speak lolcat, and not to read Shakespeare?! But a couple of decades of widespread internet access have demonstrated that internet dialects operate much like any other dialect: speakers learn to switch confidently and accurately between the two, borrowing words from one to the other as seems appropriate, to the lexical enhancement of both. The internet has changed the English language considerably; long may it continue.

Image credits: surfing the net; old mobile phone; comedy eyebrows; children at birthday party; spirit level; cat in tree; shiba inu; coding

Have you ever wondered about the language used in Social Media? Or the woexrds we use are based on our personality traits? If your answer is yes, you are in luck.

Background

The Positive Psychology Center based out of the University of Pennsylvania created what is known as The World Well-Being Project (WWBP). This amazing project is forging scientific techniques by measuring psychological well-being and physical health based on the analysis of language in social media. The brightest computer scientists, psychologists, and statisticians are putting their heads together on the psychosocial processes that affect health and happiness, and are exploring the potential for replacing expensive survey methods. In 2013, WWBP published a study entitled “Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach”. In one of the largest studies to date, WWBP analyzed over 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers. To analyze the messages, they used two different methods to find demographic and psychological attributes:

• Differential Language Analysis (DLA): a method designed by WWBP to identify the most distinguishing language features from any given attribute.
• Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC): a popular tool used in psychology to find ways people use words in their daily lives. This can provide rich information about their beliefs, fears, thinking patterns, social relationships, and personalities.

In this particular study, WWBP also had volunteers take standard personality tests (the Big 5 Factor Model) to determine the words used in certain personality traits. Combine all of these, and they were able to link the social media language of personality, gender, and age with 91.9% accuracy. Now let’s get our hands dirty and take a look at how they gathered the Facebook status updates and formulated their visualization charts.

The Data

The complete dataset consisted of approximately 19 million Facebook status updates written by all participants. The team at WWBP restricted their analysis to those Facebook users meeting 4 certain criteria:

• They must indicate English as a primary language
• Have written at least 1,000 words in their status updates
• Be under the age of 65
• Indicate gender (Male & Female) and age

Language of Gender:

Female language features are shown on top with male language features below. The size of the word indicates the strength of the correlation; the color indicates relative frequency of usage. Underscores (_) connect words of multiword phrases.

• Females from this study (Top), used more emotion words (e.g., excited) and first-person singulars and they mention more psychological and social processes (e.g., ‘love you’ and ‘<3’ –a heart).
• Males used more swear words and object references (e.g., ‘xbox’, ‘black ops’, ‘wishes he’).

Language of Age:

As you can see in Figure 3 above, there are subtle changes of topics progressing from one age group to the next. Also, there are clear distinctions in words such as use of slang, emoticons, and Internet speak in the 13 to 18 age group. In the 23 to 29 age group, you can see a couple Internet speak or work topics (e.g. ‘at work’, ‘new job’). We see a school related topic for 13 to 18 year olds (e.g. ‘school’, ‘homework’, ‘ugh’), while we see a college related topic for 19 to 22 year olds (e.g. ‘semester’, ‘college’, ‘register’). As you progress to the 30 to 65 age group, words being used are focused more on emotional stability with family and friends (e.g. ‘daughter’, ‘my son’, ‘my kids’, and ‘my fb friends’). In general, you will see a progression of school, college, work, and family when looking at the major topics across all age groups.

Standard Frequency of Topics and Words Based on Age:

In Fig. 4A, the graph shows the relative frequency of the most selective topics for each age group as a function of age. Fig. 4B reinforces this hypothesis by presenting a similar pattern based on other social topics. Fig. 4C shows the use of ‘we’ increases after the age of 22, whereas ‘I’ decreases. This definitely suggests the increasing importance of friendships and relationships as people age.

Language of Personality:

The researchers dug into how our language and personality coincide. They analyzed the words used by participants and organized them based on the personality of each participant. Here’s a quick refresher of the 5 Personality Factors:

• Extroversion: describes how you interact with people.
• Neuroticism: is how you deal with emotions
• Agreeableness: is how you feel towards others
• Conscientiousness: describes how organized and dependable you are
• Openness: is when someone is curious and openminded to new experiences and knowledge

