The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language

by David Crystal

  +

  slow

  +

  sludge

  +

  slug

  +

  sluggish

  +

  sluice

  +

  slum

  +

  slumber

  +

  slump

  +

  slur

  +

  slurp

  +

  slurry

  +

  slush

  +

  slut

  +

  sly

  +

  However, when all the clear cases of symbolic words are gathered together – teeny, crack, mumble, splash, cuckoo, and the rest – the total is still very small. The vast majority of words in English are made up of sounds that bear no obvious relationship to the objects, events, sensations and ideas which give content to our physical and mental worlds.

  Sound symbolism in practice

  The symbolic value of sounds is nowhere better illustrated than in successful nonsense verse, the most famous example of which is Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’.

  ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

  All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe.

  ‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

  Beware that Jubjub bird, and shun

  The frumious Bandersnatch!’

  He took his vorpal sword in hand:

  Long time the manxome foe he sought –

  So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

  And stood awhile in thought.

  And, as in uffish thought he stood,

  The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

  Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

  And burbled as it came!

  One, two! One, two! And through and through

  The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

  He left it dead, and with its head

  He went galumphing back.

  ‘And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

  Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

  O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’

  He chortled in his joy.

  ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

  All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe.

  Carroll (in the persona of Humpty Dumpty) also provided interpretations of some of the nonsense words, such as slithy = ‘lithe and slimy’, mimsy = ‘flimsy and miserable’, mome = ‘from home’, outgrabe = ‘something between bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle’. (See also p. 144.)

  8

  The Effect of Technology

  A new technology always has a major impact upon language, whether written or spoken. The history of writing shows repeatedly how the choice of a particular implement or surface can influence the graphic outcome, as in the chiselled shapes of cuneiform script or the flowing brush-strokes of Chinese characters. The arrival of printing (p. 207) added a whole new dimension to graphic expression, facilitating a fresh range of contrasts (such as italic and boldface) and fostering the growth of a new subject, typography, which in its modern incarnation engages with tens of thousands of typefaces. Printing also had a significant impact on conventions of word-spacing, hyphenation, line-breaking, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling, and it was not long before new sets of graphological conventions became standardized as recognizable language varieties – seen today in such distinctive domains of graphic expression as books, periodicals, newspapers, advertising, brochures, catalogues, instruction manuals, contracts, and tickets. Since the nineteenth century the range has increased yet again, with each new visual telecommunicative technology – such as the telegraph, typewriter, and word-processor – manifesting a graphic medium which expresses certain elements of the language and suppresses others. The typewriter, for example, was good at showing the contrast between upper-and lower-case letters, but lacked the right-hand justified setting of print, and users had to devise an alternative convention (underlining) to capture the functions of italics and boldface in print.

  Speech too has had its expressive range immensely enriched by the arrival of new technology. The telephone demanded a new set of linguistic conventions to enable speakers to ‘manage’ spoken interaction which was not face-to-face – most obviously, the conventions of saying ‘hello’ and checking of numbers at the conversation outset (conventions which vary greatly between languages). Radio broadcasting produced the most dramatic expansion in the 1920s, not only by further privileging a particular accent and dialect (RP and standard English, p. 64), but by introducing a range of new varieties of spoken expression, such as the commentary (consisting of many sub-varieties, such as sports and political occasions), the news broadcast, the weather forecast, and the commercial. In due course, this range was extended yet again through television, where the co-occurrence of speech and vision immediately altered the options for linguistic expression made available to its practitioners. ‘You can see’, say the TV weather forecasters, ‘a cold front approaching from the south-west’ an option not available to their radio counterparts. And with satellite television, still further constraints emerge: presenters on such international channels as CNN and BBC cannot say this morning or tonight, for such time-references would be ambiguous around the time-zones of the world; instead they have to make their days of the week explicit. Something happened on Monday morning – which will be said even if it is still Monday. And the word foreign is so anathema that some international stations fine their staff if they are heard using it.

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century we are entering a further stage in the technologically motivated expansion of the linguistic resources of English, and this stage is likely to be more dramatic in its outcome than anything we have seen hitherto. The point is made by Bob Cotton and Malcolm Garrett in the title of their book reviewing the emergence of interactive television, personal digital assistants, and the many other technologies that will take advantage of the immense increases in communicative bandwidth: ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet’! But the arrival of the Internet has already given some clear indications about the way in which languages are going to be affected, and the signs are that we are here encountering a development whose consequences for English (and indeed for languages in general) are profound – in the long term expanding the language, and the range of varieties in the language, in many more ways than were achieved by either printing or broadcasting.

