Because Internet

by Gretchen McCulloch

Even those of us who know that a single book isn’t the sole repository of a language and that dictionaries are records of how people are already using the language, not providers of words for us to start using—we still often think of the English language as contained within a sufficiently large quantity of books. We think of it as “the language of Shakespeare,” or the twenty volumes of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, or the entire Library of Congress, or the millions of books scanned and made searchable by Google Books.

  This association isn’t accidental.

  If we look at how frequently people wrote the phrase “English language” across all the books scanned by Google, from 1500 to 2000, we see a major upswing between 1750 and 1800. It’s consistently low beforehand, and consistently high thereafter. “English” and “language” by themselves are pretty much steady—it’s just the two words together that go up.

  What happened in that period? Well, in 1755, Samuel Johnson published A Dictionary of the English Language, the first major English print dictionary. Johnson’s dictionary became widely cited, and Johnson was interested in defining exactly what the English language consisted of. As he put it in the dictionary’s preface: “I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated.”

  We can’t just blame Sam—he was part of a movement. The late 1700s and early 1800s saw the beginnings of a massive trend in publishing dictionaries and grammars and books about “the English language.” On the one hand, this period brought us the first incredibly cool dialect maps that we saw in Chapter 2. On the other, this detailed record-making was a way of constructing what it meant to be the English language, or even a language at all. And what it meant to be a language was to be a book. As late as 1977, a Merriam-Webster ad campaign proclaimed, “Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary: it’s where the words live.”

  But the book metaphor has run its course. Just as early analogies of the brain compared it to a steam engine or hydraulic pump, while many modern neuroscientists invoke computers as metaphor, our language metaphors, too, need to evolve with the times. Here, perhaps, is the greatest impact that the internet can have on the English language: as a new metaphor.

  Like the big collaborative projects of the internet, such as Wikipedia and Firefox, like the decentralized network of websites and machines that make up the internet itself, language is a network, a web. Language is the ultimate participatory democracy. To put it in technological terms, language is humanity’s most spectacular open source project.

  Just as we find things on the internet by following links from one place to another, language spreads and disseminates through our conversations and interactions. We each inhabit our own idiosyncratic corner of the internet, a weird mix of friends, acquaintances, people we haven’t talked with in ages, and people we secretly think are way too cool for us. Likewise, we each speak a slightly different idiolect informed by our entire unique linguistic history.

  When we thought of language as a book, we thought of it as static and authoritative, a thing which would be better if we returned to a pristine first edition and erased all the messy new words that people had scribbled into the margins. But there is no pristine first edition of a network. A network is not debased as it changes; its flexibility is a key part of its strength. So, too, is language enriched and made alive again for each subsequent generation as new connections grow and old ones wither away.

  When we thought of language like a book, we thought of it as an unruly mess of words that had to be kept in order, like a Victorian gardener constantly retrimming the hedges into spirals and globes. When we think of language like a network, we can see order as a thing that emerges out of the natural tendencies of the individuals, the way that a forest keeps itself in order even though it doesn’t get pruned and weeded.

  When we thought of language as a book, we thought of it as linear and finite. A book can only have so many pages, so you have to decide what to keep in, what to fence out, and how to order what remains. If you and I buy the same dictionary, we read the same exact words, making it seem like there is a single, finite English language that everyone agrees upon, which can be contained between two covers. But the internet has no beginning or end, and it’s growing faster than any one person can follow. Sure, it does technically take up space, in the form of fiber-optic cables running under oceans and chilled rows of hard drives in data centers, but while a book is always telling your hands how many pages it has left, an internet device is a portal to a universe bigger than you can fathom.

  A single human mind can come up with a sentence that’s never been said before in human history, and it’s not even hard. Here’s one: “The hesitant otters enjoyed the moon floating above the purple forest.” In fact, even “The otters enjoyed the moon” was enough to get me zero Google hits at time of writing. You can do it yourself: make a sentence containing an animal that would be unwise to keep as a pet, a verb with at least two syllables, a color or texture that you’re wearing, and something nonwearable in your immediate environment. Your odds are really good that no one’s ever said it before. But you don’t even have to go surreal: try googling in quotation marks the last message you texted that was longer than ten words. You’ll probably get zero hits.

  When we know language as a network, we realize that any portrait of it is incomplete, and that’s a marvelous thing. Many webpages are dynamic, generated only as we reach for them by searching for or posting something brand-new. So, too, is the creative capacity of language greater than its entire recorded history. Any one of us can coin a word or compose a sentence that has never been said before, and it now exists in the language as soon as we utter it, whether it winks in and out for a single moment or whether it catches on and endures in the minds of people yet unborn. When you lay a book down and come back to it, you expect all its ink to stay where you left it, but the only languages that stay unchanging are the dead ones. When you step away from a living language, or a network made of human beings, you don’t expect it to fall silent and still without you.