We can see at the top left that socially related categories like party topics emerge as a key distinguishing feature for Extroverts. Additionally, results suggest that Introverts are interested in Japanese media (e.g. ‘anime’, ‘manga’, ‘internet’, and Japanese style emoticons: ˆ_ˆ).The bottom left of Figure 5 above shows that people High in Neuroticism commonly mentioned phrases like ‘sick of’, ‘depressed’ and ‘I hate’. The bottom right shows language related to emotional stability (Low Neuroticism). Low Neurotic individuals wrote about enjoyable social activities that foster harmony or create a greater emotional balance, such as ‘sports’, ‘vacation’, ‘beach’, ‘church’, ‘team’, and a family time topic. In Figure 6 below (bottom right), people who display Low Openness use shortened words in their status update (e.g. ‘2day’, ‘ur’, ‘every 1’). People who are High Open (bottom left) utilize creative words (e.g. ‘art’, ‘universe’, ‘music’, ‘writing’, and ‘soul’). You may not resonate with this, but Low Conscientiousness people (Middle-left) use very explicit words in their updates whereas High Conscientiousness people (Middle-left) use phrases (e.g. ‘to work’, ‘ready for’, and ‘great day’). As you can see, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are very favorable resources for the study of people; status updates and tweets are expressive, personal, and have emotional content. Remember a few things:

• That language, in general, is unbiased and is measurable behavioral data
• Facebook language specifically allows researchers to observe individuals as they present their true self to the online world.

DLA Method

Figure 1 

As you can see from Figure 1 above, the DLA operates by: 1.) Feature Extraction: Extracting Language by: (a) words and phrases: a sequence of 1 to 3 words found in a string of text, emoticons, and two or more words that correspond to some conventional way of saying things. (b) topics: automatically analyzing large collections of unlabeled text. 2.) Correlational Analysis: the process of correlating words with gender, age, and personality. Since they found thousands of significantly correlated words, visualization charts were the key in understanding their research (see Fig. 2 below).

Fascinating right?

VI школьная научно— практическая конференция 

«Познание и творчество»

Секция: Английский язык

Тема: The language and the Internet

Автор: Караева Луиза, 9класс

Научный руководитель:

Фидарова Мэри Каурбековна,

учитель английского языка высшей категории

Март,2014 год.

Contents

Introduction……………………………………………………………3

Chapter I. Language and the Internet………………………………..4

1.  The medium of Netspeak………………………………………….5
2.  Smiles and emoticons………………………………………………6

Chapter II The Internet slang………………………………………….8

2.1. The reasons for the appearance of Internet slang………………8

2.2. Trends in the Internet slang usage……………………………….9

2.3. Slang of Social Networks…………………………………………..11

2.4. The most popular slang words……………………………………12

Chapter III The impact of the Internet on the Russian language…………………………………………………………………15

Conclusion………………………………………………………………17

Application………………………………………………………………18

Used literature list………………………………………………………19

            Introduction

In recent years, the Internet has come to dominate our lives. E-mail, instant messaging and chat are rapidly replacing conventional forms of correspondence. The Web has become the first port of call for both information inquiry and leisure  activity. How is this affecting the language? There is a widespread view that a “technospeak” comes to rule, standards will be lost.

Covering the range of Internet genres, including E-mail, chat and the Web, we’ll try to make an account of how the Internet is radically changing the way we use language. This aspect of language has not been thoroughly studied yet, that’s why we find it rather actual.

        The object of this paper is the research of online slang dictionaries (www.urbandictionary.com., www.onlineslangdictionary.com.) , The Dictionary of modern Russian literary language, D.N. Ushakov’s Explanatary Dictionary of  the Russian language, G.N.Sklyarevskaya’s Explanatary Dictionary of modern the Russian language.

        The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which the electronic medium is having an effect on language in general.

        The aim has caused a number of tasks:

1. To identify pros and cons of the Internet influence on the English language.

2. The impact of the Internet on the Russian language.

3. To find the most used slang words.

I find the topic to be of theoretical importance as it attempts to establish some tendencies in the modern means of Internet communication. Its practical importance consists in the opportunity of using the language properly while writing e-mails or visiting chat rooms.

The paper consists of introduction, three chapters, conclusion, appendix and bibliography.

Chapter I. Language and the Internet

Will the English -dominated Internet spell the end of other tongues? (David Crystal)

This question illustrates widely held anxieties about the effect of the Internet on language and languages. Do the relaxed standards of E-mails augur the end of literacy and spelling as we know it? Will linguistic creativity and flexibility be lost as globalization imposes sameness?

