(...)
"Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it." (((Yeah, I reckon.)))
Crystal calls this a "moral panic" over "mythologies" – his clearest example being the belief that text messaging is destroying children's ability to spell. "It's all nonsense, but people believe it."
He addressed this in his book Txtng: the Gr8 Db8, published three years ago, in which he found that "txt speak" accounted for barely 10 per cent of the contents of the messages exchanged, and noted that abbreviations have always been part of the English language. Having solved that argument with some decent data, (((You gotta like these guys who actually accumulate data and study it objectively – I think they're called "scientists" or something))) he tells me that he's now moving on to Twitter.
"On Twitter [which limits each written entry to 140 characters], you don't get the range of texting abbreviations you get in text messaging. It's a more sophisticated kind of communicative medium. You get semantic threads running through it. When you start counting thousands and thousands of messages, you suddenly realise that on the whole it's a new art form in the making."
The breadth of the internet means that language is morphing not just on grocers' signs and in school playgrounds, but on a far more fundamental level.
"All these different genres – instant messaging, blogging, chatrooms, virtual worlds – have evolved different sets of communicative strategies, which means that you can look at the language and say, 'That must be an example of a chatroom, that must be an example of a tweet,' and you can predict it." (((And mine it. For profit. Probably.)))
(...)
Becoming involved in bigger arguments seems to be an occupational hazard for a linguist. (((Oh yeah, sure, but only politically correct people say that.)))
Whether it be education, politics or neuroscience, we all have a vested interest in the implications of language. Our conversation turns to the recent news of a man who had been lying in a vegetative state for seven years before doctors managed to establish basic communication by scanning his brainwaves.
"We are moving fast in a direction where you will be able to see what people are saying," says Crystal, optimistically. (((Uh, sorta.))) "We've got to the stage where you can see the complexity of language processing. We're not at the stage yet of being able to see clearly individual sentence patterns and words, but it's not long off." (...) ((("Neural Web Semantics.")))