  A language with people but no books is a living language that can always create books, but a language with books and no people exists only in pale, shadowed, ghostly form. Johnson and his contemporaries found English “energetick without rules” by the standards of Latin because they were comparing a living language with a fossil. Fossils can teach us a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean that living animals are only worthy of study once they’ve been stripped down to their bones and footprints. Rather than thinking of books as a way of embalming language, of rendering it fixed and dead for eternity (or at least of trapping and caging it so it doesn’t move around quite so much), we can think of them as maps and guidebooks to help people navigate language’s living, moving splendor. Every atlas eventually becomes a history book, but a globe is still a glorious thing to feel spinning under your hands with potential.

  It’s always tempting to apologize, when writing about technology, for how out of date this book is going to be at some point and all the areas that I inevitably haven’t covered. But that would be missing the point. The purpose of this book isn’t to enshrine internet language, like an unlucky dinosaur caught in quicksand, as if it’s a thing that I can capture and preserve. Rather, it’s to provide a snapshot of a particular era and a lens that we can use to look at future changes. When we study only formal language, we see through this tiny pinhole into what English can do. When we study informal language, we open our minds wide. We step out of the library and see the complexity of the wide world that surrounds us.

  So if you’re wondering why this book hasn’t talked about something you’re interested in, consider this an invitation to draw your own map of another portion of the territory, to conduct your own internet linguistic research. The future of research on internet language lies with you, the reader, just as much as the future o
f language itself lies with you, the speaker. In particular, here are a few areas that I think may be fruitful for future research. For one thing, this has been a book primarily about English, and in particular American English, simply because a lot of dialect maps are drawn of the United States. But there are other Englishes and other languages, especially as the second half of the world’s population comes online.

  Around 7,000 languages are spoken in the world today, and the vast majority of them have only a tiny amount of representation on the internet. Wikipedia only has articles in 293 languages, and half of those languages have less than ten thousand articles. Google Translate supports 103 languages, but many of the language pairs are translated via English. Major social networks support even fewer: Facebook’s interface is available in about 100, Twitter’s in about 50, and new social networks tend to launch exclusively in one language. Even relatively substantial national languages, like Icelandic, are becoming displaced by English and a handful of other languages with big internet presences, and those that don’t have government funding behind them are doing even worse. Unfortunately, the versions of these statistics that I included in the first draft of this chapter in 2016 had barely changed when I updated them in early 2019. The momentum for making the internet hospitable to every language is slowing where it should be increasing. Nonetheless, users are still figuring out ways to communicate online: people who are illiterate or who speak languages that don’t have well-established writing systems or autocomplete tools are among the highest users of voice texting, or sending five- to thirty-second audio clips through chat apps.

  A second broad domain for continued investigation is technological changes. Just as digital tone of voice developed in all caps and all lowercase, with emoticons and emoji, further changes in how we convey the intentions behind our words will also develop as technology evolves. We’ll undoubtedly come up with new ways to express our intentions as voice, image, and video tools become easier to integrate into our conversations. Normal people don’t talk in the vanilla standardized language of books and television, and we’ll hack at our communicative tools until they let us reflect that, or else relegate them to information or entertainment rather than communication.

  Our collective societal relationship to technologically mediated communication is also changing. At the moment, there’s still a generation gap. But the gap isn’t really about whether you know what the acronyms stand for or which buttons to press: it’s about whether you dismiss the expressive capacity of informal writing or whether you assume it. As an older person who’d recently been told that ending a text with a period made them sound annoyed told me, “They know I’m old! Why would anyone assume I know how to communicate something that subtle in a text?” All three generations of Internet People assume that everyone is constantly communicating subtle emotional signals in text, even if there’s some minor disagreement about exactly which subtleties mean what. Getting an Internet Person to stop overthinking a text message is just as impossible as getting people of any age to stop reading emotional nuances from tone of voice. We can’t help it.

  But relatively soon, there will no longer be any people left who aren’t internet people, at least not at a generational level, not in major world languages. The internet will be like prior technologies that no one could escape: the radio or the telephone or the book. An individual person can still refuse to use social media or have a smartphone, just like a person in the 1980s could refuse to own a television set or have a phone line, but you’ll still know a lot about it regardless. The internet has become ambient, an inescapable part of the broader culture.

  That’s why I’ve avoided referring to things that aren’t online as “real life.” The internet has become real life. Popular culture and internet culture overlap more often than they diverge. True, “irl” and “real life” are common expressions, and it’s quite possible that they may stick around with their original connotation washed out through continued use. But that hasn’t happened quite yet, and in the meantime there are real harms to not recognizing the common humanity of the real people who are touched or harmed at the other end of our digital messages.