        The Internet is an association of computer network with common standards which enables messages to be sent from any registered computer on one network to any host on any other. It developed in 1960s in the USA as an experimental network which quickly grew to include military, federal, regional, university, business and personal users. It is now the world’s largest computer network, providing and increasing range of services and enabling unprecedented numbers of people to be in touch with each other through electronic mail, discussion groups and the provision of digital “pages” on any topic. Functional information, such as electronic shopping, advertisements can be found alongside creative works, such as poems and scripts, with the availability of movies, TV programs and other kinds of information. Some commentators have likened the Internet to an amalgam of television, telephone and conventional publishing and the term “cyberspace” has been coined to capture the notion of a world of information present or possible in digital forms (the information superhighway). The potential of the Internet is currently limited by relatively slow data transmission speeds, but there is no denying the unprecedented scale and significance of the net as a global medium.

The paper will try to explore the ways in which the nature of the electronic medium as such, along with the Internet`s global scale and intensity of use, is having an effect on language in general and on individual language in particular. The electronic medium, to begin with, presents us with a channel which facilitates and constrains our ability to communicate in ways that are fundamentally different from those found in other situations. Many of the expectations and practices which we associate with spoken and written language no longer obtain. The first task therefore to investigate the linguistic properties of the so-called “ electronic revolution “ and to take a view on whether the way in which we use language on the Internet is becoming so different from our previous linguistic behavior that it might be described as revolutionary.

        What happens, linguistically, when the members of the human race use a technology enabling any of them to be in routine contact with anyone else? Some of these means are e-mail, chat-groups and virtual worlds.

        Chat groups are continuous discussions on a particular topic, organized in “rooms” at particular Internet sites, in which computer users interested in the, topic can participate. There are 2 situations here, depending on whether the interaction takes place in real timed(synchronous) or in postponed time (asynchronous). Some are moderated, others are uncontrolled. The chat-group situations promote the use of a highly distinctive and consistent language variety.

Virtual worlds are imaginary environments which people can enter to engage in text-based fantasy social interaction. In virtual worlds they adopt new identities, explore fantasy worlds, engage in novel exploits and use their guises to interact with other participants. As the research shows there is a clear contrast with the world of paper-based communication. Letter-writing, for instance, is routinely opening and closing formulae (Dear Sir/Madam, Yours faithfully, etc.), where to put the address and the date and how to break up the text into paragraphs. But with the Internet equivalent of letter- writing- emails- there is no such long tradition. Most people are unaware of the facts which have to be respected if their messages aren`t to be misunderstood. Often, the first indication that they have misconstructed the message comes when they receive an unpalatable response from the recipient.

             1.1 The Medium of Netspeak.

The Internet is the electronic, global and interactive medium and each of these properties has consequences for the kind of language found there. The most fundamental influence arises out of the electronic character if the channel. Several writers have called Internet language” written speech”, they advise “write the way people talk”. But the world is composed of many different types of people who talk in many different ways, so what kind of speech it is, exactly, that the new style guides want us to be writing down? The language of geeks has had a strong influence on Netspeak, its jargon appealing to a relatively young and computer-literate population. But what will happen to Netspeak as the user base broadens and people with a wider range of language preferences come on line?

Before we can answer these questions, we need to be clear about the nature of spoken and written language.

                   Table1. Differences between speech and writing.( after D. Crystal)

SPEECH	WRITING
1 Speech is time-bound, dynamic, transient. It is part of an interaction in which both participants are usually present.	1Writing is space- bound, static, permanent. The writer usually distant from the reader and often doesn`t know who the reader is going to be.
2 There is no time- lag between production and reception.	2There is always a time – lag between production and reception.
3As participants are typically in face – to – face interaction , they can rely on such extra-linguistic clues as facial expression and gesture to aid meaning (feedback). The lexicon of speech is often characteristically vague, using words which refer directly to the situation.	Lack of visual contact means that participants can’t rely on context to make their meaning clear. Most writing therefore avoids the use of deictic expressions, which are likely to be ambiguous.

1.2.Smileys and emoticons

As Netspeak lacks the facial expressions, gestures and conventions of body posture and distance, which are so critical in expressing personal opinion and attitudes and in moderating social relationships smileys and emoticons have been introduced. These are combinations of keyboard characters designed to show an emotional facial expression: they are typed in sequence on a single line and placed after the final punctuation mark of a sentence. The 2 basics types express positive attitudes and negative attitudes respectively:  

 or    or    or

Table 2 illustrates the most commonly used forms, along with a few of the hundreds of ludic shapes and sequences which have been invented and collected in smiley dictionaries. It’s plain that they are potentially helpful but extremely crude way of capturing some of the basic features of facial expression, but their semantic role is limited. They can forestall a gross misperception of a speakers intent, but an individual smiley still allows a huge number of readings (happiness, jokes, sympathy, good mood, delight, amusement), which can only be disambiguated by referring to the verbal context. Without care, however, they can lead to their misunderstanding.