  A new medium

  The Internet is a genuine new medium of linguistic communication, taking some of the properties of the two traditional mediums, speech and writing, synthesizing them in a novel way, and adding further properties which were unavailable to either. This novel amalgam of properties (which I call ‘Netspeak’) manifests itself in somewhat different ways in each of the five communicative situations that comprise the Internet, and before exploring these properties further it is important to appreciate what they are.

  E-mail is the use of computer systems to transfer messages between individual users. Although it takes up only a relatively small domain of Internet ‘space’, by comparison with the billions of pages on the World Wide Web, it far exceeds the Web in terms of the number of daily individual transactions made. As one commentator, John Naughton, has observed: ‘The Net was built on electronic mail…. It’s the oil which lubricates the system.’

  The World Wide Web is the full collection of all the computers linked to the Internet which hold documents that are mutually accessible through the use of a standard protocol (the HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP ). The creator of the Web, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, has defined it as ‘the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge’.

  In a synchronous chatgroup, people ‘talk’ in real time with others from aro
und the world, entering any of the thousands of virtual ‘rooms’ which now exist. The subject-matter can be anything from the most inconsequential everyday gossip to the most arcane or specialized topic.

  In an asynchronous chatgroup, people leave messages in an electronic location (often called a list) which can then be read and responded to by other people at any subsequent time, from minutes to months. Here too, the range of subject-matters is vast, from hobbies to research debates.

  Also popular – at least, among younger netizens – is the range of virtual worlds activities originally stimulated by fantasy games of the ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ kind, in which people adopted imaginary personas and engaged in combat. In their Internet form, where they are known as MUDs (‘Multi-User Dimensions’) and MOOs (‘MUDs, Object Orientated’), they offer a broad range of opportunities for people to construct an imaginary world, which may be anything from a castle or alien planet to a grand hotel or school classroom. The participants send text messages to each other or interact with programmed ‘objects’ located within their virtual world, simulating real-life situations (in the manner of role-play), playing competitive games, or just having a good chat.

  Each of these situations has its own linguistic conventions; but they all display the same core linguistic properties, arising out of their existence as Internet domains. In none of these situations can the communicative activities be seen as equivalent to traditional writing or speech. Because people are typing their messages on a screen, there are obvious similarities with written language; but there are some important differences. To begin with, most of the interactions are in the form of a dialogue – doing the job of speech, only in written form. Moreover it is a fast-moving dialogue, especially in chatgroups and virtual worlds, where people are exchanging messages as fast as they can type. E-mails are also dialogic in character. Although there can be quite a lag before a reply is received, the language in which the reply is often couched is that of a face-to-face conversation, as these opening lines from three e-mails illustrates:

  Yeah, that’s fine. Be there at 6, then.

  OK.

  What do you mean, I’m always late???

  The Web is the least dialogic situation, but even there many sites are making their pages as interactive as possible, giving people an opportunity to use e-mail, chatgroup, help, FAQs (‘frequently asked questions’), and other functions. It is this dialogic character which has led some commentators to describe Internet communication as ‘written speech’.

  Web pages look most like traditional writing, and indeed as we browse through a range of sites it is possible to see on screen an electronic version of many of the varieties of written language that exist in the ‘real world’. There are e-versions of newspaper pages, for example, which are graphological replicas of what you would see in the physical item; and similarly we can find examples of scientific, religious, legal, and many other kinds of printed English identical in all respects other than the limitations imposed by screen size. But the same browsing activity will also bring to light the ways in which the language of Web sites is fundamentally unlike traditional print. Animation and movement possibilities exist: lines can appear and disappear, words and images can change their size and shape, and new text can appear while you are watching. Close a page down and then re-open it, and it may not be the same page: it may have been ‘refreshed’ by the site owner, or it may appear in a different format. This is by no means the user’s experience of traditional written language. When I open a book or a magazine at page 6, put it down, then return to page 6 after a few moments, I expect to see the same page 6, not a different page. Nor do I expect the words and lines on page 6 to alter before my eyes. Yet such things are routine on the Web.