  Similarly, it’s easy to assume that all new words in the twenty-first century are internet words, because we may notice them first online. But Future English was always going to be different from Present English, just like Present English is different from the English spoken a hundred or a thousand years ago. While the internet is often a means for spreading new words, that doesn’t mean it’s always the cause of them. It’s important to recall that while the linguistic features of teenagers are a harbinger of the future—the vowels, the words, the inflections—we shouldn’t confuse them with the social features of teenagers—the cliques, the social drama, who’s a jock or a nerd, and so on. Kids eventually grow up and get jobs and find social niches that more or less suit them, and take it in their own turn to complain about the next generation—middle school is an aberration for all of us. Interviewing a couple teenagers about what’s cool on social media may tell us which linguistic features and technological platforms we’ll all be using in a couple years, but it won’t tell us what our social lives will feel like from the inside. (Thank goodness.)

  We know that language as a human ability is so very old—some hundred thousand years older than any form of writing—and what that means is that language is incredibly durable. We know that we’ve met many societies without any form of writing system, but we’ve never met any without spoken or signed language at all. Furthermore, linguistic complexity is unrelated to the complexity of the material culture it comes from. Language has existed with or without all kinds of technology—writing, agriculture, aqueducts, electricity, industrialization, automobiles, airplanes, cameras, photocopiers, televisions—and the internet is no exception. In fact, language’s only known predator is other people: many languages have been stamped out or imposed on others through war or conquest.

  The changeability of language is its strength: if children had to copy exactly how their parents spoke in order for language to be transmitted, language would be brittle and fragile. It would be losable, the way that ancient techniques for art or architecture can be lost. But because we remake language at every generation, because we learn it from our peers, not just our elders, because we can make ourselves understood even though we all speak subtly different personal varieties, language is flexible and strong.

  When we thought of language like a book, perhaps it was natural that we were worried and careful about what we enshrined in it. But now that we can think of language like the internet, it’s clear that there is space for innovation, space for many Englishes and many other languages besides, space for linguistic playfulness and creativity. There’s space, in this glorious linguistic web, for you.

  Acknowledgments

  The best part about writing a book about the internet is that when you inevitably get distracted by the internet, it often ends up sparking something to write about. Thanks to internet people in general.

  A big problem in internet research is that half the links you cite will stop working in just two years. To mitigate link rot, every link in this book has been saved in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and I’ve made a donation to help it stay in operation. Enter any broken urls at archive.org for a backed-up copy.

  I’d like to thank my editor, Courtney Young, for understanding the spirit of the book better than I did myself at times. Thank you also to the rest of the team at Riverhead Books, especially Kevin Murphy, and the copyediting team for gracefully handling a style guide founded on internet style; jacket designer Grace Han for landing on a brilliant representation of internet writing; and my publicist, Shailyn Tavella, for her energy and enthusiasm. I’d also like to thank my agent, Howard Yoon, for all his support behind the scenes, Dara Kaye for her sense of humor and advice on multilingualism, and the rest of the team at Ross Yoon.

  Massive thanks to Nicole Cliffe at
The Toast for responding to my most ridiculous pitches with unmitigated enthusiasm, and to the Toasties for making me write better just to imagine you reading me. Huge thanks also to Wired and Alexis Sobel Fitts, Andrea Valdez, and Emily Dreyfuss, for creating such a fantastic new home for the Resident Linguist series. I’d also like to thank for their mentorship Mignon Fogarty, Arika Okrent, Clive Thompson, Emily Gref, Jennifer Kutz, Erin McKean, and Ben Zimmer. Special thanks to Laura Bailey, Megan Garber, Molly Atlas, and the American Dialect Society for the title, and to A.E. Prevost for their attention to detail and highly articulate cat.

  I’m greatly indebted to previous scholars of the internet, whose vivid descriptions and archives helped me get a feeling for the early days of networked computers. I’m equally indebted to junior internet researchers working on emerging internet communication styles beyond my experience. Special thanks to everyone who sent me student papers, conference presentations, master’s theses, PhD dissertations, and other cutting-edge internet linguistics.

  Thank you to my educational institutions: King’s-Edgehill School, the International Baccalaureate, Queen’s University, McGill University, and my advisors, especially Jessica Coon and Janine Metallic. Many thanks also to the readers, listeners, and patrons of my blog and podcast, whose enthusiasm was a vital counterbalance to the solitude of book writing.

  I’d like to thank my family, my first and longest-running test audience for articulating why I find linguistics so exciting. In particular, I appreciate my sister Janis for answering questions on whether things were still cool, my brother Malcolm for thoughts on breaking down massive goals, and my parents for their complete trust that I was doing what I needed to do and that somehow it would work out, even when they didn’t understand any of it.

  A big thank you to the ling-friends who encouraged my first forays into pop linguistics, Leland Paul Kusmer and Caroline Anderson; to the ling-friends who came along a little later, Moti Lieberman, A.E. Prevost, Jane Solomon, Jeffrey Lamontagne, Emily Gref, Sunny Ananth, and Linguist Twitter; and to non-ling friends including Sabina, Jenny, and the groupchat. Special thanks to Alex and family for letting me stay with them in NYC, and to the coffeeshops of Montreal, especially the ones that stay open late.