Table2. Examples of smileys (After Sanderson, 1998)

Basic smileys
	pleasure, humor, etc.
	sadness, dissatisfaction, etc.
	winking
;-(	crying.
:-0	shocked, amazed.
:-] :-[	sarcastic.
Joke smileys
[:-)	User is wearing a walkman
	User is wearing sunglasses
B:-)	User is wearing sunglasses on head
:-{)	User has a moustache
:*)	User is drunk
:-[	User is a vampire
:-E	User is a bucktoothed vampire
:-@	User is screaming
-:-)	User is a punk
-:-(	User punks don’t smile
+-:-)	User hold Christian religious office
0:-)	User is an angel at heart

It is a common experience that a smile can go down the wrong way. Those who get into the habit of routinely using smileys can also find themselves in the position of having their unmarked utterances misinterpreted precisely because they have no smiley attached to them. Usage guides warn against overuse. However, they are not especially frequent some people don’t use them at all. Most participants, moreover, made no use of most of the formal possibilities, restricting themselves to just one or two types, especially variants of the positive smiley, as in:

 don’t be silly                         hi                         that’s a pain :))))

        It should be noted too that smileys have other roles than disambiguation. Sometimes they seem to be doing a little more than expressing rapport. Often, their presence seems to have purely pragmatic force-acting as a warning to the recipient that the sender’s worried about the effect a sentence might have.

Chapter II. The Internet slang.

        There have been ongoing debates about how the use of slang on the Internet influences language usage outside of technology. Even though the direct causal relationship between the Internet and language has yet to be proven by any scientific research, Internet slang has invited split views on its influence on the standard of the language use in non-computer- mediated communications.

        Prescriptivists tend to have the widespread belief that the Internet has a negative influence on the future of language, and that it would lend to a degradation of standard. Some would even attribute any declination of standard formal English to the increase in usage of electronic communication. It has also been suggested that the linguistic differences between Standard English and computer mediated communication (CMC) can have implication for literacy education.

        On the other hand, discriptivists have counter-argued that the Internet allows better expressions of a language. Rather than established linguistic conventions, linguistic choices sometimes reflect personal taste. It has also been suggested that as opposed to intentionally flouting language conventions, Internet slang is a result of a lack of motivations to monitor speech online. They describe language in E-mails as being derived from “writing the way people talk” and that there is no need to insist on “Standard English”. Using and spreading Internet slang also adds onto the cultural currency of a language. It is important to the speakers of the language due to the foundation it provides for identifying within a group and also for defining a person’s individual linguistic and communicative competence. The result is a specialized based on its use of slang.

                2.1. The reasons for appearance of Internet slang.  

The rise of web-based technologies, online chatting, mobile texting, e-mail and instant messaging have all helped shape the way we communicate. Short – form words, acronyms, phrases and memes have almost helped contribute to the development of a whole new language that defines Internet culture. Today, this so-called Internet language is as popular as ever and virtually second nature in use amongst Internet users.

           Why do people use Internet slang?

Unlike writing an A + English essay on Shakespeare, Internet slang has two common goals, which often overthrow proper spelling and grammar.

        To express emotions: It’s obvious that expressing emotion through written text can be difficult. Internet slang words and acronyms help you tell people that we are happy, sad, amused, angry, confused or surprised. The acronym “LOL”, which stands for “laugh out loud” is one of the most common acronyms used on the Internet. Often users will incorporate textual emoticons like “:)” or “:(“ to represent expressive human faces and emotions.

To speed up communication: You live in a busy world, and you don’t have time to waste typing out the message you’d like to send to your friend, family or colleagues. Typing a message usually takes longer than saying it verbally, that’s why Internet slang and short – forms words are used to get the message in writing as quickly as possible. It’s a quick and convenient way to communicate on the web.

Table3. The most popular internet slang words and acronyms.

Acronyms	Meaning
ASAP BBL BF/GF BFF Gr8 IDK IMO JK NM ORLY TMI Y TTYL ASL AFK WRT NP	As soon as possible Be Back Later Boyfriend / girlfriend Best friend forever Great I don’t know In my opinion Just kidding Never mind Oh, really? Too much information Why Talk to you later Age/ sex/ location Away from keyboard With respect to No problem

These are the most popular well-known and widely used Internet slang words. People all over the world use them on social media sites, e-mail and SMS text messaging.

Although short-form wording and acronyms help us get the job done faster and more conveniently, time spent communicating through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and texting on cell phones is being blamed for poor spelling and grammar skills with regards to today’s youth. Abbreviations, lowercase words that should be capitalized and neglectful proofreading are other common mistakes that are blamed on social media and SMS texting.