  If Netspeak is not like traditional writing, then is it like traditional speech? Here too there are basic differences. The limitations of the keyboard enable only certain of the properties of spoken language to be expressed on the screen – essentially the segmental properties (the vowels, consonants, and punctuation marks). It is not really possible to convey the intonation, stress, speed, rhythm, and tone of voice of speech – those properties neatly summed up in the old phrase, ‘It ain’t what you say but the way that you say it’ – though users do their best by exaggerating punctuation marks, repeating letters, altering capitalization and spacing, and adding other symbols, as in these examples:

  aaaaahhhhh, hiiiiiii

  no more!!!!!, whohe????

  I SAID NO

  why not

  the * real * answer

  Nor is it possible to convey the other semiotic properties which add so much meaning to face-to-face conversation – the facial expressions and gestures, also neatly summed up by saying ‘It ain’t what you say, nor the way that you say it, but the way that you look when you say it’. A great deal of Internet language is thus inherently ambiguous, in just the way that writing is. Attempts have been made to express on screen the meaning conveyed by these non-verbal aspects of communication, notably in the use of emoticons, or smileys – combinations of keyboard characters designed to show an emotional facial expression: they are typed in sequence on a single line, placed after the final punctuation mark of a

  Basic smileys

  :-) pleasure, humour, etc.

  :-( sadness, dissatisfaction, etc.

  ;-) winking (in any of its meanings)

  ;-( :~-( crying

  %-( %-) confused

  :-0 8–0 shocked, amazed

  :-] :-[ sarcastic

  Joke smileys

  [:-) User is wearing a Walkman

  8-) 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

  :-F User is a bucktoothed vampire with one tooth missing

  :-~) User has a cold

  :-@ User is screaming

  -:-) User is a punk

  -:-( Real punks don’t smile

  +-:-) User holds a Christian religious office

  o:-) User is an angel at heart

  sentence, and read sideways. A small selection is shown in the panel, but hardly any are used apart from the first two, and even those are of limited value in clarifying meaning. Studies suggest that only about 10–15 per cent of messages use smileys at all.

  Netspeak is not like speech, either, in that it is unable to employ the feedback features that play such an important role in face-to-face conversation. Messages sent via a computer are complete and unidirectional. When we send a message to someone, we type it a keystroke at a time, but it does not arrive on that person’s screen a keystroke at a time – in the manner of the old teleprinters. The message does not leave our computer until we ‘send’ it, and that means the whole of a message is transmitted at once, and arrives on the recipient’s screen at once. There is no way that a recipient can react to our message while it is being typed, for the obvious reason that recipients do not know they are getting any messages at all until the text arrives on their screens. Correspondingly, there is no way for a participant to get a sense of how successful a message is, while it is being written – whether it has been understood, or whether it needs repair. There is no technical way which would allow the receiver to send the electronic equivalent of a simultaneous nod, an uh-uh, or any of the other audio-visual reactions which play such a critical role in face-to-face interaction. Addressing someone on the Internet is a bit like having a telephone conversation in which a listener is giving you no reactions at all: it is a most unusual situation.

  So if Netspeak is like neither speech nor writing, what is it like? It is, in short, itself – a medium of language which communicates in unique ways. Electronic texts, of whatever kind, are simply not the same as other kinds of texts. They are more dynamic, with variable boundaries, and they allow a fresh range of communicative possibilities. Here are three examples of the dynamic cha
racter of e-texts which contributes to their uniqueness:

  In e-mails, we can manipulate a received message while responding to it. We can split a paragraph into two and type our response within the message (and do this at any number of places). We can cut and paste parts of the received message so as to alter their order, and edit the received text in any way we wish, before sending our response back to the sender. This ‘quoting’ procedure, often called framing, may then be replicated by the sender, who reacts to our response, carrying out similar operations. And the whole procedure can be given a further dimension if the exchange is copied to a third party, with parallel responses being made to the same stimulus. E-mail exchanges become extremely complex, as a consequence, with a typically ‘nested’ appearance (messages within messages within messages…), and there is certainly nothing like them in traditional written language use.

  In chatgroups, we can ‘talk’ to an indefinite number of people and pay equal attention to everything each of them is saying. This contrasts with traditional multi-party conversational settings, such as a cocktail party, where we may be surrounded by thirty people each involved in a dozen or so individual conversations. It is obviously impossible to attend to all of them at once. But on a chat screen, the contribution of each person appears on the screen soon after it is typed, and we can devote equal attention to each. It is, as a consequence, possible to follow any sub-conversations which may emerge – a typical feature of chatgroup interaction, where several conversational threads are processed simultaneously by varying combinations of participants.