Language Mutation 2.0

Wed Jan 13 16:11:00 IST 2010, by Abhishek Mehta

To "unfriend" is a well-known word in social networking fraternity and has become Oxford word of the Year 2009. Phonetics, Words and Grammar evolve  by constantly improving themselves over generations. One good example of such evolution is the word "nickname". The word began with "ekename", in earlier English "eke" meant "also". "Also known as" was "an ekename". Through times, however, people began to pronounce the 'n' in "an" as the first letter of the following word. Hence nickname (: Ref..).

Language has evolved chronologically, growing at par with the society. This is not true anymore; Internet phenomenon has made our society too large too soon. Single culture does not drive language growth anymore; arrogance, ignorance and market forces are manipulating it to the level of mutation. Chat rooms, emails and programming languages, spearheaded phase one of language mutation. LOL, ASAP and BRB like acronyms have ruled the Internet world, axe had even fallen over the pronouns like "you"/'u' and "We/v". This loss was hardly bearable but the robust expansion of Internet, internationalization, published media, microblogging and worldwide success of social networking has already pushed us in the phase 2.0 of mutation. Fate of every language appears indecisive.

Domain/username Scarcity:

Annually, more than 30 million domains get registered worldwide. Getting domain name with a reasonable semantic match is impossible (More..). So, companies are turning to weird ways of spelling and naming. Books will be called "bookz:, "and" will be spelled 'n', "for" will be 4 and "to" will be termed as '2'. This naming convention is neither illegal nor immoral but the fallout of the same will be seen in years to come. Domain/user names are the last few things entered in browsers without auto spell checkers. Generations with such spelling habits will invent some weirdo Lingua franca . And it will not be offending to spell Bishop Tutu as Bishop 22.

Microblogging:

It is Hot! It is in! It is "The Thing"! And it is "oh la la". Whatever one says, it is linguist's nightmare. Lynn Truss might consider a suicide, if she reads, what comes out of microblogging. Netizens, microbloggers and the bloggers are least sensitive about punctilious species like Lynn Truss. With expression limited to 150 characters, grammar goes for a toss and integers are preferred over words. It's more like alphanumeric literature unfit for writing poetry, fit enough hip hop though.

The lost craft of handwriting:

My peers often complained about my bad handwriting; being a computer graduate my answer was "I do not care". This was long back; now computer is everywhere and for everyone. Problem is, no one else also gives a damn, now. With keypads to type on and computers to type in, beautiful skill of handwriting will only be limited to types of fonts printed by your printer. State of California in USA, famous for Silicon Valley and Arnold Schwarzenegger, recently passed a bill of making whole education system online. This is the first nail in handwriting's coffin. Oh yes! Even I want to save the trees or say the printing cost, but not in the primary schools.

Word Processors are like packaged foods:

Packaged foods are easy to cook, of course; are they healthiest, nein. Word processors make your life easier but it harms the human habits of concentration, memorizing, mesmerizing and even grammerizing. Keep on typing and it will keep correcting you. This is good to have feature in the hands of Stephen King or V S Naipaul but certainly not in the hands of kids, students and Engineers (I know this). Army of students without the jaws of spelling and grammar have to be on the life support of electronic tools forever. Like this conversation from 2020 AD:-

Daughter: Mom! Can you spell my name? My "Spell Checker Chip" has gone for upgrade.
Mom: Sorry, I can't honey! Mine is not upgraded since you were conceived.

Internationalization:

If "The World is Flat" then it is going to flatten the language. In India, Hindi has adopted English to form Hinglish, British queen is in trouble with the immigrated pronunciation and "Howdy" will be in spani-english . Language globalization is matter of pride, but the cost will appear in decades.

Intermingling of so many foreign words will create vast vocabulary; an individual's vocabularies will appear smaller and smaller. In such scenario, language will start imploding to a new avatar for business, literature and communication purposes else masses won't get it. This certainly will harm the individual identity of any language.

Courtesy:

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Posted at 04:11PM Jan 13, 2010 by ABhi in Trends  |  Comments[0]