2.2. Trends in the Internet slang usage.

Internet slang is the typical form of language people use on chats, forums, Facebook, blogs and sometimes even in mails. Of course, this type of language is mainly used by the young generation. It is mainly a mix of acronyms, smileys, misspelling, etc. in order to express feelings and communicate in a faster way. Internet users try more and more to write the way they speak. But it can also become a trend that young people follow in order to be “cool”.

Trends :

It is interesting to understand that some Internet slang appeared as a design effect, a way of beautifying status or blog in a “different” way. This phenomena appears, most of all, among teenagers who I still looking for who they are. Trying to be different, original, these new trends appeared on the Web.

The use of extra “i”: About two years ago, new trend on blogs a Facebook status appeared among teenagers in France. It consisted in repeating the letter “i” or any vowel in a sentence,

not in order to produce a sound effect or an emotion, but just as a visual effect.

Example: “This iiis mee!” –is the title of the blog.

        The use of capital letters:  Another visual effect is to write a sentence using a capital letter and than small ones.

Example: My LiFe Is SoOoOo CoMpLiCaTeD!!

        The use of punctuation and capital letters: not really a trend effect but just a way to express feelings by emphasizing an exclamation points, etc.

Example: “What happened to u????????”

            “So…what r we gonna do??”

              “NO way!!!!!!!!”

        Nowadays, more and more forums try to prohibit this kind of language and want a return to real English language conversation. What they call “text speak” or “text talk” is for some of them just a lack of education.

        Non-alphabet characters can be used to replace the letters they resemble: for example, 5 or even $ can replace the letter “S”.

        Mistakes are often left uncorrected: common typing misspellings such as “teh” instead of “the” are left uncorrected or sometimes adopted to replace the correct spelling.

        Letters can be substituted for other letters that may sound alike: using “Z” for a final letters “s” and “x” for the word ending in the letters “c” or “k” is common( for example: “5xillz-skills).

        Rules of grammar are rarely obeyed. Some will capitalize every letter except for vowels (LiKe ThiS) and otherwise reject conventional English style and grammar or drop vowels from words (“vry”-“very”)

        The use of numbers or numbers or letters and numbers:

10q-thank you

12b-Wannabe

10x-Thanks

224-Today, tomorrow, forever

2B-to be

4ever, 4eva-forever

R8-right

        Many Internet slang expressions combine net-working terms with real world terms to refer to particular types of Internet users:

• Cybernaut (cyberspace + astronaut) : a person adept at online gaming communities that involve virtual worlds, simulations and cyberspace in general.
• Internaut (Internet + astronaut) : a veteran online with an academic knowledge of the Internet.
• Websurfer (World Wide Web + surfer) : anyone that engages in Web browsing.
• Emoticons (emotions + icons) are yet another type of Internet Hang. These simple keyboard pictographs can pepper text to indicate intonation so that a joke, for example, will be understood as such. With an emoticon one can indicate anger, laughter, teasing, crying, sadness and many other emotions.
• Digerati (digital + illuminati) someone versed in digital technologies.

Other types of Internet slang borrow offensive words from the real world and apply them to the online community. “A troll”, for example, is someone who disregards netiequette in a news group, forum or chatroom by attempting to start arguments or flame wars – another Internet slang for heated arguments that spiral out of control into personal attacks.  

        2.3. Slang of Social Networks

        A. V. Kuznetsov in his book “Slang of Social Networks” analyzes the slang of the Facebook users and divides the words into several groups:

1. Slang verbs that refer to searching, adding and removing friends on Facebook.

• To de-face — to remove a friend from your Facebook page.
• To frignore – to accept a friend request from someone on Facebook and then proceed to ignore them.
• To refriend – to add a friend in Facebook again.
• To misfriend – to accidentally make a friend request on Facebook.
• To collect faces – to add old and new friends to your profile on Facebook.

1. A group of terms describing communication with friends on Facebook.

• Inbox rot — to neither accept nor decline a friend request from someone on Facebook.
• To facejecte – when you send a message, wall post or comment on someone else’s Facebook page expecting a response but you don’t get one.
• Irlfriend – a person who is your friend in real life, as opposed to a Facebook friend, who is most like a complete stranger.

1. Terms, describing all details of user communication:

• Book up – a group of friends that are planning to meet up and use Facebook chat.
• Like out – to give thumbs up to everything on somebody’s Facebook profile by using the “Like” function.
• Red Cup Picture – Red Cup Pictures are photos traditionally appearing on Facebook which generally depict some sort of partying.

