Can you believe that it’s been almost 50 years since the internet was invented?! Its officially recognised birthday is 1st January 1983, and so much has happened since then… not least with the English language! English has been on quite the journey over thousands of years and the addition of the internet and technology has become an integral part of its most recent developments.
But just how much has the online world changed English?
The short answer is hugely! From the appropriation of words that originally had a different meaning to the explosion of text speak (which to many of us has become almost a new language in itself!) to the creation of entirely new words, the impact of technology and the internet has been incredibly significant. And with some of these new words infiltrating into the likes of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), many of the changes seem to be here to stay.
Just how do words even make it into the dictionary?!
According to this article from 2010, for a word to be added into the OED there needs to be evidence that people are using it over a period of time – at least five years. Evidence comes from a number of sources, for example, correspondence from the public and trawling through dated material to find out when a term first started appearing.
Linguist Anne Curzan calls how people behave and interact online ‘electronically mediated conversation’ (EMC). This covers things like taking selfies and even trolling, as well as the activities that people are involved in online such as blogging, googling or tweeting.
So let’s delve a little deeper into the changes that we’ve seen emerging within the context of EMC and the internet…
New vocabulary
There are some totally new words that didn’t even exist 50 years ago – great grandparents would have been baffled by the likes of selfies, emojis and unfriending someone, but this slang or jargon is now fully incorporated into our daily language.
Even the hashtag wasn’t always a hashtag – in the US or Canada it used to be called the pound or number sign, and in the UK it was just a hash. Now every social media platform is awash with #.
Text speak
We’ve also seen an abundance of acronyms become everyday language. Good examples of this are FOMO (fear of missing out), LOL (laughing out loud) and DM (direct message). As the proliferation of these acronyms increases, particularly with the younger demographic, we also see a gap growing in the generational gap within modern language, which might explain why many parents of teenage and young adult children feel they speak in an entirely different language!
Appropriation of words
There are some words that have evolved into meaning something completely different than their original meaning, common examples of these are “cloud”, “tablet” and “catfish”. Talk to your wartime relatives about “spam” and the word had a very different meaning to its current one!
Whatever the words, we transcribe them!
Much the same as the English language, transcription has evolved too – and Fiona Shipley has been at the heart of it since 1990. Get in touch to find out more about our transcription services and what we could do for your business by emailing alex@fionashipley.com.