Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

When future historians look back on this era, they’ll find our changes just as fascinating as we now find innovative words from Shakespeare or Latin or Norman French. So let’s adopt the perspective of these future historians now, and explore the revolutionary period in linguistic history that we’re living through from a place of excitement and curiosity.

The role that young women play as language disruptors is so clearly established at this point it’s practically boring to linguists who study this topic: well-known sociolinguist William Labov estimated that women lead 90 percent of linguistic change

most of us have a hard time trusting what we naturally think sounds like a reasonable English sentence, haunted as we are by the ghosts of misguided grammarians.

“Standard” language and “correct” spelling are collective agreements, not eternal truths, and collective agreements can change.

Could we not put our tremendous computing power (both human and mechanical) to better use than upholding the prejudices of a bunch of aristocrats from the eighteenth century?

When we learn to write in ways that communicate our tone of voice, not just our mastery of rules, we learn to see writing not as a way of asserting our intellectual superiority, but as a way of listening to each other better.

What is language other than a tool for transmitting new mental representations of the world into the minds of other people?

for any type of conversation, people are doing it because it meets a need for them. It might not be a need we remember. It might not be a need we have ourselves. It might not be a need we want to acknowledge.

We create successful communication when all parties help each other win.

Laughing at an in-joke says, “I too was here when this happened.” Laughing at a joke about shared struggles says, “We’re all in this together.” Laughing at a racist or sexist joke says, “I accept these stereotypes.”

Language is the ultimate participatory democracy. To put it in technological terms, language is humanity’s most spectacular open source project.

the only languages that stay unchanging are the dead ones.

language’s only known predator is other people: many languages have been stamped out or imposed on others through war or conquest.

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.