1. Slang terms, describing the activities connected with Facebook status.

• Statiquette – to have proper etiquette when updating one’s Facebook status.
• Twit booking – the act of constantly updating your Facebook status.
• Sargoning — the act of liking people’s status regardless of what it may say or mean.
• Thffb – “too hot for Facebook”
• TMF Syndrome – too much Facebook Syndrome is a condition when a person is very addicted to Facebook.

It can be seen that the largest group of slang terms describes friendship and user connections.

The next group of slang terms refers to status feature (twitbooking, status, idiot, etc)  

This research shows several tendencies in Facebook Hang usage:

1. Most of analyzed Facebook slang terms refer to Facebook features and common problems of users.
2. Most of Hang terms are particular to Facebook subculture and refer to certain Facebook realities.
3. The main function of certain slang terms is to name Facebook realities that don’t have corresponding units in conventional lexica.

2.4. The most popular slang words

        Some linguists are against the claim that the Internet is impoverishing the English language. On the contrary, it is expanding it with new and entertaining means of expression. Take, for example, very useful ejaculation “facepalm”. This splendidly economical way of indicating ironic despair is just one of the useful lexical innovations the Internet offers to those who actually read it.

 In his book “Netymology: From Apps to Zombies: A linguistic celebration of the Digital World” , Tom Chatfield tells stories behind new words, which have already become part of the English language.

1. Avatars

This word for our digital incarnations has a marvelously mystical origin, beginning with the Sanskrit term avatara, describing the descent of a god from the heavens into earthly form. Arriving in English in the late 18th century, via Hindi, the term largely preserved its mystical meaning until Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash first popularized it in a technological sense.

Fusing notions of virtual world-building and incarnation, it’s the perfect emblem of computers as a portal to a new species of experience.

2. Hashtags

In 1920s America, the # sign served as shorthand for weight in pounds (and they still call it the pound sign). It was first brought to a wider public thanks to its adoption by telephone engineers at Bell Labs in the 1960s as the generic function symbol on their new touch-tone phones – and if you’re looking to sound clever, you could call it an «octothorpe», the tongue-in-cheek term coined at Bell to describe it. It’s on Twitter, though, that hashtags have really come into their own, serving as a kind of function code for social interaction #ifyoulikethatkindofthing.

3. Scunthorpe problems

Computing can be as much combat as collaboration between people and machines, and the Scunthorpe problem is a perfect example. Entirely innocent words can fall victim to machine filth-filters thanks to unfortunate sequences of letters within them – and, in Scunthrope’s case, it’s the second to fifth letters that create the difficulty. The effect was labelled in honour of the town in 1996, when AOL temporarily prevented any Scunthorpe residents from creating user accounts; but those who live in Penistone, South Yorkshire – or people with surnames like Cockburn – may be equally familiar with algorithms’ censorious tendencies.

4. Trolling

Although the archetypical emblem of an online troll is of a grinning bogeyman, the word can be traced back to the Old French verb troller, meaning to wander around while hunting. «Trolling» entered English around 1600 as a description of fishing by trailing bait around a body of water, and it was this idea of baiting the unwitting that led to the idea of online «trolling», where experienced net users would simulate naivety in order ensnare the naive. The noun «troll», meanwhile, does refer to a wide class of monstrous Nordic creatures: a sense that has dovetailed neatly with the increasingly viciously art of trolling.

5. Memes

Richard Dawkins coined the term «meme» in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as a shortening of the Ancient Greek term mimeme («an imitated thing»). He designed his new word to sound like «gene», signifying a unit of cultural transmission. Little did he know that his term would become one of the most iconic of online phenomena, embodying the capacity of the internet to itself act as a kind of gene-pool for thoughts and beliefs – and for infectious, endlessly ingenious slices of time-wasting.

6. Spam

The most enduring gift of British comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus may prove to be a digital one: the term «spam». The key episode, first broadcast in 1970, featured a sketch called «SPAM»: the brand name used since 1937 by the Hormel Foods Corporation as a contraction of the phrase spiced ham. Set in a cafe where almost every single item on the menu featured spam, the sketch culminated in a chorus of Viking warriors drowning everyone else’s voices out by chanting the word «spam».  A satirical indictment of British culinary monotony, it took on a second life during the early 1980s, when those who wished to derail early online discussions copied out the same words repeatedly in order to clog up a debate. Inspired by Python, the word spam proved a popular way of doing this. «Spamming» came to describe any process of drowning out «real» content – and the rest is repetitive history.

7. LOLs

If you type «LOL» or «lol», you’re not literally «laughing out loud». You’re offering a kind of stage direction: dramatizing the process of typing. It sounds simple, but this is part of a radical change in language. For the first time in history, we’re conducting conversations through written words (or, more precisely, through typing onto screens). And in the process we’re expending immense effort on making words and symbols express the emotional range of face-to-face interactions. Yet it’s all, also, performance; a careful crafting of appearances that can bear little resemblance to reality.

8. Meh

There’s a special place in my heart for the supremely useful three letters of «meh», which express an almost infinitely flexible contemporary species of indifference. In its basic exclamatory form, it suggests something along the lines of «OK, whatever». As an adjective, it takes on a more ineffable flavor: «it was all very meh». You can even use it as a noun: «I stand by my meh.» Apparently first recorded in a 1995 episode of The Simpsons, some theories trace meh back to the disdainful Yiddish term mnyeh. Its ascent towards canonical status, though, embodies a thoroughly digital breed of boredom.

9. Cupertinos

Also known as «auto-correct errors», a Cupertino error occurs when your computer thinks it knows what you’re trying to say better than you do. The name comes from an early spell checker program, which knew the word Cupertino — the Californian city where Apple has its headquarters — but not the word «cooperation». All the cooperations in a document might thus be automatically «corrected» into Cupertinos. Courtesy of smart phones, Cupertinos today are a richer field than ever – a personal favourite being my last phone’s determination to transform «Facebook» into «ravenous».

10. Geeks

«Geek» arrived in English from Low German, in which a geek denoted a crazy person; in travelling circuses, the geek show traditionally involved a performer biting off the heads of live chickens. By 1952, the sense of a freakishly adept technology enthusiast had appeared in science fiction maestro Robert Heinlein’s short story «The Year of the Jackpot» («the poor geek!» being the phrase) – and by the 1980s it had become a common label for socially awkward children obsessed with new technological devices. As this generation of tech-savvy youngsters provided the first generation of internet millionaires, and then billionaires, the unthinkable happened: geeks became cool (not to mention chic) – and ready to inherit the earth.

Chapter III The impact of the Internet on the Russian language.

Not only the English language has been influenced by the Internet, but Russian as well. The Internet has bad influence on it. When chattering in various social networks like “Facebook”, “Odnoklassniki”, etc. people often forget the rules of punctuation and spelling. They put dots instead of commas and write a new sentence with a small letter. This leads to illiteracy as people get used to such forms of writing.  

With the development of the Internet Russian-speaking people who are very active in social networks have got new language area. In this area one should use the written language, on the one hand, but on the other hand there are practically no limitations to its correct usage.

Indeed, before the appearance of the Internet spelling mistakes were not admitted in practically all spheres of language usage whether it was a dictation at school, an application, a written complaint, a report or simply a message. Every document written by hand had to be literate, as mistakes could influence the writer`s fate, that`s why people tried to avoid making mistakes.

In the new linguistic area-the Internet-the situation is the opposite. There are no limitations, the only one is to be understood.

Thus, one can see that the use of the written form of the language in the Internet is becoming more and more like its use in the oral language

Let`s take the word «сейчас» as an example. Why write such a long and complicated word, they say, when you can use a simple and clear word «щас» or even «ща»? This example shows deviation from both pronunciation and spelling.

There are a lot of examples of this kind.

              Table4.

Linguistic norm	The Internet
Привет	Прив
Я тебя люблю	ЯТЛ
С днем рождения	СДР
Спасибо	СПС
Пожалуйста	ПЖЛ

      Syncopating words like this, people simply forget their right spelling, which also contributes to illiteracy. This is another proof of bad influence of the Internet on the language.

     The wish to be original and cool causes various spelling distortions. Some researchers explain this phenomenon as an effort to parody illiterate spelling, other linguists believe it`s a reaction to either illogical spelling rules or school practice of teaching Russian.

          Let`s study some examples of this kind.

      The word “автор” (author) means a creator of something, a compiler of some scientific, literary work, project, invention. This word is neutral, it has no additional evaluating or emotional coloring. Spelling deformation gives way to the contrary interpretation of the word, attaching neglectful evaluating sense to the meaning of the word. “Афтар” in the Internet is not an author, a creator of something significant.

          Native speakers have an idea of strong link between the form and the meaning of the word. Distortion of the form, its destruction is seen as infringement to its meaning. The result is the decrease and discredit to its conception. Thus, the word “автор-создатель” turns into “автор-писака”.

       Semantic transformations are characteristic of the words having some evaluating connotation. The word” кросавчег” is frequently used on the websites. In the modern Russian literary language the word “красавчик” means “a handsome man.” It has a note “colloquial” in D.I.Ushakov`s Dictionary and has ironic stylistic coloring. The spelling distortion of the word-“кросавчег”- takes 0off its positive shade of meaning and leads to the appearance of a negative evaluating component.

           Similar distortions can be found in the following deformations

   Table5

Standard Russian	The Language of the Internet
персонаж	пирсонаж
предчувствие	претчуствие
оригинал	аригинал
животное	жывотное
позитив	пазетиф
финал	фенал
мужчина	мущщина
человек	чилавег
письмо	песьмо
богатый	багаты
неунывающий	ниунывающий
написал	напесал

As can be seen from the table, different parts of speech are undergoing transformation.

Another method of expressive deformation has been noticed while studying the language of the Internet. “Echo constructions” (превед-медвед) are often used in chat-rooms. Word spelling deformation gives a scornful shade to the meaning of the word. They become special marks by which the Internet users “recognize” each other and accept “rules” of special communication.

But there is good news too! A countertendency has appeared in the Internet asking the user not to use phrases humiliating the addressee. One can notice some stabilization of linguistic and stylistic means.

Conclusion

         There is no doubt that technology has had “a significant impact” on language in the last ten years. Some entirely new words like the verb “to google” or look something up on a search engine and the noun “app” used to describe programs for smart phones have either been recently invented or come into popular use. The nature of the language of the Internet is rapidly evolving.

         As the analysis shows there are some new tendencies in the languages of the Internet:

• Internet slang has steadily gained popularity amongst the technology-literate generations over the past decade or so to the point where it is slowly becoming validated as an actual dialect.
• Although Internet slang began as a means of “opposition” to mainstream language, its popularity with today’s globalized digitally literate population has shifted it into a part of everyday language, where it also leaves a profound impact.
• Every different country has its own language background and cultural differences and hence they tend to have their own rules and motivations for their own Internet slang.
• The popular use of Internet slang resulted in a unique online and offline community. It has also virtual communities marked by the specific slang they use and led to a more homogenized yet diverse online culture.
• In recent years there is urge towards refinement of the language from various spelling and semantic deformations  
• There is a tendency to stabilize stylistic means.
• Objective processes in the Internet language coincide with the subjective determination of bloggers to make texts free of distortion.  

Appendix

Acronym – a word formed from the initial letters of a name or by combing initial letters of a series of words.

Descriptivism – the practice of application of descriptive linguistic, especially in the analysis oh grammar.

Descriptivists- grammarians who ask the question, “what is English like- what are its forms and how do they function in various situations.”

Chat- a synchronous CMC venue for holding conversations with multiple participants.

CMC- computer mediated communication.

Internet slang – refers to a variety of slang language used by different communities on the internet

Netspeak, chatspeak, cyber-slang – a type of slang that Internet users have popularized.

Netspeak – 1.idioms and peculiarities of spelling and grammar that are characteristic of online documents and communication.

                2.the expressions, technical words, slang etc. commonly used in Internet .

Prescriptivism – the branch of linguistic that deals with syntax and morphology.

Prescriptivists – grammarians who ask the question :” what should English be like – what forms should people use and what functions should the serve?”

SMS- short messaging system.

Textspeak – the abbreviated language used in digital communication. It is formed in one of three ways : initialism, reduction and substitution.

                                        Bibliography

1. Crystal, David . “ The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
2. Crystal, David “ Language and the Internet. Cambridge University Press,2001.”
3. Bernard, M.R. “ Preserving Language Diversity. Computers can be a tool for makind the Survival of Language Possible. Cultural Survical Quarterly , 1992.”
4. Castells, M “ The rise of the Network Society. Malden: Blackwell, 1996”
5. Craddol , D “ The Future of English. London : the British Council, 1997”
6. Crystal, David “ English as a global language. Cambridge,1997”
7. Смирнов Ф.О. Искусство общения в Интернет. Краткое руководство. — Научно-популярное издание. — М.: Издательский дом Вильямс, 2006. — ISBN 5-8459-1004-8

Internet sources

www. urban dictionary. com

www. dictionary of slang. com

teenslang. Su

www. slovonovo. ru

www. slanger. ru

                                Dictionaries

• The Dictionary of modern Russian literary language.
• D.N. Ushakov’s Explanatary Dictionary of  the Russian language.
• G.N.Sklyarevskaya’s Explanatary Dictionary of modern the Russian language